Ainsley's American Girl doll named Carly has an eyelid
that doesn't always open after her nap. We filled out a doll
hospital admittance form and shipped her for repairs. Ainsley
asked if we should poke holes in the shipping box so that she could
breathe. Cute. Carly should be home for Christmas.
December 5, Saturday
Let it snow! Our first snow fall of
the season is a month early and is more than just a dusting of snow. Betsi
took Ainsley to her 7:00am swim meet before it really started to
snow.
I finally discovered the right combination of hardware and steps required to install Mac OS X on my Dell Mini 9. Everything worked for a short time before the SSD died. Grrr. It's been a long three months of never getting everything to work with Ubuntu and not getting everything to work with Mac OS X. Windows XP and anti-virus was going to cripple the netbook, so that was my last option.
Mark, Remy and Quincy dropped Michelle off at the airport and stopped by for a few hours. Playing in the snow and hanging out was a great way to spend the afternoon.
Remy and Quincy enjoy the hot cocoa after playing in
the snow.
December 6, Sunday
Day two of the 7:00am swim meet. Ainsley swam the IM, 50m butterfly
and 50m free.
Dinner and a movie with the kids. We saw The
Blind Side with Sandra
Bullock and liked it. The new Apple store is across the street. I
told Betsi that any Christmas gift from that store would suit me just
fine.
December 7, Monday
Sunrise out our bedroom window. There was more
of an orange glow that what the photo shows.
December 12, Saturday
I installed the replacement SSD and reinstalled Mac
OS X. I even have a backup. Everything works except for
sleep mode. For almost $500, I have a 3 lb, 9 inch "MacBook
Mini" (1.4Kg, 23cm). While I've learned a lot, there's
been a lot of pain and suffering along the way. The wallpaper
is courtesy of National
Geographic.
MyDellMini answered most of my questions. I
discovered the $29 retail version of Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard is
what I needed and not the OEM CD that comes with a Mac. The $29
retail version is designed to be an upgrade and therefore, is not bootable. The "hack" is
to find and install a boot loader that works. I used NetBookInstaller,
but the one that works changes all of the time. I also needed our
existing iMac and a spare external hard drive. I bought an external
DVD writer and 16GB USB flash drive, but they never worked for me. My
screens didn't look like the ones on the internet and I was too new to
Macs to understand why.
The steps:
Replace the 8GB SSD
Mac OS X requires at least 16GB of drive space for installation.
Remove the old 8GB solid state drive (SSD) from the Dell Mini
and replace it with a 32GB SSD.
Format and partition the external hard drive.
Connect the external hard drive to the Mac.
Open Disk Utility (Finder, Applications, Utilities,
Disk Utility).
Highlight the external hard drive on the left.
Click on the Partition tab (First Aid, Erase, Partition, RAID,
Restore).
Choose Partition 1 under Volume Scheme.
Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the format.
Choose GUID partition after clicking on the Options button.
Click apply.
Restore the Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 upgrade DVD to the external
hard drive.
Insert the Mac OS X DVD.
Open Disk Utility (Finder, Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility).
Highlight the DVD drive on the left.
Click on the Restore tab (First Aid, Erase, RAID, Restore).
Click and drag the DVD on the left to the Source box.
Click and drag the external hard drive on the left to the Destination
box.
To make the external hard drive bootable is the "Hack" in "Hackintosh"
and the program that works changes all of the time. Today's
hack may be different from yesterday's hack of using NetbookInstaller. Search MyDellMini for
the latest.
Go into the BIOS set up by pressing F2 or 0 (zero) in the first
few seconds of rebooting the Dell Mini. There should be a message
on the screen for which button to press for Boot Options. I
pressed the key a few times to make sure it registers
On the Main tab on the third line down, make sure you have BIOS
version A04 or A05. If you have version A06, then you'll need
to downgrade the BIOS.
On the Advanced tab, change the USB BIOS Legacy Support to [Enabled]. Change
USB Wake Support to [Enabled].
On the Boot tab, highlight USB Storage, press F6 to move it to
the top of the boot order, and press F10 to save and exit.
Turn off the Dell Mini in the first few seconds of rebooting. It's
a waste of time if it reboots completely.
Install Mac OS X on the Dell Mini.
Attach the external hard drive to the Dell Mini and reboot.
It should boot from the external hard drive.
Choose your language when prompted.
When the Install Mac OS X window appears, click on Disk Utility
on the menu bar.
Format and partition the Dell Mini hard drive (see instructions
above).
Close Disk Utility.
Click the Continue button. It will take 1 hour even though
it says 30 minutes.
Boot the Dell Mini.
Turn off the Dell Mini.
Unplug the external hard drive from the Dell Mini.
Boot up the Dell Mini.
The first boot up can take 4 to 10 minutes. Subsequent boot
ups will take less than a minute.
Most things work.
Two fingered scrolling using the track pad does not work.
Sleep mode doesn't work for me, but it may for you. For
some reason, every time I reboot the laptop, the BIOS setting of
USB Legacy Support changes from [Disable] (which makes the sleep
feature work) to [Enabled]. My work around is to never close
the laptop lid while the computer is on and deactivate sleep mode
in System Preferences, Energy Saver.
Do's and Don'ts.
Do not upgrade the Dell Mini to Mac OS X 10.6.2, which disables
support for the Intel Atom processor. There may be a hack that
fixes that by the time you read this.
Do not run the hack to delete the hibernate file to have drive
space. I had to reinstall Mac OS X after that.
Make a disk image to an external hard drive after installing
your favorite software.
December 13, Sunday
The rain all day Sunday and changing temperature produced
a dense, low level fog. We could still see the stars. Ryan
took most of these creepy
photos.
December 14, Monday
Last night's fog caused frost and black ice. It
turned our black roof shingles white.
December 17, Thursday
Betsi flew to Ironwood, Michigan in the upper peninsula to visit Chris. They
have three feet of snow on the ground.
December 18, Friday
We are expecting 15 to 20 inches (38 to 50cm) of snow
between 9:00pm tonight and midnight tomorrow. This is rare
for this area and may break an all time record for a December snow
storm.
December 19, Saturday
It snowed all day.
December 20, Sunday
Snow drifts from the roof below and covers part of our bedroom window. See more photos.
December 24, Thursday, Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve dinner at Lori and Harry's.
Shadow.
Ainsley was estatic when the doorbell rang and a box
was at our doorstep. As promised, Carley was home from the
doll hospital by Christmas. She
came with a hospital gown, hospital bracelet, "Get Well" balloon,
and a certificate of good health.
Betsi helps an excited Ainsley to fall asleep before
Santa arrives. Both Betsi and Shadow fell asleep too. Ainsley
is holding onto Carley and Shelby.
December 26, Saturday
A hawk in our back yard.
December 27, Sunday
They boys were using the shovel to dig out caves into
the snow bank last week, but the shovel was eventually covered by
snow and lost. After a week of melting, the shovel was found
again.
Next
