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)

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 5, 2019

It’s official, Sketch is dead!

For those who hasn’t heard, Figma recently rolled out a new version which support plugins.

This is huge and I’ll tell you why.

As we all know, even now (2019) Sketch still has the largest market share among all the screen design tools, despite being behind in every aspects (platform dependency, speed, features etc.) except one: its plugin ecosystem, which is essentially the only thing that other tools hasn’t been able to catch up to Sketch.

Until now anyway.

Figma recently rolled out plugins on Wednesday, and it’s already taking over the community by storm. The plugin repository only contains handful of entries right now but it already massively expanded Figma’s functionality, and even fixing Figma’s own shortcomings in a couple of instances. Better yet, this repo is expected to massively grow in the future, especially as Figma overtake Sketch as the reigning champion.

Here’s a few favorites of mine:

-Autoflow: adding flows is one of those

December 12, 2018

Supporting Firefox

With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of a monoculture. I believe these fears are coming from a good place – a monoculture certainly is not desirable, and a persistent challenge from competitors keeps tech at its best. Compounding this news was also a link floating around stating that Mozilla Firefox was staring at a market share of below 9%. What gives me pause, however, is that much of the advocacy for Firefox seems to stem from the fact that it’s not Chrome. The pure logic of such a strategy is clear, but is it particularly convincing as a technique?

Speaking more broadly for a moment, we as a society apply a lot of pressure on people to do stuff – to save the planet, and make the world a better place, and all the rest of it. Much of it is advocated through what I would describe as almost ‘fear-based’ language – kind of “do x or y will happen” type scenarios. To be fair, much of it is set up that way. There’s no real selfish benefit to e.g recycling, its pretty much about the altruism. In fact, if you read the news, the stakes are pretty high it would seem. For me, the conversation around Firefox strays too close to these heavy ultimatums. I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform – almost as hostages, rather than excited participants.

It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises. For instance, it’s arguably easier to avoid tracking with Firefox if that’s your speed. I’m sure there are other things – does Firefox beat Chrome out for speed? Or is it better featured in some areas? Perhaps Firefox is lacking things; I’ve been using WebSockets a lot recently, and Chrome’s frame-by-frame view of a WebSocket connection is invaluable. As far as I’m aware, Firefox doesn’t have this (yet). These aren’t concrete suggestions, but maybe ideas of where the conversation can go.

I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome – personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience.

Firefox is a fantastic browser, and the need to grow its market share is more pressing than ever. By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve the health of the browser ‘market’ all round.

December 11, 2018

What the f*ck is Moca?

So if you live in Vietnam and use Grab, you’re probably aware that they recently ditched GrabPay (their internal payment gateway) for a 3rd party, Vietnamese based solution. While that didn’t come as a surprise since they were pressured by our government for a while already, what did come as a surprise is their choice of provider: Moca.

I thought for sure they were misspelling Momo or something, as it stands they are the largest digital wallet app in Vietnam as we speak, and is an obvious choice if you’re looking for a service like that. Surely Grab, a multi billion dollar company wouldn’t choose a non established name right? But nah, they gonna go with Moca, a name most people have never even heard before in their life. But that’s ok, competition is always good for the end users, provided that the competition is, well, competitive. Let’s go ahead and check them out. A quick google search bring me to their homepage:
image
What the fuck is this shit? The English website is damn near empty, with nothing but an address and a Facebook Fan Page plugin. It’s amazing how that logo still managed to clip some of the minimal amount of content this page has
Ok that’s a little alarming. But surely you can’t judge a mobile app by the absolutely pitiful look of their desktop website. So let’s fire up Grab and check out the real thing:
dumb moca
Ok what the fuck is this shit? You ask me for my name, I enter my name, then you validate it as a motherfucking pin? What the living fuck is wrong with you? Hire a fucking UX person, hire a fucking QA team. You want to build a product, get a fucking team to build a product. Jesus fucking Christ.
Sorry for this rant again. I’m okay with beta software being buggy, I’m very much not ok with production software that millions people use on a daily basis being buggy.
December 11, 2018

What is that sexy font Google uses in all their products?

So as I was watching the official announcement of Flutter 1.0, I once again notice that all of their typographic designs used in their product used that same font: Product Sans. It’s slick, I have to have it.

Unfortunately the only thing that Google has on its official website is basically a short message saying  ‘Nah, you can’t have it, mofo’

But in all my years as a graphic designer, I’ve never let something as trivial as a licensing statement from a multi-billion dollar company deter me from trying to get my sticky fingers on the font.

So here we are:

Could this be Google Sans?