Last week I issued a caution about Squeeze possibly causing kernel panics.  Well, it turns out that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause, but it probably just made my problem more evident.  If you want to give Squeeze a shot, go for it!  Don’t let my experience scare you off.

The problem was that one of my 4GB SODIMMs was bad, and that was what was causing all the kernel panics.  I had previously tried testing my RAM with TechTool Pro, but it didn’t find any issues.  A friend of mine suggested that I tried Memtest OS X.  Low and behold, it found issues left and right!  I tried removing and swapping sticks and narrowed it down to one specific stick.  The RMA is in and while I’m temporarily down to 5GB of RAM (long story) instead of 8GB, I can at least run stably now.

EDIT: I found that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause of my problems.  If you want to try Squeeze, I think you can do it safely.  However, I’ll leave the instructions below for how to “uninstall” Squeeze.

So after Saturday’s install of Squeeze, I’ve had some issues with my Mac.  Here are the issues I’ve observed so far:

• Random hard OS X crashes
• CrashPlan engine crashing
• Spotlight indexing never completes

Of course, I can’t say that Squeeze caused all of these issues, but I think that it’s not worth the risk to save 600MB on a 500GB hard drive.  If anything, I’m going to say that Spotlight issues were the root cause of the CrashPlan issues, and I have no idea about the OS X crashes.  However, I was able to fix it pretty quickly.  After removing the directories from the Squeeze interface, just run this command from terminal for each directory you “squeezed”:

mac:~ myhome$ afscexpand Dropbox/

The command will complete after a minute or so (depending on size), and you’ll be left with your files in the original uncompressed state.

I’ve recently had some flakey behavior with my Hackintosh, and some of that has been traced back to incompatibilities between my Drobo using USB (FW800 is REALLY slow on it for some reason) and the version of OS X I’m running (10.5.7).  The best fix would be to do a reinstall and get it back on 10.5.6.  Even then, I know that it’ll just be a matter of time before something else pops up.

Luckily I was able to grab a refurbished 1GB 2.0GHz Mac Mini off of the Apple Store for cheap.  Even better is the RAM I just took out of my MBP will bring it up to 4GB.

I’m looking forward to having a Mac server that will do everything (Bonjour, Back to my Mac, working video, fast FW800, security updates) and won’t require constant babysitting.  Also, this now frees up the Atom hardware from the hackintosh to do my firewall project.  It’s a win-win!

I’ll probably do another Hackintosh at some point in the future, but I won’t have it be something that I rely on daily, as it just requires too much care and feeding.

Look for some future posts on using the Mac Mini as a server and setting up pfSense on the Atom hardware.

It was decided that last night I would attempt to upgrade our HTPC with some parts we had laying around.  This would be a combination of cannibalization from machines that haven’t been touched since we got our Macs, and some parts that had been given to us by friends that were untested.

Here’s how the install went:

• Install motherboard
• Find out that a metal tab from the backing plate was blocking the PS/2 ports
• Remove motherboard
• Install motherboard
• Find out that metal tabs from the backing plate were blocking the Ethernet ports
• Remove motherboard
• Install motherboard
• Install hard drives
• Find out that hard drives blocked the power connector on the motherboard
• Remove hard drives
• Move hard drives to alternate mounting locations
• Find out that alternate hard drive carrier hits video card
• Bend the crap out of the hard drive carrier to make it fit
• Find out that the hard drive carrier now blocks the power connector on the video card
• Bend the crap out of the hard drive carrier the OTHER way
• Cable up all the power and internal cables
• Hit power button
• Power breaker trips

*sigh*

I was having fun with the install, up to a point.  Now I’m wondering why I didn’t just go to the Apple store and pick up an Apple TV for $200 and call it a day.  Right now I have no HTPC until I get something worked out.  Plan B is to take some other known working parts that should work and get it going that way.  Plan C is to start throwing stuff.

Once I get everything running, the plan is to get Windows 7 on there to use the Windows Media Center.  I’ll post reviews of Windows 7 as a HTPC if/when I get it running!

Now that you’re making some decent products, you should consider figuring out your marketing. Even if I wanted to buy a GM vehicle, I’d be confused as to which one I should buy because they’re practically the same with different body panels!

These two Google AdWords ads just showed up exactly like this on a website for me:

I assume I’d buy the Chevy Equinox if I want MPG, and the GMC Terrain if I want IPSI (ideas per square inch).

Has anyone else experienced the following error when trying to reblog a tweet in Tumblr?

Leave a comment and let me know if this is working for you or not.

After waiting about 45 minutes on hold, VMware confirmed that they’re having issues with the Academic store and it should be fixed in about 24 hours.  At this point, I have no choice but to uninstall Fusion 3 and reinstall Fusion 2. *sigh*

Good thing the guy answered right when he did, because I had literally entered my credit card number in the regular store and was about to hit check out.

It seems that VMware’s Academic store won’t recognize that I’ve registered VMware Fusion 2.x and won’t allow me to proceed through checkout.  I’m on hold waiting for their support to try to get it straightened out, but in the mean time I have a VMware installation that I can’t start up.

In addition, I thought I would just request an eval key for Fusion 3 to get me through until I had a proper key, but that system seems broken too!

I guess I probably should have waited for a serial before installing Fusion 3?