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Unofficial Apple Device Updates

Greg Esposito Leave a comment

Apple has a pretty consistent track record of cutting off OS support to Macs on convenient technological gaps- more than the logical cutoff of PowerPC support to Intel only support when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard shipped. But the community around Apple has usually stepped in and provided some life to machines Apple has abandoned. Let’s look at a few of these…

MLPostFactor – Bringing Mountain Lion to machines left behind by Apple

Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) requires a 64-bit EFI to install, and fully 64-bit drivers for all hardware. For this reason, a lot of machines could not boot it and were stuck with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

OSX-Denied

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Synology NAS and Ghostcasting

Greg Esposito Leave a comment

So imagine a scenario where you have to prep hundreds of different machines, for different customers, with different setups, but with hundreds of potential variations of OS, applications, licensing, and you’d need these all on demand.

Back in the day (up to about 2 years ago, actually), we solved this scenario in our warehouse with a hard drive duplicator setup. We had a massive 16 drive IDE drive duplicator, a smaller 8 drive SATA duplicator, and had recently purchased a 16 drive SATA duplicator that ran it’s own embedded Windows and was quite fancy. We then augmented this deployment solution with the concept of “master drives” that we’d mark as unique, store on a shelf, and pull out to duplicate.

HDD-Duplicator

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Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet: Jellybean!

Greg Esposito 17 Comments

The Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, when originally launched, was marketed as an iPad-killer, the “business-level” Android tablet due to being made by a major PC manufacturer. I know a lot of people bought into this hype. It’s unfortunate that the marketing mumbo-jumbo sold so many, but not enough, as Lenovo quickly abandoned it’s Android efforts and the quickly launched successor, the ThinkPad Tablet 2, is an x86-based Windows 8 tablet.

ThinkPad_Tablet

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Kasper: Stuffit 5 Password Recovery

Greg Esposito 65 Comments

I don’t profess to be an expert programmer or a skilled security researcher, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the last dozen plus years working on recovering old passwords in StuffIt archives. StuffIt was the popular compression tools for Mac users until the Mac OS X-era, when it was overtaken by the standard ZIP format (and price per gigabyte of storage reached a point where compression just wasn’t as critical). You can still purchase Stuffit Deluxe 2011 for both Windows and Mac, but for most people there will never be a need.

Kasper-Logo

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AirPlay and AirParrot

Greg Esposito 4 Comments

I was approached with a challenge to craft a solution that will do the following:

– Allow a presenter to wirelessly display a presentation

– Allow the presenter to walk around with the device (preferably a light Windows based tablet to be held for 2-3 hours in one hand)

– Mirror the content to two television screens at once, with the content being readable on two large (40-50 inch) TVs

– Allow the presenter to utilize PowerPoint’s Presenter View to keep tabs on timing and have access to notes

– Keep the cost down while also getting it ready in three days

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