Category Archives: Blogging

Yes, a normal human can build a Hackintosh.

Hackintosh - NovaBench score

A couple of months ago, I noticed that my late-2008 MacBook was getting sluggish. I started pricing out some newer, higher-end computers, but didn’t like my options. On the Mac side, anything with the level of components I wanted was insanely expensive. And although I wasn’t necessarily opposed to switching back to a Windows PC — especially if I built my own — I knew that most of my software was now tied up OS X, which meant that I would have to spend several hundred dollars to buy the Windows versions of many of the programs I owned if I wanted to be able to do any work. This basically left me with one other option: build a Hackintosh.

I won’t go into the pros and cons about building a Hackintosh, or why I decided it was the best option for me. All I’m going to say is that I’m glad I did it. Not only did I end up with an incredible machine, but I also learned a lot in the process. This blog post is my own personal take on a DIY Hackintosh guide. I’m putting it out there not because I think I’m an expert, but rather because I’m a novice who somehow managed to pull it off, and I wanted to let others know what to expect when doing their first build.

First, let me say that I would rate my knowledge of computers as fair to middling. Before I embarked on this journey, I had a basic understanding of what the various components of a computer did, but not much more than that. Naturally, when I first started looking into building a Hackintosh, I doubted whether I could handle it. Even looking at a “simple” DIY Hackintosh guide like this excellent one from Lifehacker, I found myself grappling with a lot of scary new terms: “BIOS,” “kext,” “DSDT,” “boot flag,” “kernel panic,” etc. I also read a lot of opinions from people on various forums who said that installing OS X on a homebuilt PC was difficult and a waste of time compared to building a Windows-based system, which is a much more straightforward process.

I’m here to tell you that building a Hackintosh is actually not that difficult. All it takes is some research, a little persistence and an ability to follow directions carefully. Here’s a summary of my experience; I present it in the hope that others might find it useful.

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Choose Your Components

Choosing components is a critical part of this process, because not everything works out of the box with OS X. The easiest thing to do, if you can afford to buy all-new components, is to use the tonymacx86 Buyer’s Guide to select components that are OS X-compatible. I basically just went right down the list of suggested components for a “CustoMac Pro” and picked out what I wanted.

Of course, if you’re an actual hacker, you’re range of options is much bigger. A relative on my wife’s side built a Hackintosh out of a $186 Acer Aspire One notebook. I imagine something like that takes actual skill, which I don’t have and can’t really discuss here.

Anyway, here is the full list of components I chose:

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H ATX LGA1155 Motherboard
  • Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
  • Storage: Sandisk Extreme 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk
  • Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (x 2)
  • Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB Video Card
  • Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 802.11a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter
  • Case: Corsair 500R Black ATX Mid Tower Case
  • Power Supply: Corsair Enthusiast 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
  • Optical Drive: Sony AD-7280S-0B DVD/CD Writer

Here’s the PCPartPicker part list, for those who are interested. PCPartPicker, by the way, is a website you’ll probably want to bookmark if you’re thinking of building your own system. It lets you price out the components and make sure they’re compatible.

(FYI, I went on Apple’s online store and priced out a Mac Pro with similar components; the total added up to well over $3,000. So basically, I got the same computer for less than half that price. If that’s not a reason to build a Hackintosh, then I don’t know what is.

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Assemble the Hardware

Before you install OS X on your new computer, first you need to actually build it. (Check out my Flickr set of my build.) For me, this was the easiest and most fun part of the whole process. I’m not going to go into any detail, however, because others do it much better than I could. There are a lot of great guides out there on how to build a computer, but these are the ones that really helped me:

Honestly, the only thing I found difficult about this process was cable management — which was partially my fault for buying a semi-modular power supply instead of a fully modular one. If you run into any trouble figuring out which cables go where, here’s a simple tip that might help you: do a YouTube search for the model of your case and/or power supply.

Adjust Your BIOS Settings

Once your computer is fully assembled, it’s time to get it ready by adjusting the settings in the BIOS, which is the basic input/output system that controls the flow of data from the computer’s components.

This was an area where I made a key mistake the first time I tried installing OS X. I ended up wasting a lot of time troubleshooting because I didn’t do my homework on which settings needed to be changed in my BIOS. I suggest you read up on it beforehand to save yourself a lot of frustration.

Frankly, you don’t even really need to know what a BIOS is or how it works. Just know that you’re going to have to fidget with its setting in order to get OS X to run right on your new homebuilt computer. Here are the key changes I needed to make in my BIOS to get OS X Mountain Lion up and running. Remember that this is specific to my particular system, though:

  • AHCI – enabled
  • xHCI mode – auto
  • xHCI hand-off – enabled
  • EHCI hand-off – enabled
  • Init Display First – PEG
  • High Precision Event Timer – enabled
  • Wake on LAN – disabled

Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up your BIOS for OS X on a Gigabyte motherboard like mine. (If you have an older motherboard without a UEFI, try go here and skip to step #4.)

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Install OS X Mountain Lion

This is the exciting part. It’s also the part where things can start to go wrong. They shouldn’t, though, if you’ve adjusted your BIOS settings correctly and are capable of following directions.

I used the Unibeast installation method, since I already owned a MacBook and was able to download a copy of OS X Mountain Lion from the App Store. Rather than go through the process step-by-step, I’ll just point you to this excellent installation guide from MacBreaker. (Lifehacker also has a good tutorial, if you prefer.) Basically, you’re going to download an application called UniBeast from tonymacx86.com that will turn a USB thumb drive into a bootable OS X Mountain Lion installer. You’re then going to use this bootable thumb drive to install OS X Mountain Lion on your soon-to-be-Hackintosh’s hard drive. That’s really about it for this step.

Except, of course, that things probably won’t work right the first few times. Do yourself a favor and prepare for some frustration here. Plan on getting stuck a couple of times on the gray startup screen that appears when you’re trying to install OS X. If that happens, you’ll need this list of “boot flags” that you can use to temporarily bypass whatever the problem is. What’s a boot flag, you ask? Again, I really have no idea; I’m just following others’ instructions. (Personally, I had a lot of luck with the -x, or “safe mode,” boot flag.) Once you’ve got OS X installed, then you can move on to the next step, which should eliminate the need for using any boot flags on startup.

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Run MultiBeast

The last step to getting your Hackintosh running properly is to download a program called MultiBeast that will let you easily install the drivers you need. Multibeast a free application created by some very ingenious people (clearly much smarter than I am) that will help you install files called “kexts” that will allow your new Hackintosh to run smoothly.

This is arguably the most difficult part of the process, in the sense that you have a lot of different options to choose from and choosing a wrong one could really sidetrack you. Your best strategy here is probably to search the tonymacx86.com forums for the kinds of hardware you’re using and see what other people did to configure their systems using Multibeast. I know it might seem insane to spend an enormous sum of money on computer parts and then trust a bunch of anonymous users on an internet forum to help you get it working right, but trust me, you would be surprised at the depth of knowledge these people have. In my case, I found this thread from a user with a system very similar to mine that basically spelled out step-by-step which settings I needed. I followed his instructions to the letter and ended up with a fully functional, completely reliable Hackintosh.

working on computer

Have a Backup Plan

Of course, there’s always the possibility that you just won’t get the damn thing figured out. In that case, I’d recommend buying a copy of Windows 7 as a backup. Windows is much, much easier to install than OS X. So, worst case scenario, you give up on installing OS X and have yourself a really nice Windows machine. Best case scenario, you end up not needing your copy of Windows and  return it for you money back — or, even better, do what I did and create a dual-boot OS X/Windows machine by installing another hard drive and using the Chimera bootloader.

I hope this is useful. If you’re thinking about doing this for the first time and decide to go ahead with it, just remember that your best friends in this process are going to be tonymacx86.com and YouTube.

Good luck. I’ll leave you with a couple of other miscellaneous websites/pages I found that helped me through this process:

Six reporters St. Paulites should be following on Twitter

I’m not a very prolific Twitter user. This might seem odd for someone whose work involves social media, but most of that work is actually done through my office’s account. We don’t use personal Twitter accounts at work, and at home I tend to spend more time on Facebook, where the intricate privacy options allow me to exercise a bit more discretion in terms of who’s allowed to see what (a big plus when your work is politically sensitive).

What I probably would tweet about, if I bothered to make time for it, is St. Paul stuff — people, places, events, etc. Fortunately, St. Paulites who want to know what’s going on around town have some much better options than me. Here are a few of my favorites:

Chao Xiong (Star Tribune)
Beat: St. Paul and Ramsey County public safety
Twitter handle: @ChaoStrib
Sample:

Frederick Melo (Pioneer Press)
Beat: St. Paul urban life, politics, neighborhoods
Twitter handle: @FrederickMelo
Sample:

Ben Garvin (Pioneer Press)
Beat: Photojournalist
Twitter handle: @bengarvin
Sample:

Mara Gottfried (Pioneer Press)
Beat: St. Paul public safety
Twitter handle: @MaraGottfried
Sample:

Julio Ojeda-Zapata (Pioneer Press)
Beat: Technology (with an eye on the local angle)
Twitter handle: @ojezap
Sample:

Emily Gurnon (Pioneer Press)
Beat: Ramsey County courts
Twitter handle: @EmilyGurnon
Sample:

Know some other good ones? Post them in the comments.

The $500 Kitchen Makeover

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When Patty and I moved into our house a little more than two years ago, the one thing we knew had to go was the kitchen floor. It was ugly, pockmarked, discolored and soiled by a thousand or so varieties of dirt and grime.

The problem is, we’re sort of cheap. And indecisive. Consequently, we spent the next two years debating what kind of flooring we wanted, how much we were willing to spend, and finally, whether we should pay a contractor to do the job right or take a chance on our own abilities as do-it-yourselfers.

From the beginning, Patty thought we should just do the floor ourselves. I resisted the idea, noting that our previous home improvement projects had yielded mediocre results. We went back and forth on the issue until one day Patty stumbled across this blog post, which describes how to redo your kitchen floor in black-and-white checkerboard for under $100 using vinyl, adhesive-backed tiles.

I know black-and-white checkerboard isn’t very popular anymore, but for some reason Patty and I seemed to gravitate toward it. We looked at a lot of modern, more conventional tile and sheet vinyl options, but everything looked boring. In any case, we thought we could make the black-and-white checkerboard work in our kitchen. I read the blog post, studied the photos, and then read it again. I clicked through to the how-to video on YouTube and checked out the website of the company that sells the tiles, Mazer Wholesale, Inc. It all seemed pretty self-explanatory.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like we really could do this ourselves. The tipping point came when Patty pointed out that if we could pull off a project like this for such a small price, we would still have enough money left over to pay a contractor to come in and fix it if the end result was so bad that we couldn’t live with it.

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I could go into detail about the actual process of laying the tiles, but it really is pretty simple and there are plenty of resources available online to help explain it. The edge pieces can be tricky, but after the first few you’ll get the hang of how to measure them. I will simply say that before doing this project, I had never done flooring in my life. If I can do it, anyone can.

We found our kitchen had a some qualities that meshed well with the checkerboard pattern — namely the yellow walls and the wood grain countertop, both of which help warm and soften the room. We decided to repaint the cabinets to match our appliances; that, of course, necessitated repainting all the molding and the door to the basement as well. (We found out that painting cabinets is a vastly more difficult task than laying down self-adhesive tiles over linoleum.)

When we got to the end, we still found that something was missing. We decided the room needed more color — something to punch it up a bit. We found some cheap red accent rugs at Target, and then went on Amazon and ordered some red-and-white checkerboard valances for the windows. We also bought a new dining set that we both liked from Ikea, and threw in a few plants and some framed prints on the walls for good measure.

Here’s what it all cost us:

  • Tiles (including shipping) ~$125
  • Painting supplies from Home Depot ~$150
  • Rugs, valances, cellular shades and wall decorations ~$125
  • Table and chairs from Ikea ~$100

There you have it. New kitchen, $500. Finally, here are a couple of blog posts from Apartment Therapy that I found helpful:

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Slowly Making Progress

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About a month ago, I set out to build my own WordPress theme from scratch. What you’re looking at today isn’t it.

Instead, I chose to revamp my current WordPress.com site while I finish building my new one. What’s the holdup, you ask? Well, for the past couple of months I’ve been learning HTML and CSS, and it turns out that my coding skills have very quickly exceeded my graphic design skills. In other words, I can make a website, I just can’t make it look good. Yet.

The new legislative session begins this week, which means my job is going to get very busy for the next few months. Since I’ll have less free time to devote to building the new site, in the meantime I thought I’d make some incremental improvements to this one. I added some new pages, including a showcase page that serves as my new landing page (I’m trying to de-emphasize my blog, since I rarely use it anymore), and I picked a cleaner, less obnoxious theme that I think actually looks quite good for a stock WordPress theme.

So, I will continue to pore over lines of CSS code like the ones pictured above, but in the meantime feel free to let me know what you think of my new WordPress.com site.

See you around.

About This Blog, Which I Rarely Use…

As you might have noticed, I’ve been posting on this blog at the rate of about once or twice per year. When I started it, I never intended to be much of a “blogger” per se; I simply wanted my own piece of real estate somewhere out there on the web. I figured that sooner or later someone was going to type my name into Google, and when they did, it might be a good idea to steer them toward something that belonged to me personally, rather than just a Facebook page or LinkedIn account.

In spite of its lack of fresh content, this blog manages to attract roughly 15 visitors per day. (A three-year-old post about the Megabus consistently gets the most traffic.) I wish I could tell you I had plans to start posting more often, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Partly this is due to the nature of my career: I work in a nonpartisan office in a highly political environment, which means I need to choose my words and my subject matter carefully when presenting myself to the public, so as not to seem in any way biased.

So if this blog seems rather dull and lifeless, it’s not entirely by accident.

Given all these considerations, I’ve realized that a blog probably isn’t the best format for what I’m trying to achieve by having my own website. Therefore, I plan on switching to more of a static web page format in the near future. I’m currently in the process of learning web design, and so my goal is to code a new website for myself from scratch. I’ll probably keep this blog alive and link to it using its wordpress.com domain name. But you can look for a new and improved (let’s hope) nickbusse.com in the near future.

So this is what it’s like…

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The last 48 hours have been fairly instructive for me as a blogger. Since WordPress linked to my post about DIY home renovation angst on their “Freshly Pressed” featured blogs page, I’ve received more web traffic in two days than I’ll probably ever get on this blog again. The number of comments I got on that post — 46 so far — is about half the total number I’d ever received before WordPress so generously started funneling pageviews into this, my lowly purchase on the blogosphere.

It’s cool to get a taste of what life would be like if I were a real blogger — someone who posted regularly on topics interesting enough to draw thousands of pageviews per day. As it is, I update this blog about four times a year, and my visitors are usually limited to friends, family and a handful of people I know through social media. I generally try to keep things pretty innocuous here, which doesn’t always make for interesting reading. But I’ve learned the hard way that drawing too much attention to oneself can be perilous, especially when one works in a career field that can be politically sensitive.

To those who have visited in the last couple of days — even just to spam my comment thread — I thank you for stopping by. I was trying to think of a way to parlay this temporary flood of attention into something useful, but so far I’ve got nothing. I’m sure I’ll think of something right after WordPress takes down the link.

To DIY, or Not to DIY?

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My wife and I have been homeowners for a little more than 10 months now, and one of the issues we’re constantly faced with is whether it makes better sense to hire a contractor to do home renovations or to save the money and do the work ourselves. It’s a problem complicated by the ever-growing abundance of DIY blogs and how-to websites that make seemingly any project look manageable, if not downright easy.

We’re fortunate in that we bought a house that doesn’t really need a lot of work. From the beginning, most of the projects on our to-do list were optional: add a second bathroom, replace the basement windows with glass block, redo the rusty old linoleum floor in the kitchen. But that only increases the pressure on us to do things ourselves. After all, if something isn’t essential, why not take your time, save the money and do it on your own?

It turns out there is a pretty compelling counter-argument. So far, we’ve taken on two “big” projects by ourselves: replacing the broken, non-functioning door to the storage space above our garage, and removing our drafty old basement windows (five in all) and installing custom-built glass block panels. Both projects yielded home upgrades that are fully functional, money-saving and — for the most part — good-looking. The trouble comes when you look closer at the workmanship: while not bad from a distance, it’s clearly lacking in the details. From the outside, our new door looks fine; from the inside, it looks like somebody handed a nail gun and a pack of wood shims to a 3-year-old.  And our glass block windows, while pretty, aren’t 100 percent level. The mortar is also uneven in spots (something that we can perhaps correct later.)

The question is, how much do these details really matter? We saved more than $500 by putting in the new basement windows ourselves. Are the imperfections we left worth that much?

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Old window: rotting, drafty and insecure.

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New window: rock-solid and energy-efficient; just not 100 percent level.

I’ve developed a rule of thumb: with proper tools and plenty of research, I can complete a project up to about 70–80 percent of the quality I’d expect from a contractor (in about three to four times the amount of time). When contemplating a home upgrade, the question then becomes: “Would I be satisfied with doing this in a way that’s 70–80 percent as good as I want it to be, in order to save X amount of dollars?”

Of course, there’s no guarantee a contractor would do any better. When we first moved in, we made the mistake of hiring a local “handyman” to install our dishwasher. He hooked it up okay, but he left behind some major problems with the drainpipe underneath the sink, and his electrician buddy installed an electrical switch for the garbage disposal directly beneath where the pipe was leaking. Oops.

After that experience, I bought a membership to Angie’s List, which lets you read and write reviews of contractors’ work. The $7.50-a-month price tag for a membership is a bit grating, but it’s worth it. You get discounts from a lot of contractors for being a member; more importantly, you get to see beforehand, from customer reviews, whether a contractor actually knows what they’re doing. Between a busted air conditioner, a smashed fender on my car, a new garage door and some major plumbing work, my membership to this site has already paid for itself a dozen times over.

Given that my odds of hiring a competent contractor are drastically higher now that I have access to that site, it’s tempting to avoid DIY projects altogether. Of course, I haven’t spoken yet of the sense of accomplishment you get from doing things yourself — but that’s mainly because I don’t get it. I’m a perfectionist; when I build something, all I tend to see are the flaws. My wife is much more satisfied with the outcome of our home renovations than I am. It’s also probably true, as she pointed out, that as we continue doing things ourselves, we’ll get better over time. Still, I can’t say I’m eager to try our hand at replacing the kitchen floor or installing that second bathroom alone. There are some things I don’t want to risk screwing up — especially, in the case of the bathroom, when plumbing and electricity are involved. Besides, contractors gotta eat too…