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Hackintosh Mountain Lion Upgrade

Posted on July 20, 2012

As the impending release of OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion is near, it is also time to make sure that we are ready to install Apple’s new OS onto our custom Intel hardware. We will cover the in-place upgrade from OSX Lion 10.7.4 to the GM(Final) release of OSX Mountain Lion.

This procedure has been confirmed to work with the official release of Mountain Lion in the App Store.

A clean install of Mountain Lion will not be covered in this article, but you can refer to this site which will walk you through a clean install. A clean install is great if you want to start from scratch, but for the rest of us with a lot of data, read on.

Tonymacx86 has released Unibeast for Mountain Lion which can be used to perform a clean install.

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0

My Wife’s Mother

Posted on June 4, 2012

Sometimes words can never convey how a person feels about another. I know this all too well. I was never very good at it and was probably the reason why some relationships didn’t work out. Now I must try to explain my feelings about this weekend’s events using those words.

Death surrounds us everyday and is made known by TV, Radio, and the Internet. Most times, we brush it off with only a quick comment about how sad it is to hear that a certain individual has passed on. Usually, grief is observed if we share particular memories with that individual and that grief increases as the amount of memories with that person increases.

I did not get to create a ton of memories with my wife’s mother. I do not need to in order to appreciate her. It didn’t take long to figure out how wonderful she was. Even to know I was only able to call her Mom for 7 months, the small amount of memories did not lessen the blow of her sudden death. The grief and pain was amplified by the thought that I would not be able to enjoy her as family.

My wife’s pale and panicked face only helped to make me feel more helpless. Nothing is more draining than going from a high and then crashing to the lowest point that a person can. Tomorrow, we begin the process of celebrating the life of a wonderful person. All I can do in this sad moment in time is to stand strong for my wife.

Here is to Susan Kay Kirschenheiter, the mother of my beloved wife. May she find peace and happiness in the next life. Here is also hoping that she finally gets to meet my grandmother, Esther Romeo, who passed away last 4th of July.

We miss you both so much!

Her Obituary

2

Linksys E3000 Tomato USB Firmware and PPTP

Posted on May 27, 2012

For many years, I have used routers that were DD-WRT compatible for the additional configuration options the 3rd party firmware provides. When I purchased a Linksys E3000 last year, I immediately installed DD-WRT in place of the stock Linksys firmware. I experienced some stability issues (later found out that it was due to high interference in the 2.4ghz spectrum) and had switched to the Tomato USB firmware. I immediately loved the interface which felt clean and organized. Since it was based off of the DD-WRT project, I knew that it would be just as customizable.

With the addition of iDevices and the constant demand to access home resources at home from the road, I decided that a VPN would be the best way to secure these resources as it is already supported on iDevices. PPTP was the best choice since these devices supported it out of the box. Here, I will run over the installation method to get a working VPN connection through the Tomato USB firmware.
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10

Intel i5 “Sandy Bridge” OSX Lion Install on Asus P8Z68-V/GEN3

Posted on January 21, 2012

I came to a point where I felt that my simple Intel e2200 Hackintosh system was in need of an upgrade. I had been wanting to look into building either an i5 or i7 Sandy Bridge system. When a local retailer decided to put the i5-2600k and i7-2600k on sale, I could not resist the temptation and found myself researching for the perfect motherboard.

Here, I will outline the software build from start to finish, and show how easy it is to build a i5 Sandy Bridge Hackintosh with OSx Lion.

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1

TDSS Fake Partition and Internet Redirect

Posted on December 1, 2011

Anyone that does tech support on a workstation level, may be familiar with a strain of a Windows viruses known as TDSS. TDSS is not commonly able to be detected by most anti-virus scanners out there, and can be contracted through a bad web link or even attached to an email. A brief overview of TDSS can be found over at the Trend Micro website. Trend Micro is known for both consumer retail produts, as well as business level products that deal with malware, spam, and firewalls. Kaspersky, another anti-virus product, has a free tool that is able to remove most versions of the TDSS virus called TDSSKILLER. This free utility is quick to find and destroy the TDSS virus, but a new strain has surfaced that has to be removed manually.

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