Posted on 14th July 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.
Posted on 19th May 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.
Posted on 15th March 2014
Running a modern Hackintosh has become fairly simple and straightforward these days. With the help of websites offering everything from installers to hardware compatibly charts, building a dream Mac is easily done. There is still a chance that something could break. It could be caused by a bad install, update, or even worse, a bad hard drive. What is fairly difficult is the fact that running hard drive diagnostics outside of a fully bootable Mac install may only allow you to test the physical drive. What about if is not a physical issue and is file system related?
That is where a great program from real Mac fame, DiskWarrior comes in to play for most. Sure, OSX has a built in drive verification utility and you could boot into single user mode and run fsck, but what if those fail? What if you can not boot into OSX at all? DiskWarrior does give you a disk image that can be booted off of, if it is a real Macintosh computer. It will not boot on non-Apple hardware. So what do you do then?
You boot to your recovery install of OSX.
Posted on 13th May 2013
Will June 11, 2013 be the best day this year? Many news outlets are citing that we will see the release of a newly designed iOS7 and Mac OSX 10.9.
Both are old news to some and new news to others. What both parties can take away from this, is that there is a high possibility that the somewhat antiquated interface that is iOS could see a refresh.
What things can we expect to change?
Posted on 10th March 2013
For those of us using Apple’s OSx on custom hardware (Hackintosh), iMessages has failed to connect in recent months. This is due to how iMessages verifies the hardware and sees that we are not running a true Apple device.
Chimera, the bootloader included in MultiBeast, has been updated to 2.0.1. In the 2.x release, they have added a fix that allows iMesaages to work on your home-brew OSx machine. This update is not currently a part of Multibeast, so it will require downloading and installing separately. Just follow the install wizard and make sure to install on your Hackintosh primary partition/drive. Any custom configurations should not be overwritten, but always make a backup just in case.
Download Chimera (Requires an account).