I have a true love for Wikipedia: I always wanted to take the power of information with in my pocket. My good old iPod, which i bought in 2005 was not good enough for the task: you’d need to install a linux on it to get the work done - well, Linux is fine on the Desktop, but not my gadgets!

The world had to wait until 2008, when Mr Patric Collison came out with the ultimate software, an interface to the wikipedia bulk xml based database dump. On his site, you can find all information on installing Wikipedia on your iPod Touch or iPhone.

I advise you to download the English dump file via The Pirate Bay, the best torrent tracker on Planet Earth.

I created a dummy video about my progress:

I got my iPod Touch as a gift from my previous company for Christmas, and I’m so happy with it - thank you guys again

Being a geek myself, of course I found a way to hack it; and optimized my sites and stuff to be usable on the new platform: Apple Safari Mobile.
With the new 1.1.4 software upgrade, you can add nice webicon to the Touch’s interface:

All you need to do is to create a custom PNG image like this one:  and reference it in the parent webpage’s header section:

<link href=”/img/apple-icon.png” rel=”apple-touch-icon” type=”image/png” />

If you ever found yourself sitting in front of a dead Hackintosh system (for example another operating system’s boot loader invaded it’s Master Boot Record (MBR) like Linux’s GRUB, and keeps telling like: Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format.), and would like to use it in it’s original way, follow the steps below:

1) get yourself a 10.4.8 bootable (Intel) DVD

2) boot from it and press F8, and type -s to enter single user mode

3)  type:
fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
flag 2
update
write
quit
reboot

I have some Mac OS Xs around me (Intel and PPC ones as well), and usually I find the opportunity to create a nice kernel panic :] But I always forget how to list the already loaded kernel extensions:

kextstat

To load a kernel extension, type:

kextload /System/Library/SomeCool.kext

to unload a kext, type:

kextunload /System/Library/SomeCool.kext

If you want to replace any kexts, just simply copy over as root (i usually do it in midnight commander) and after say:

chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/SomeCool.kext

chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/SomeCool.kext

and clear the kernel cache:

kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions/

The CS3 Installer does not let you run Photoshop on any other system but 10.4.8. If you have two machines, and one has 10.4.8, just simply copy over the /Application/Adobe Photoshop CS3/ folder and /Library/Application Support/Adobe folders… and magically, it will work.
If it says something about Invalid Product key or Invalid Install - see this link, how to manage this problem

Today I was crazy enough to insert a DVD RAM into my Powerbook 12″, so I was completely unable to remove the disk, because it was not mounted anyhow, and pressing F12 didn’t work either. So I looked around and found this magic spell:

drutil tray eject

I store my personal documents in a 128bit encoded .dmg file, which is password protected (good old porns I finally faced the problem, that I’ve grown out this image - but i had no place to create a new one and copy over the contents (I was working heavy on a dvd edit) - so i RTFM.

hdiutil resize -size nn[m|g|t] mysecret.dmg


I really like to listen to Internet radios, for example www.radioparadise.com. I can easily check and download all cool music I hear - well, it turned out that it can be much more easier You need to download RadioRecorder from http://ng.netgate.net/~snowcat/RadioRecorder.html. with this little nifty program, you can get and save all streams to mp3 format, and it can populate the files as an iTunes playlist, so you can upload it to your iPod as well I found one error with this cool application: it can’t figure out the track name, so the filename was just a generated one; so I opened the source in XCode and in Recording.m @ 233 I modified to: [req setValue:@"iTunes/6.1 (Macintosh; N; PPC)" forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];

with this little change (from 4.1 to 6.1), the Shoutcast server will send the full headers to our application, and we’ll have the fine filenames and MP3 ids!

Sunday, after working all day long on the powerbook, I suddenly heard the hard disk doing silly noises, then the mp3 playback stopped and the system halted. I’ve restarted, but it could’n start the OS. I booted the installation DVD in Rescue mode, and in the Disk utility application, the following error message welcomed me:

Invalid Volume Header
Checking HFS Plus volume…
Checking Extends Overflow file… Invalid node structure
The volume Thora could not be repaired after 3 attempts.Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired
Holy fuck! All my 55+ gigabytes of data is lost?! I called my friend immediately, and he handed a DiskWarrior CD, but I no longer trusted the original HDD, so I bought a new one - a Samsung 5400/8Mb cached 80G - to replace the old 60G 4700/2Mb one. I also bought a Firewire/USB craddle, and an LG DVD-RAM/DVDRW+ writer.
I successfully restored the system with DiskWarrior, and after I CCC-d (a copy application using ditto and psync) the whole old drive to the new one. Afterwards, I booted from the firewire disk, and nothing happened. Sweet Jesus, I spent 90+ minutes for nothing? A complete reinstall would only cost 30… Then I realized the following:
1) The FW connection mysteriously lost in the copy process at 90%, and the symlink under /Volumes/ (/Volumes/FW-backup) reverted to a single folder (!) instead of a link to /dev/sdisk3, so I just copied over from one directory to another…
2) The CCC was unable to copy all kernel files from the root folder. mac.sym mach_kernel were missing, so I needed to copy them manually. After the restart, everything worked as expected, so I was ready for the operation
I opened and disassembled the Powerbook (as I did several times before) and now I’m writing this article onto the new drive. The old one will be used as another HDD in the Intel-laptop (the current host of Windows Vista and Ubuntu) and the laptop’s old drive will function as an external HDD via a 2,5″ $10 usb-craddle.
(I’m still planing to upgrade my iPod, indeed - see the previous article :))