Today, the Daily Mail, UK’s 2nd biggest-selling newspaper made a boo boo by quoting a parody Twitter account, thinking it was the REAL Steve Jobs. Many of us who spend copious amounts of time on Twitter are familiar with the popular @ceoSteveJobs account that spews lots of funny one-liners aimed to poke fun at all-things-Apple.

So, what did the parody account say? Just 13 simple words.

We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect. – @ceoSteveJobs

Then, the Daily Mail went on to publish the following news piece online.

I can only imagine how embarrassing it must be for the newspaper, when the entire twittersphere picked up on their mistake and started *rolling their eyes* at the gross misreporting.

Soon after, the article was pulled from the Daily Mail, but a copy still remains here at TheBackpackr.com – read it, if you wish. At the same time, a seemingly similar post (view here) with the same imagery was found on the Daily Mail, though dated earlier. Bizarre.

This iMaxi product with wings is probably slated as a gag that will humiliate that insane Apple fanboy/fangirl in your life who incessantly talks about Apple, Apple, APPLE. It’s fairly cheap to give away as a crazy gift, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with one. If you’re really, really keen on getting one, go on to their store here.

And just in case you haven’t seen one of my favourite spoof ads that came out hours after the launch of the iPad, here it is.

Here’s Bill Gates of Microsoft fame – note the snide comments to Steve Jobs. Looks at the contextual advertisement that appeared on the right hand column too!

And now, Steve Jobs, the man who brought us Apple computers (and nearly Apple everything these days!). Once again, note the advertising on the right.

Anyhow, in keeping with the times, we needed a new Mac-based machine in the office and I decided to get grimy and build one with Snow Leopard AND Windows. Yup, dual-booting it’s called. Over the weekend, I encountered numerous grey screens of death, hung computers and problems of every kind – I just could not believe how others said this motherboard was the easiest to install on. After awhile, I decided to return it to the store and get another unit, JUST IN CASE the motherboard had problems (which HARDLY ever happens, right?). Whaddya know… the install was flawless after I swapped it!

I haven’t got oodles of tips and tricks to share, but here are some of the things I did to get it going.

1. If you haven’t heard of the all-time-awesome-kickass-Lifehacker-Snow-Leopard-install, then you simply must. It’s a prerequisite to building a hackintosh. Read here.
2. Do as Lifehacker tells you – go prepare your thumbdrive with the install files, then come back here.
3. Also, go procure your hardware – for BEST-est results, do get the Gigabyte EP45-UD3L, EP45-UD3R or EP45-UD3P motherboards. They allow you to pretty much get the retail Snow Leopard working out of the box. Any current NVIDIA graphics card will do. I got the 9400GT which has HDMI, DVI and VGA ports. As for the processor, any Core2Duo/Core2Quad ones are fine. I used a Q9400 Intel Quad Core CPU.
4. Set your BIOS settings – this is important for the system to run optimally. The only settings you really need to modify are in “Integrated Peripherals” – set the ICH SATA Control Mode to AHCI [default is IDE] and Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode to AHCI [default is IDE].
5. Now, proceed to boot with the thumbdrive – you have to configure your BIOS boot options to select the thumbdrive.
6. Everything else is pretty dead easy (from going to Tools-Disk Utility and partitioning the hard drive), to installing the OS.
7. Complete the installation process and when the machine reboots, let the thumbdrive boot again. On the OS selection screen, select the internal hard drive you installed it to. (The reason you do this is because the bootloader isn’t installed on the internal drive yet – don’t worry if you don’t understand this gibberish!).
8. Now, download the file mentioned in Lifehacker (EP45UD3P Snow Leopard.pkg zip) and run it, but install it on the internal drive.
9. That’s it really! If you’d like to run Software Update to upgrade to 10.6.1, you may do so (that’s the latest version as of today) – nothing adverse will happen.

If you’d like to dual boot between the Mac OS and Windows, here’s a spanner that gets thrown in.

1. After booting into the installation (Step 5 above), go to Tools-Disk Utility and create 2 partitions. (Practical tip: make them slightly different sizes so you can identify them easily later in your Windows install). On one partition, set it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and on the second, set it to FAT32. Do click on Options and set the Partition Map scheme to GUID.
2. After the partitioning and formatting is done, close the window and return to the installer. You can resume with Step 7 above.
3. After you’re done with the Mac OS installation, pop in your Windows DVD and change the boot sequence in BIOS. I’m using Vista (*puke*) as I’ve got a legit licence for it. Let the DVD boot up.
4. Click on Repair your computer link, then click Next and select Command Prompt.
5. At the black screen, type diskpart [enter].
6. Then type select disk 0 [enter].
7. Type list partition [enter].
8. You will see a list of your partitions with numbers on the side. You need to select the one you intend to install Windows on.
9. Type select partition xx [enter] (where xx is the number you identified in Step 8).
10. Type active [enter].
11. Return to the Windows installer and continue to install Windows on the designated partition.
12. When you’re done, Windows will boot by default (hey, where’s my Mac installation?).
13. Don’t worry, you just need to download a program called EasyBCD that will easily tweak the Windows boot manager. Download it here.
14. Run it and go to Add/Remove Entries. Select the Mac tab.
15. Select Generic x86 PC and give it a name you like – Mac OS works well. Click Save.

There you have it… A Mac and a PC cohabitating on the same hard drive. How sweet is that…? Here’s the bootloader screen that gives you the option to select your OS.

Here’s my setup before I put it into a “nicer” casing. 2 friends commented that a hackintosh is function without form – I totally agree, and think that Hackintoshes are like Frankenstein – an ugly brute with force. Macs are the princess with elegance but less power.

Now, write a comment and let me know if you’ve had success. Please don’t ask questions such as, “will this XYZ motherboard work?” – this short tutorial is solely for the EP45-UD3R and similar variants. If you want it to work, get this motherboard. I’ll try to put a video together when I work on the next installation of this setup, but it may take awhile…

For the iPhone 3Gs, I did use the tap-to-focus on the subject feature. All photos are not touched up, and are saved at the highest quality after adding the watermark in Photoshop.

Initial observations are that the tap-to-focus on the iPhone 3Gs also is for metering, and in certain cases, can over or underexpose images depending on where you tap. Overall, the images from the iPhone 3G pale in comparison, as the iPhone 3Gs adds vibrance and a certain warmth to the images. Gone too is the milky film that overlays the iPhone 3G images.

Sure it beats the Microsoft error messages of “An exception 06 has occured at 0028:C11B3ADC” (Do I locate that on Google maps? Or is that on someone’s Tee?), but it was still pretty darn foreign to me.

Microsoft mystery exception errors

After doing some research, I found the solution, which was hidden under a haystack, under another haystack. In case you encounter an error message like the following, I will share the solution with you – “Some actions taken while the account your-account was offline could not be completed online.” and “Mail has undone actions on some messages so that you can redo the actions while online.”

Just follow these instructions, and you’ll be fine.

1. Be not afraid. You may never have used Terminal or even heard of it before.

2. Close Apple Mac Mail. Force Quit, if you need to.

3. In Finder, navigate to Applications and Utilities. Look for Terminal and run it.

4. From the blank screen, follow the instructions below.

5. Start your Apple Mac Mail again and rejoice! It should have been fixed.

P.S. Perhaps the error could have arisen because I was sending out a 50MB email and didn’t have enough time to let it complete. I shut my notebook, and hopped into the car. From there on, I was using my iPhone for mail and Twitter too, of course!

Is he a spy? Perhaps his Mac was at the doctors for service?

It goes to prove that geeks are cool (most of us anyway…) and we have varied interests. There were sessions on how to Salsa, Espresso appreciation, sharing of holiday experiences, Kufi art and also a little about coding standards. Overall it’s just a gathering to network and meet others. A few interesting observations:

1. Everyone is on Twitter – am I correct? (Seems that way, ‘coz people were Tweeting from each session) – Follow me?
2. Many techies use Apple Macs – it’s rare to see so many Macs in one location!
3. Typical staple geek food is pizza – well, it ended that way yesterday…
4. Live streaming seems to be the in thing now

I found it interesting to “guess” and try to associate Twitter usernames to faces – very often, the little avatars don’t do a good job at all. Anyhow, the funniest incident was sending @thechannelc a Tweet saying, I’m behind you, the guy with the camcorder, to which she turned around several seconds later and shook my hand. Indeed, we’re all a connected bunch.

We also had live updates on the #barcampkl hashtag going on here. Great use of technology there.

I had a video camcorder with me, and recorded bits and pieces from the day, and put them together here. Enjoy! Are you in the video? If you are, add an annotation on YouTube with your Twitter / Facebook username by clicking here.

Music credit: Steve ALLEN (Robert Pieculewicz)

I attended a Christian media conference recently, which is meant to promote the use of media in the church context. There were 3 streams – live audio, photography and videography. I opted to improve my production skills and signed up for videography. It was an intense 4 days, where we were indoctrinated with the whole production process, from scriptwriting to camera work to lighting to directing and finally, to editing.

The team I worked with were really a fun bunch, and we worked together on working out the script, negotiating with other teams to borrow a team member (the older man is borrowed), and shooting the video. The edit process began at 9pm, and we finally finished the output at 3am! By then, 2 of our team members had slumbered already!

Areas to improve on: pre-production planning is vital – plan your shots well, and make sure the team members are performing their roles (we lost our log sheet of all the shots during the process! That wasted a lot of time in the edit room). Also, ensure you have sufficient lighting – some parts we didn’t have lights as they were in great demand by other teams.

It was a great experience, and definitely a fun one for anyone wanting to learn video skills. Now to put it to good use on The Backpackr!