Bill Farmer

Random thoughts on random subjects

Upgrading to Windows 10

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I didn’t like the Windows 10 preview, I thought it was a pain in the backside, so I have delayed upgrading from Windows 7 until the last minute when I got the countdown notification. I have been running a slightly dodgy copy of Windows 7 for a long time, so I was somewhat surprised when, out of the goodness of their hearts, Microsoft said I could have an activated copy of Windows 10 for free.

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Resurrecting a netbook as a web server

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

When I got fed up with Windows XP on my netbook, I tried windows 7 on it, but it was barely usable. So I tried Windows 7 Starter which was better. I upgraded it to Home Premium, which was OK at first, but slowed down as it got clagged up with updates. That was it until recently, when I read an article about putting Windows 10 on one. I didn’t try that, but I did try Linux Mint on it.

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Build Mac OSX apps using command line tools

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

You will need to install the Xcode command line tools, you don’t need the Xcode app. The easiest way to do this is to attempt to build an app like emacs by typing ./configure on the command line. A dialog box will pop up asking if you want to download and install the tools. Xcode now uses the LLVM CLang compiler and documentation is exceedingly hard to find. You can type gcc -help or clang -help on the command line to get some info.

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Read iBook books on an Android tablet

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

You will need to install Calibre to make the books usable, and the books must be DRM free. There are two ways to do this: If you have a Mac or Hackintosh you can find your books in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books, in what appears to be epub files but are really folders with numeric names. Copy the ones you want to somewhere accessible, like ~/Books, and zip the contents of each folder, not the folder itself.

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Install OSX El Capitan on a PC (MBR)

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

Prerequisites A real Mac or Hackintosh A spare disk drive – at least 8Gb, preferably USB An 8Gb or larger USB stick The Install OSX El Capitan.app from the App Store A disk partition to install in Install on spare disk drive Connect your spare drive to your PC. Use the method described here to build the El Capitan install USB stick and install OSX using the GPT partition scheme on your spare disk drive.

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