November 27, 2019

The ‘Prebuilt Hackintosh of 2013’ in 2020

Current status: SUCCESS! (see update Feb 20 below)

Yes ladies and gents, I’m talking about the venerable “Dell XPS 8500“.

Bought it back in ’13 because of that very article. My particular config a 3rd gen Core i7 (3770), 0NW73C motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-1600 (since then upgraded to 16GB) and a GT640 video card.

I ran Sierra and High Sierra on it for a while, but for the last 2-3 years I only had Windows and Deepin installed. I wanted to put OS X on it once more but was waiting for a proper NVIDIA web driver (it was running a 1050ti), but alas Apple and NVIDIA couldn’t come to an agreement.

So last week I decided to swap out my Gigabyte 1050ti 4GB for a Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB (I’m lucky the Green cards hold their values better than Red’s) in hope of better compatibility. However I’m still having troubles getting even the installer to work.

Things I tried:

• Making a vanilla Catalina installer with latest Clover (using this guide)

  Result: got to the Apple logo with progress bar, but as soon as the progress fills up I got a blank black screen.

• Making a premade Mojave installer with TonyMac UniBeast Mojave

  Result: still got a blank screen but if I wait for it to go to sleep and wake it, I can get to the installer screen with Disk Utility + Install Mojave etc., but clicking on any of the entries will hang the computer.

Update Jan 30/2020:

Managed to get Catalina installed using the vanilla install method (with Clover). However this was done with the integrated graphic. Also, WiFi, Bluetooth and Audio aren’t working yet so I need to tinker with it some more when I have the time.

Update Feb 03/2020: SUCCESS!

So everything works now, apart from the Wifi/Bluetooth card (Dell DW1703, which is actually an Atheros AR9485 in disguise)I could easily grab a Broadcom card to replace it, but it’s not worth it for me since I could only get them from Aliexpress and they take months to reach where I live (Vietnam). Plus I have no real need for Wifi/BT on a desktop anyway.

Audio did take a wee bit of work, I had to go into System Preferences to get the icon to show up, and change the layout to 11 in config.plist. But after that it just works beautifully.

So, to recap. Here’s all the steps that I did:

  1. Download Catalina from the App Store
  2. Put it on a 16GB flash drive by using the /CreateInstallMedia command in the terminal
  3. Install Clover 5103 on the flash drive (and copy some essential kexts while you’re at it, I only had Lilu, WhateverGreen, AppleALC, VirtualSMC)
  4. Pop the flash drive into my XPS 8500 and boot from it (Legacy mode)
  5. On the first screen, fire up Disk Utility and format the 512GB SSD with APFS
  6. Install Catalina to the newly formatted drive, then restart with the flash drive still connected
  7. Upon restart, boot into Clover on the flash drive, and choose to boot from the SSD instead of the installation media, you should be able to get into a fully working version of Catalina running on your computer at this point, albeit the drive is not bootable on its own yet.
  8. Install Clover into the SSD.

That’s it, that’s as vanilla as it can be for a Clover installation. If everything goes well you should now have a fully functional XPS 8500 hackintosh!

Update Feb 10, 2020: Successfully added Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB to the installation! (Need to disable Legacy OPROM in boot option otherwise you will get a blank screen)

I will create another post soon with more details

 

Update Apr 01, 2020:

Just updated to 10.15.4 without any issue. Which is actually a pretty impressive feat considering that this upgrade broke some users’ Hackintoshes (especially for AMD Users and Intel Skylake and above users)

November 7, 2019

Good bye Mr. Snowball

2005:
Wasn’t particularly an eventful year.
Lots of things hasn’t happened yet.
The first iPhone wasn’t due for another 2 years.
I wasn’t even in college, just a kid fresh out of High School.
And yet one thing made that year particularly memorable to me, to all of my family.
This guy right here.
I still remember vividly the day he came into our lives, such tiny little creature, with piercing blue eyes. So small and yet nothing seems to be scaring him. Footsteps, loud noises, nothing could even make him turn his head.
(We soon found out that’s because he’s completely, utterly deaf 1f642 which is also why he never had a formal name, because nobody could’ve called him. He was simply known as “The Snowball”)
Then he’d proceed to spend the next 14 years of his life brightening up our days, without fail.
Today is no different really. After spending most of the days being awesome, he took a hearty meal from his favorite bow, went back to his favorite box, took a nap, and decided not to wake up again.
Today is a beautiful autumn day. I guess if you could choose how and when to go, today is as good as any.
Still, it’s never easy losing a friend who was with you for almost half your life.

2005-2019
Rest in peace buddy, you may have left our lives, but you will never leave our hearts.

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October 13, 2019

Homelab Journal #1: Setting up the ghetto hardware

My often spend my scarce free time teaching myself new things (when I don’t feel like DIYing useless shits). I’ve spent the last few weekends teaching myself around Google Cloud platform (and later on, Amazon Web Services). What I learned most from those experiences is that: my knowledge regarding networking and virtualization was close to non-existent and if anything, I need to go back to practice on a local environment where I have access to all the hardwares before I even think about dirtying my hands with cloud implementations.

And that’s how I came to join r/HomeLab and subsequently r/HomeServer. Now I’ve been told before that these subs will more likely discourage you from building your own homelab rather than encouraging it, as they will make whatever you build feel puny in comparison, but I didn’t expect some people to build a freaking datacenter in their garages. While many of those guys got the hardwares for free from work, I know some of those people dropped hundred of thousands dollar into hardware purchases. Homelabbing is, in a way, similar to photography or music or even toy collection, once it become a hardcore hobby it gets rather expensive.

As a photographer I don’t feel like I can afford to sink my wallet into yet another expensive hobby, and as such I decided to do it my way, the thrifty, cheapskate way.

Meet my Nam Vu home server, the cheapest, most ghetto machine you can imagine:

Hardware specs:

• Intel Core2Quad Q6600 @3.0Ghz (tapemodded) ~$5

• Lenovo MTQ45NK Motherboard ~$15

• 4x2GB DDR3 1333Mhz Memory ~$12

• 320GB Toshiba HDD ~$13

This machine will be dual booting Proxmox 6 and Windows 10 LTSC.

Why bother having Windows when you can have it running under Proxmox you ask? Well I need Windows for a lot of different applications (like sync clients for many cloud storage services), plus the Remote Desktop feature blows TeamViewer and AnyDesk out of the water. And for those applications I want the best performance I can get, which is hardly achievable if you run it under a hypervisor with this ghetto hardware.

Now Proxmox doesn’t recommend dual booting with anything, in fact its default installer ISO doesn’t even include an option for you to partition your drive, so if you want a dual boot configuration your only hope is to setup Debian to run along side Windows first, and then installing Proxmox VE on top of Debian. I will be covering the steps in my next posts, they are fairly simple to setup at first but there’s a couple of issues that you might run into along the way.

September 14, 2019

Kết thúc mười năm

Hôm nay tình cờ lôi quyển hộ chiếu ra, phát hiện đã đến ngày hết hạn, tự nhiên nhớ lại cái ngày này đúng 10 năm về trước, cảm giác hân hoan khi nhận được nó vẫn còn như in.

Có nhiều thứ từ cách đây một thập kỷ mà mình ko còn có thể nhớ nổi nữa, nhưng cuốn hộ chiếu này thì mình vẫn nhớ như in, vì bối cảnh đặc biệt mà mình nhận được nó.

10 năm trước là kỷ niệm 60 năm thành lập hãng hàng không JetBlue, bọn nó dân chơi offer 1 cái deal cho phép mình mua 1 cái vé $600 có thể bay đến bất cứ sân bay nào mà JetBlue có hoạt động trong lãnh thổ US. Và đó là khởi đầu của tất cả, chuyến ‘road trip’ đầu tiên trong cuộc đời, chuyến đi mở mang đầu óc đầu tiên. (trước thời điểm đó mình thuộc loại hardcore introvert, cả tháng chỉ có đến trường rồi về nhà chơi game, ko ra khỏi nhà, nếu không có bà chị lôi đi chuyến đi này chắc giờ mình vẫn tiếp tục lesor lắm).

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August 14, 2019

My Electron Toolbelt

Love it or hate it, Electron is now an important part of your everyday life. For those who haven’t heard of it by now, Electron is a software framework that enable developers to create desktop applications using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). It garnered a lot of attention in recently years.

Sure, many elitist developers have publicly spoken against it. They argue that their performance is sub par comparing to native applications, even go as far as calling Electron apps “web pages”. In reality, they were correct, and also completely missed the point. What Electron brings to the table isn’t performance, but availability. Electron massively lowered the barrier-to-entry in desktop software development, and cut the cost of porting applications across platforms to almost nothing at all. Truth is, I think what the elitist developers are so pissed off about is that fact Electron enabled ‘lesser devs’ to build beautiful, functional apps that work cross-platform, something that would take decades for them to achieve.

While I can see why the old devs are unhappy with these changes, as an end user I couldn’t be happier with Electron. It’s a godsend.

Anyway here’s my list of Electron-based apps that I couldn’t live without

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August 14, 2019

My ghetto $40 home cloud server/media center setup

So I have a bunch of old hard drives laying around. About 5-6 different hard drives of various capacities ranging from 1TB to 2TB, not counting the 2.5″ drives. Looking at that pile, naturally the first thing that comes to mind is building a NAS. I was going to get a cheap Buffalo NAS for around $50 but then I realized I’d also need it to double as a workstation since I do need (I think ‘need’ is the right word) a computer in my workshop

Here’s the parts I used:

Hardware Setup:

Mobo: Lenovo MTQ45MK -est. $15 | salvaged from an old ThinkCentre M58, what I like is that unlike most OEM PCs, this mobo actually has 4 RAM slots, making it a lot cheaper to add more memories since 2GB sticks are dirt cheap.

CPU: Intel Quad Q6600 -est. $8 | probably the best bang for the buck CPU you can get for socket 775, a quad-core processor that goes for under $10, with an amazing overclocking head room (not that we are going to be doing any OCing, but it’s nice the have the option)

Memories: (x4) Kingmax 2GB DDR3 1333Mhz -est. $4/ea | DDR3 memories are cheaper than dirt these days, plus you most likely have stick or two already lying around somewhere. I already 2 sticks so I only needed to order 2 more. If you want to meet FreeNAS minimum requirements, this is probably the cheapest way get at it, at $16 for 8GB.

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