Posted on August 12, 2015
Some of you know that I helped this great organization back in the early 2000s. This event marks the 13th year of it’s existence! And to add to the greatness, a good friend of mine Jorge Castro is doing a keynote!
If you are interested in Open Source and Linux, then this event is worth the trip. Plus, it is free for the basic attendance package.
Head over to their website and register!
Posted on July 14, 2015
Following the guide of Insignia NS-PCY5BMA Bluetooth 4.0, Macintosh Yosemite 10.10.2, and Handoff, Handoff is still working well, even on Apple’s current 10.10.4. One issue that will creep up, is that every time the system is updated, the Bluetooth kext is replaced/updated. Luckily, only 2 things need to happen to restore functionality. read more
Posted on July 13, 2015
My wife and I are proud to announce that we will both be in the musical, The Music Man, for the Worthington Community Theatre. Abby is playing the role of Miss Marion Paroo, and I will be playing the hated Anvil Salesman, Charlie Cowell. Get your tickets today at http://www.mcconnellarts.org!
Check out these videos that Fox 28 did with some of the cast this morning: read more
Posted on May 19, 2015
With the release of Yosemite and iOS 8.1, came a new way to connect the many Apple devices that one person can have. This method known as Continuity and Handoff allows a phone call to be answered on a Macintosh computer and transferred to an iPhone along with access to continuing to edit an email from one device to another. These are just a couple of examples of Apple’s new feature set. See Apple’s explanation here.
The feature is designed to work only with newer model Macs and can leave some of us, including Hackintoshers, out of the mix. The requirements call for Bluetooth 4.0 and certain WiFi chipsets to natively enable the feature. Some work from the community has given us the “Continuity Activation Enabler” for older Macs and can even work for some Hackintoshes that have a Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor that is natively support Out of the Box in Yosemite. A cheap Bluetooth adaptor can be found in a lot of places online, but local availability of a solution can be limited.
Best Buy sells at least one Bluetooth 4.0 dongle under their in-house brand Insignia model NS-PCY5BMA. Luckily for us, it sports the Broadcom BCM20702A0 chipset which OS X Yosemite supports, but just not in the Insignia flavor. To enable Handoff, we must get a working Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor at the start. The Insignia one can be used after it is enabled in OS X. What we will look at today is how to get OS X to recognize this adaptor, and then activate the Handoff feature. This guide should work for any adaptor that has the BCM20702A0, but is not recognized under the Bluetooth section in the System Information window. read more
Posted on March 17, 2015
First off, Happy St. Patricks Day!
It has been a question that many Hackintoshers have been trying to solve since the release of the Yosemite betas last year. How do we get iMessages to work? Many have tried and many have failed. What has seemed to lack is a good comprehensive guide covering a wide range of scenarios.
This guide over at Tonymacx86 is a pretty detailed resources and should help you get your setup going. You are best to use the Clover Bootloader as is seems to handle the manual values as well as NVRAM much better then Chimera/Chameleon. I will note the chapter I followed for each setting in my setup.
Anytime I would try to sign in to Messages, I would get the “An error occurred during activation. Try again.” message. This was good news for me since I just had to make sure Clover had the right serial numbers and so on. Some situations will still require you to call in to Apple to have them whitelist your serial and some other values. For my situation, all I needed to make sure I had valid was:
I also made sure that all of my configs for iMessage and iCloud were deleted prior to doing anything as to make sure I started as fresh as possible. (Chapter 3.3)
Note on the SmUUID. It is better to generate a unique SmUUID and not assume that your motherboards will work with Apple’s servers. Just run uuidgen from the terminal 4 or 5 times and use that value in Clover Configurator. Also make sure, as is detailed in chapter 3.2, that your ethernet and wifi are labeled as enX and showing as Built-In for this to work right.
Once all of these were set up with correct values, I did need to change my Apple ID password. Once reset, I was able to login and send/receive iMessages once again. Once you have correct values, you will want to always use these with your particular motherboard/cpu combination as to not blacklist that system in the future as long as Apple does not change their verification process again.
And finally, a big shout out to jaymonkey who has spent countless hours keeping his guide up to date. Without his collection of information, iMessages would not be functioning on Yosemite Hackintoshes.