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Easy Hackintosh wi-fi

Hackintosh

Never easier.

The ease with which full function wi-fi can be installed in a Hackintosh has never been greater or the cost lower.

What follows assumes you use an Airport Extreme (AEX) or Time Capsule (TC) wi-fi router. My AEX is a Gen 1 (2008), single band only, but Gen 4 AEX/TCs and later are dual band, meaning that they can support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz (802-11n) devices simultaneously. With the advent of iPhone 5 most of my ‘go to’ devices now support 5GHz, including Hacks, iPads and iPhones, so dual-band is not a requirement. We do have two devices in the home which are 2.4GHz capable only, the xBox 360 and the old iMac G4, and these are set to receive their broadband signal directly from the A&T Uverse router which is 2.4GHz, 802-11b. As usual, the Telephone Company is a decade behind. Everything else looks to the Airport Extreme and now uses the 5GHz band.

The Hackintosh wi-fi issue has become much simpler over time. First one used an external USB wi-fi dongle with the associated (awful) Realtek software. Then TP-Link came along with internal PCIe cards which delivered Airport capability and, later, when OS X Lion came along, AirDrop functionality after you messed with Pref files some. You would buy the TP-Link PCIe card then an aftermarket wi-fi card which was an SOB to install in the card owing to the fiddly connectors. After application of cable ties and solder for the joints you destroyed, the card worked fine.

The other day I learned from the excellent Tonymacx86 Hack forum that TP-Link now makes a dual band wi-fi card which integrates the PCIe card and the wi-fi card. The model number is TL-WDN4800 and Amazon has it for $35 – which is less than the previous card + wi-fi card combination cost and is a plug-and-play installation in any Hack. B&H Photo also carries the card for a similar price. (Prices seem to fluctuate daily by a few dollars). The card comes with regular and low-profile brackets, the latter for use in Hacks built in Micro ATX cases.

Here are the old and new cards, antennas removed:

And here are the before and after results on one of my Hacks – the one with the botched old card installed, one antenna missing, replaced with the new card. A two minute job:

Clearly, having three working antennas does no harm. Comparing the speed of the new card with a properly installed old one at a like location, the new card consistently reports download speed 10% higher than the old, possibly attributable to superior antenna design.

There is but one quirk. The Airport Extreme defaults to channel 149 with 5GHz wi-fi, whereas the new TP-Link card only goes up to 48. So, go into Applications->Utilities->Airport Utility->Airport Extreme->Edit->Wireless->Wireless Options and set Radio Channel to 48, then Save. Your new TP-Link card will now be visible to the Hack in which you installed it.

Setting the Channel to 48 in Airport Utility.

Gordon Parks and fashion

Photographers

A surprise find.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) lived a full and productive life, doing much to raise awareness of the poor, not least during his years at FSA with the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Marion Post Wolcott.

What I did not know is that somehow this talented man managed to gain access to the exclusionary 1950s world of fashion photography, well described in the NY Times Lens Blog.

While the monochrome work is rather imitative of the style of Irving Penn, with everything super sleek and ultra defined, the color work is an absolute revelation. Parks graps the essence that sparse color is good color, as seen below. The upcoming book on his work is something to look forward to.

Rich

Photography

Subliminal advertising at its best.

From the Patek Philippe magazine, Vol. 3 No. 7

So I showed this ad to my 10 year old son to get his reaction.

“These people are rich” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Well, their clothes.”

“And?”

“They are beautiful.”

“True.”

“And they have flowers. Poor people do not have flowers.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

“And the pencils.”

“Well doesn’t everyone have pencils?”

“Not that many.”

A child sees what an adult cannot articulate, yet aspires to.

It’s a beautiful advertisement, with the costly watch and ring barely visible, but clearly the stars of the show.

Here’s another, though the benefits of train travel are presumably lost on American consumers and who can blame them when the only choice is Amtrak? This one I find to be simply insanely charming because, of course, like for every proud father, that’s my son in the picture. And it’s a great photograph, regardless of purpose.

Sony RX1 camera

Cameras

The (not so) poor man’s Leica at last?

If you told me to select just one lens for all my street snaps it would be the 35mm f/2 Summicron on a Leica M body. Optically unsurpassed, the problem with that combination is that it comes in at some $10,000, and the dated body design comes with a cluttered multi-frame finder. Further, the Leica is manual focus only and 35mm is long enough that focus often matters, especially at larger apertures. So even putting aside price, the Leica no longer cuts it for rapid action street snaps where auto-everything is the order of the day.

Sony has just released its RX1 camera and it is an intriguing design for street snaps. First, it comes with a full frame sensor in a very compact body – 4.5 x 2.8 x 2.6 inches weighing just 18 ounces. The Leica M9 without lens is 5.5 x 2.9 x 3.2 inches and 30 ounces, with the 35mm Summicron. Second the non-interchangeable lens is a 35mm f/2 design from Zeiss who have recently been distinguishing themselves with outstanding optics for full frame Canon and Nikon DSLRs.

There are some quibbles from reading the specifications. There’s no optical viewfinder which is essential for street work. Squinting at an LCD screen at arm’s length in bright light is not a prescription for stealth. Sony is asking $600 for their clip on finder, which is silly, and you can get the wonderful Voigtländer from CameraQuest for $209. I use the 28mm version and can recommend it without reservation. It’s unclear what battery life is like, but if the LCD screen can be turned off – assuming it’s the greatest power consumer – then over 300 snaps on a charge seems possible. Sony claims 270 shots when using the LCD. It is also unclear how responsive the camera is. The Leica’s shutter release remains the standard against which to judge, being beautifully sprung, predictable and fast – after you have futzed with manual focusing, that is. If the Sony is anywhere close then it’s a winner in my book.

The 24mp sensor looks to be the one from Nikon’s FF D600 which is known to be outstanding, especially at high ISO where it takes over from where the low light sensor in the D700 excelled. Focus is down to 5 inches and there’s a movie mode if that’s your thing. And, best of all, it says ‘Sony’ in large chrome script on the front so no one will ever take you seriously while you get your snaps. Sony makes TVs (OK, loses money on overpriced TVs) and point-and-shoots, right?

Controls include an Aperture Priority auto exposure mode and the lens has a real aperture ring – excellent! That remains the optimal design in my opinion, not the modern Canon and Nikon DSLR approach which dictates the use of fiddly control wheels while removing the aperture ring from the lens. There’s a built-in pop up flash which is nice to have, if hardly relevant to street snapping. There’s also a nice clickable exposure compensation dial on the top plate for corrections up to +/- 3 stops which is hands-down a better way of doing it than using LCD menus. Very handy.

Chimping the test snaps at DPReview compared to the Nikon D600 (taken with the outstanding 85mm f/1.8G lens) shows little quality difference, though the Sony’s lens displays modest barrel distortion. Once Adobe comes up with a profile the barrel distortion can be easily corrected on import into PS or LR. Noise is barely visible in 16x enlargements even at ISO 6400.

The biggest stumbling point is the price. At $3000 with a good aftermarket viewfinder this is a very costly camera indeed. That sort of money gets you a full frame Nikon D600 with a similar sensor and a fine lens or two. Admittedly, that’s comparing chalk and cheese, but the D600 can do street snaps at a pinch, if less unobtrusively, and can also do lots of things that the single purpose RX1 cannot. However, at $3,000, that’s still less than the Leica 35mm Summicron alone!


Pink Hair. When there’s no time for manual focus, AF is the ticket. Panny G3, kit lens, ISO 1600.