—A “Brief” Note on Switching to Mac, from a (former) Windows Guy.

I have to say, in all my years of conflict with Apple, the designer/technophile in me feels a connection to their hardware. Just look at any of iFixit’s teardowns of late, and you can see how chaos is brought to order. No it’s not the products I have a problem with, just the company’s stance on certain things, and the way they slant information to the not so savvy in order to benefit their public appeal. I also grew to hate fanboy-ism, which… seems to be an Apple thing. (Seriously get a life)

Growing up, my biggest Apple repellent was incompatibility. It really wasn’t a choice. It just so happened that I was born into a world/region that used Windows. So naturally, that’s what I got used to. And being that most of the world used Windows, it kind of made the case for the Mac a little weak. The Macs I got exposed to in my youth didn’t have enough for me. They were cute, but not very useful, so I went on about my days mostly ignoring them. How ironic that a platform whose biggest detractor was a lack of applications, would one day be the world leader in mobile “apps”. Kudos.

—Trinity: A Personal Computer with a Personality Disorder. (How to triple-boot OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu!)

I sort of did it before with Silvia; triple booting Ubuntu 10.04, the original Windows XP installation that came with her, and Windows 7 Enterprise just for the heck of it all on one drive. GRUB handled the selection process on startup, and after tweaking the countdown timer I was pleased with it. Doing something similar with a hackintosh on the first try was an ambitious idea (if I do say so myself), but I wanted one machine to rule them all.

I suspected that getting three of today’s major platforms to play nice together on one drive was going to be a serious headache. It would probably be much simpler to use a separate hard drive for each OS, but that would be rather boring wouldn’t it? Plus I only had one drive and, with the recent flooding in Thailand, purchasing another one was kind of out of the budget. Tony put up a guide on dual booting, but adding Ubuntu was a big question mark. Once again, lifehacker proved itself to be an invaluable resource.

—So you want to create a UniBeast thumb drive for your Hackintosh without a Mac? Here’s how to do it in Windows (& probably Ubuntu)

(image credit: Dennis Novak/Getty Images)

It’s quite the conundrum. You don’t have a Mac. You’re eager to install Lion on your hackintosh but it requires purchasing and installing Snow Leopard, only to then purchase and upgrade to Lion(???). Like me, you don’t want to pay for two operating systems when you’re only interested in the fresh new hotness Lion has to offer. The official OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive is $69 before tax (ouch), and like a good student of tonymacx86, you want an all-in-one bootable USB thumb drive with everything you need to set up Lion and maintain it (à la UniBeast).

I wrestled with this for a bit. I knew I wanted a “legitimate” copy of Lion for my hackintosh, as ironic as that sounds, but it just didn’t make sense buying two operating systems just to get the one I really wanted. And since all I had were Windows systems, I needed some google inspiration…

—Silvia (part three)…

(image credit: Home Theater Shack)

I stopped by my local Home Depot and bought my first soldering iron. When I was little my uncle had a soldering gun he used for small car related projects. I thought the concept of fusing metal was pretty cool. The pins on the faulty power button connector were so tiny I was afraid of shorting out the board. My early practice attempts at soldering ended in a fruitless, sloppy, unattractive heap on my workbench. Since I was such a novice I needed to learn some basic skills. I found a web tutorial on the proper soldering techniques. By this time I had also learned I could have purchased a better soldering iron and kit from Radio Shack, one of many regrets.

In any case, I had another project in mind that I figured I could hone my skills on

—Silvia (part two)…

Thanks to Dell’s excellent documentation on shall we say not-so-excellent products of the time, I discovered that a bluetooth card could be installed pretty easily (eBay!). That little blue LED lit up for the first time and I was so pleased with myself. I now had the ability to sync my BlackBerry wirelessly, though painfully slow… and not all files were compatible. Yea.. cool.

I started playing with Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu after a serious hard drive crash (another casualty of that fan). I ran one of their recovery programs to try salvage my data, as at this time the only option Windows was giving me was to install a fresh copy. It dumped file fragments in a bunch of folders. (I still haven’t gotten around to piecing them back together as it wasn’t really critical stuff.) Didn’t exactly save the day, but I liked the concept of Ubuntu, its light weight, and simplicity. And I loved the startup sounds of the drum.