Apple MagSafe cord repair

repairing-apple-magsafe

[Tommy Ward] had a big problem with the cord for his laptop power supply. This thing’s not cheap so he figured out a way to fix the frayed cord on his Apple MagSafe. He asserts that the shortened rubber collar on the plug end of the cord is to blame for this type of damage. We think rough use … Read the rest

Hacked together Mac isn’t a hackintosh

hacked-together-macintosh

Check out this 20″ iMac. Notice anything peculiar? Look closely at the branding above the Apple logo. The only thing that tips you off that this iMac is a hacked together unit is that Acer logo on the replacement screen.

As we’ve so often been caught doing, [Flippy] was browsing eBay for deals. It’s a dangerous activity because you end … Read the rest

Mac EFI PIN lock brute force attack (unsuccessful)

mac-efi-pin-lock-brute-force

[Oliver] wiped the hard drive from a Macbook Pro using the ‘dd’ command on another machine. This does a great job of getting everything off the drive, but he was still faced with the EFI PIN lock protection when he tried to put it back into the Mac. You used to be able to clear the NVRAM to get around … Read the rest

160 Mac Minis, One Rack

Mac Rack

[Steve] needed an alternative to the Xserve, since Apple stopped making it. His solution was to stick 160 Mac Minis into a rack. That’s 640 real cores, or 1280 if you count HyperThreading.

First, Steve had to tackle the shelving. Nobody made a 1U shelf to hold four Minis, so [Steve] worked with a vendor to design his own. … Read the rest

Building an ARM cross compiler on OSX

arm-cross-compiler-for-osx

We’ve tried building our own ARM cross compiler on a Linux box and it’s no picnic. Luckily there is a free cross compiling toolchain available through Mentor Graphics (formerly called Code Sourcery G++). But those looking to develop on a Mac aren’t so lucky. There is help via a script, and [Michael] wrote a guide detailing how to use crosstool-ng Read the rest

Building your own Fusion Drive

We missed the original announcement, but Apple unveiled more than just the iPad Mini at their last event. They’ve got a new storage system called Fusion Drive which is supposed to combine the access speeds of solid state with the storage density of platter drives. When you look just under the surface what you’re really seeing is a disc drive … Read the rest

OS X port of gqrx is the easiest way to get into software defined radio

Many have tried to put together an easy package for running software defined radio packages on the Mac. Not many have succeeded the way [Elias]‘ port of the gqrx SDR package has. It’s simply the easiest way to get a software defined radio up and running on the mac.

gqrx is a front end for the very popular GNU RadioRead the rest