I upgraded the Mac Pro’s stock video card to a Gigabyte nVidia GeForce GTX 600 with 2 GB of video ram. The card requires a special power cable: PCIe Power Cable for Mac. No local stores had this part in stock, so I ordered it from Amazon. It finally arrived so the card was installed last night. I followed the video instructions below and had the card installed in a few minutes. It...
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New-to-me Mac Pro
Periodically at work they offer old systems to employees as part of a employee-only sale. For the first time that I can remember, Mac Pros were available. There were a few early 2009 and 2008 models. My friend and I were lucky enough to get the only two early 2009 models left. I currently have an iMac that I bought in early 2010 (listed as late 2009 model). It has a Core 2...
Continue reading...Hackintoshing the Acer Aspire One D150
I have had a little netbook (bless it’s heart) that has tried to be my little buddy on trips. Unfortunately, it has had Windows XP on it and I have less than love for that particular operating system. My work machines and my desktop system are all Macs. I’ve been wanting to put OS X on the netbook, because nothing is cuter than a little 10″ screen with OS X. Last time I...
Continue reading...Random reboots fixed?
For the past several months, I’ve had a disconcerting issue with my iMac. The iMac randomly tries to log me out. My old Mac Mini, which has been retired to the household media server, never had this problem. Googling the symptoms resulted in a mixed bag of possible causes: failing hard drive, faulty memory chips, logic board problems, etc. I looked on the Application > Utilities > Console application for any log files...
Continue reading...Installing PloneSoftwareCenter on Plone 4
In addition to the Plone Help Center, I also wanted to have PloneSoftwareCenter for project management capabilities. The normal method for installing PloneSoftwareCenter is to add Products.PloneSoftwareCenter to the eggs = section of the zinstance/buildout.cfg file in the Plone installation. Trying to build and then run Plone, I ended up adding three additional lines to the buildout.cfg. I’m not sure why these dependencies were not automatically added. Figuring out dependencies Each time I...
Continue reading...Installing Plone 4 on Mac OS X 10.6 Server
Plone 4 is an open source content management system (CMS). It’s an elegant, extensible solution for document and content control. Large companies, including Apple, use Plone. I’m evaluating CMS solutions and was pleased to find that Plone has a Mac OS X installer. I tried to install the OS X installer and chose the local installation option. The installation process never completed. About halfway through the installation process I received the following error...
Continue reading...Severely dead Mac
My poor little Mac died a painful death. What had apparently started weeks ago with random DVD drive openings, ended today with the machine going into an endless boot cycle. Today was not a good day for this to happen. I was already annoyed from idiots on the drive home and from running errands. I was hungry and had had low grade-cramps all day. When I first opened the case I smelled burning...
Continue reading...Undead Mac!
After blowing like eight hours trying to get my Mac to work, it finally started working randomly after a reboot. I tried booting from the OS disk to restore from the Time Machine backups. That is what the backups are for, after all. Unless, after booting from the OS disk, the spinning beach ball of doom appears on the “Choose the backup drive” screen. At least I know I have to figure out...
Continue reading...Dead Mac in the middle of the road…
I installed several updates on my desktop Mac last night: Java update, another minor application update, and then two update packages for a firewall. I wasn’t expecting any problems… of course that’s when you get trouble. The Mac will now come up to the point where the gray apple logo appears on the screen. And then it didn’t progress any farther. I dropped in the installation disk to restore from the Time Machine...
Continue reading...Day in the life of a Geek
I am working from home today using a virtual private network (VPN) connection. I can then connect to my desktop Windows work machine using remote access. All of these connections are done through browsers so it’s pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, the VPN system we use is primarily setup for Windows and not Macs. Once I had heard about the weather forecast yesterday evening, I grabbed one of the IT guys to help me get...
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