Fodi's blog

I've tried SoundWire before, but there were quite a bit of stuttering from time to time. WiFi Speaker on the other hand worked fine on my crappy backup-of-a-backup Alcatel OT-990 phone (running a custom Android 2.3 build). It lags behind quite a bit (several seconds), but I only want to listen to background music this way, so it's fine. And there's no stuttering, even though I've tested it with a very old SMC soho router between the two devices.

About a month ago an old acquaintance brought me an old (2005) iMac G5 A1145 for repair. It didn't go past the Apple logo during boot and it's cooling fans were going crazy. After a few failed attempts of booting various Mac OS X installers (both DVD and USB) it became obvious: I have to take the bastard apart.

And by calling it a bastard I'm being soft. Although I wasn't a complete stranger to Apple hardware disassebly (eg. I've had a lot of "fun" removing the top case of my 2008 MacBook), I wasn't exactly prepared to the brainf*ckery I was about to expose myself to.

Thanks to the awesome guys and gals at iFixit.com, there's a very thorough illustrated disassembly guide for the A1145. However I was stuck right after step 5 (removed RAM module), I had no luck opening the two latches holding the front bezel. Turns out that a simple credit card is not exactly the best solution for this, instead you need a special tool shaped like this:

Luckily, I've found this absolutely hilarious and extremely helpful video:

...and 10 minutes and one plastic cookery course later I've turned my old student ID card into an unlicensed Apple Access Card Tool. With it I've opened the latches a minute later. I've followed the guide and removed the HDD (turns out it was dead, crawling with bad sectors) and replaced it.

Since the ODD also turned out to be dead as well and I couldn't replace it (it's not a standard SATA connector drive) and couldn't figure out how to enable USB booting (most forums said it's impossible, but as it later turned out, it's not), it seemed that I have to place the Mac OS X installer on the internal hard drive.

This was tricky, since I couldn't prepare the partition layout (1 partition for the installer, another for the to-be-installed OS X) with my PC, the otherwise awesome Transmac only allows restoring the installer image as is on a drive, and can't handle partitioning tasks. And when I've booted the installer inside the iMac, Disk Utility couldn't create a new partition on the same drive. So I had to use an other Mac's Disk Utility to create the two partitions and restore the installer image on the first one. After that, I was able to succesfully start the Mac OS X installer AND start the installation process.

Unfortunately the proccess failed multiple times with the same error message:

The Installer could not verify the contents of the "AdditionalSpeechVoices" Package

Just my luck. Searching through forums it turned out that multiple people had the same problem and all of them had the same conclusion and solution: the error is related to bad RAM and it needs to be replaced.

Now this particular iMac has a single RAM slot (in which I've had a 1 GB module installed), AND it also has 512 MB of RAM chips soldered to the logic board. So I've removed the 1 GB module, crossed my fingers, re-run the installer, aaaand... it failed again with the same error. I've run a RAM test as well and it confirmed the worst: the integrated RAM chips are bad.

This usually means the end of the adventure. Since that RAM is not replaceable, you can either buy a used logic board from eBay or such, or sell the damn thing for parts. But then I came across this forum post:

May everybody abandon this problem already since it's been long time. Everytime I install OSX on my iMac G5, I failed because of bad on-board memory. But I have come to conclusion. Like some Brazilian guy said, I just removed RAM chip with flat-head screw driver by force one by one. Then every thing fine except I lost 512MB of memory. But lot better than buy logic board way more expensive than $500. Right after that I ordered 2GB memory chip by $30. How's that? I'm very satisfied.

Now that's something that would probably upset the stomach of MacGyver even. Popping off RAM chips with a freaking flat head screwdriver from a fragile logic board one by one? Yeah, why not. Worst case scenario that I do more damage to an already screwed logic board.

"Oh Yeah, Look at Those Dead Bastards"

It was a mess, but it freaking worked. Although as an experiment I ended up installing the PPC build of Debian on the machine instead of Leopard. Because after all that hardware misery I was looking for a little software misery for a change :) but more on that later (maybe)...

To install Windows 7 on a MacBook as the only operating system (single boot), without Bootcamp, possibly on a clean hard drive...

...the best method to avoid suicidal thoughts and possible hardware damage is to pop out the internal hard drive, connect it to a PC via a SATA-USB interface, and "burn" the Windows installer ISO with WinToBootic or something similar directly on the drive, pop in back in the MacBook and boot it.

I use a Lenovo IdeaPad M490s upgraded with a 128GB Kingston mS200 SSD since December 2013 as my primary work PC, with Windows 7.

Ever need to fetch a horde of externally linked URLs from a bazillion posts and comments, all from one closed Facebook group? Here's how I did it in Chrome/Chromium. (Please note, that this guide might get out of date fairly quickly, as Facebook changes very often.) 

Step 1: Get all links loaded inside your browser tab.

Problem: Facebook only shows the last 3 comments for a post in a Group and puts in a "View n more comment(s)." link so the user can load the rest. Also, Facebook only loads a couple of the most recent posts and uses infinite scrolling to load older posts dynamically.

Solution: You can (constantly) press the End button, to jump to the bottom of the page, so it'll continue loading more and more posts until you reach the beginning. You also can use the following JS snippet to "expand" the "view more" links:

Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.getElementsByClassName("UFIPagerLink"), function(el) { el.click(); });

Step 2: Save the loaded HTML to a file.

To do this, right click anywhere on the page, choose Inspect Elements, then on the Elements tab, right click on the html (or maybe body, or even the first div inside the body) element, and choose "Copy as HTML". Then paste it into a text editor of your choice. This could take a while. I used good old Notepad. Save the file.

Step 3: Get ALL the URLs!

You can use lots of tools for this. I used the freeware NirSoft AddrView to open the file, then export the URLs I needed to a plain TXT. That's about it!

We're a team of two (Levente and me) in Békéscsaba, Hungary.

We've came up with Beatbee, an automagically working social jukebox in November.

We've found out about some real tough competition in December.

We've put the project on hold, possibly for ever.

I've started working on a "Beatbee box" (see photo), a different, but similar idea (still a social jukebox) during the holidays. I couldn't let it go, and as it turned out, Levente couldn't either.

We've pivoted the Beatbee idea in January, and now we're entering it to the TechPeaks PitchSlam in Budapest, and also the real deal: TechPeaks 2014. Stay tuned for more info, or check out the Beatbee blog at:

To kill time and play a bit with Facebook Graph API and AJAX, I've done this little crawler with a nice Bootstrap UI. It fetches random people's profile images (and profile links) from Facebook.

http://randomfaces.co