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This is not to be confused with running Android on Mac. No, that’s easy. What this blog covers is emulating Mac OS ON Android. Read on to find out how you can do it too!

A while back I posted a Technobabble article on running Windows and DOS on Android via DOS BOX, which you can see here. Since then I’ve wanted to run the Mac OS, and now it’s working!

Here’s the link I stumbled on which has everything you need to get started: http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=11650&p=133309

The page includes a link to the Mini vMac package which is the emulator. I’ve used this emulator on other platforms and it’s a lot of fun but it’s pretty bare bones. (Don’t expect anything fancy like sound!) In order to work, the emulator requires a copy of a Macintosh ROM. This means you’ll either need to use a utility to extract a ROM from a Mac.. OR… hit a website like pirate bay for a copy. (You know the “low road”) If in doubt, just google for mac roms.

You’ll also need software, so while you’re googling find a disk image of a Mac OS boot disk. System 7 will do. Fortunately, Apple gives this out free now, it’s just creating or finding the disk image that’d the trick.

One last requirement, you’ll need the Android SDK on your computer. Grab that here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

To get set up and running, get apk from that website and follow these steps:

• Go into your phone settings and under Applications, set your phone to allow installation from untrusted sources, also turn on USB debugging.
• Connect your phone to your computer.
• Using the adb command, install the mini vmac package. Here’s an example command: ./adb install ~/Desktop/minivmac4android-r23.apk The last part is just the location of the apk file. I ran this command from the SDK directory
• The hard part’s over! Now mount your phone and go into the SD card and create a folder called minivmac.
• Put the Mac ROM into this folder (Should be called “vMac.ROM”)
• Get a Mac OS boot disk image and any other disks you’ll use, and put it into this folder as well.
• Disconnect and presto!

And that’s it, look in the App drawer on your phone and you should see the mini vMac emulator icon listed. It uses a physical keyboard and touch-screen for the mouse. The menu button has options to mount disks, which will list any disks in that minivmac folder.

One other note, I have to start the emulator with my phone held sideways/landscape otherwise it only uses half the screen.

Have fun!

Mac OS running on Droid

Check out this gallery of old, vintage, classic, and weird gadgets. All stuff I don’t have room for but can’t bring myself to get rid of. (Apple ][, Mac Pluses, Tandys, Commodore 64s and more)

http://tinyurl.com/y9h8yen

Some things get better with age, and if you’re a retro game fan like me - then you’re in luck.

What is Abandonware?

Abandonware refers to software that is old, abandoned, and usually no longer supported or protected by the creators. It can be a gray area because companies are usually very protective about their copyrights - even those that are quite old. Nintendo, for example, has traditionally held a tight grip on their copyrights to older titles. Now that we have Virtual Console, we can understand why.

Old computer games are a little different.  (Sometimes) There are many games that have gone free, open source, or just fallen out of the interest of the orginating companies - if they even still exist. If you grew up with DOS or MAC you may have some old favorites you might like to play again.

This article will focus on old DOS games and getting them to play - not just on Windows but also Mac and Linux.

First up, you need something that can run the games. In many cases emulation or virtualization will do the trick. For old DOS games many people turn to DOSBOX. It’s a great little program that is available on various platforms.

Get DOS BOX here: http://www.dosbox.com/

Other ideas include VirtualBox, Virtual PC, VM Ware Fusion, or Parallels

If you’re using DOS BOX you have some configuration to do. When you run the program you get a usual DOS prompt. To get at your files, you have to mount the location. So, if in Windows you have a directory of games at c:\games you can type “mount c: c:\games” to get that directory into DOS BOX.

Other useful things will be going full screen (alt-enter) and adjusting the speed of emulation: ctrl-f11, ctrl-f12. Many old games will run extremely fast on newer machines, so some throttling will be necissary.

DOS BOX also has many front ends available for it, dosshell, boxer, and so forth. These make it easier to have multiple configurations for multiple games. It also simplifies the loading proess for your programs. If you enjoy tweaking your system, you can locate the DOS BOX configuration file (in Windows it’s in your install directory) — in the configuration file you can change defaults such as starting full screen, sound/graphics options, speed, and so forht.

All you need now is some programs. There are many sites out there with Abandonware galore. One I used to find some of my old favorites was: TheOldComputer.com

In some previous technobabble articles we talked about some of the bloated files that Windows Update leaves behind. Many times drives fill up on users and there’s no obvious reason to where all the space is going. That’s where visualization comes in - at a glance you can identify the biggest parts of your file system.

First you need a tool to accomplish it. I’ve first seen a visualizer in Ubuntu as part of the disk cleanup process, if you have a recent linux install - chances are you have something already. As for Mac/PC people…

http://windirstat.info/ (Windows: WinStatDir)

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ (Mac: Grand Perspectiv)

Both programs will scan what ever part of the file system you decide - one drive, two drives, one folder (like your home folder, for instance) when completed, you’ll see a psychedelic representation of what objects in your fiesystem are taking up the most space, relatively. Large blocks are larger files.

Once you identify a particular file or folder that takes up space, you can research what it is to determine if you can safely delete it. Running on a typical Windows machine you’ll typically find a gig or so of update backup files which can be removed safely, but when in doubt - just google something to determine if it’s needed by the system or not.

Good luck & happy spring cleaning!

Drive visualization in Windows

The large chunks to the left are big virtual machines

some of the attacks are shown here

Sorry, it’s just not. Mine isn’t either. There’s really no way around it. This article will describe several popular router configurations and how to break through them.

1) Out-of-the-box.

For instance, consider a family using a Linksys router to share their high-speed to their laptops, etc. Most likely the log in is 192.168.0.1 with user “admin” and password “admin” - with that alone you could wreak all sorts of nasty havoc on their network or lock them out entirely. Not good. Never use the defaults, and update your passwords. This isn’t just linksys routers either - it’s very simple to determine what time of router your are seeing and then you can easily google the default passwords to log into it. Vonage, Verizon, Dlink users - I’m looking at you.

2) WEP Protection

Supposedly WEP is “good enough”. Well, maybe… it’s a deterrent I suppose. These are very very common password protected networks. The Geek Squad will set it up for you, that sort of thing. Here’s how to break in with KisMac…

• First, if the network is hidden - see #3 first.
• Ok, now follow the screenshot - run a authentication flood. This will create unique IVs, which you’ll need over 100k (that’ll take 5-10 minutes to capture) you can speed this process up several ways, such as performing a packet reinject (that menu item)
• Keep an eye on the unique IV’s - and whenever you feel “lucky” you can try one of the attacks, weak scheduling vs a 40-bit has worked for me in the past. I mean… for testing purposes, of course

3) Hidden ESSID

This is a “hidden” network where typically you don’t see the network’s name come up on your computer as an available network. BestBuy in Seekonk, MA hides their “BestBuy” network this way. Quite simple to just type in and access. But you of course, have to know the ID to even get there. Now, BustBuy was easy to guess. But what if it was something a bit more random like B3stBu7 - well we might not guess that. 

Breaking in: If you can guess the name, that’s all you need. If you are running something that identifies a hidden network the way of getting the name is to hit it with a De-authenticate. First, set your program to sniff on the channel you found the hidden essid on. Next, perform the deauthentication.This is built into KisMac, and extremely ease to use. Deauthenticate is under the network menu in KisMac. What this does is basically fools the router. When performing this attack your computer will pretend to be the router and all the clients on the network will need to reauthenticate themselves. In the confusion, the name of the network will be revealed to you - and you’re in. You can see an example of a hidden network in my screenshot.

4) WPA

Well now things are getting tricky. Locking down your wireless with WPA involves a complicated process with both parties in the connection performing a super double secret handshake to even talk to one another. If neither likes the other, it’s no go - this is why people choose this protection. But it can be broken, with time.

KisMac features several means under the crack menu. Most involved blowing tons of words “a wordlist” at it to try and get it. Just choose it from the menu. As you capture packets listening in on the network, KisMac is smart enough to use portions of the keys it finds in the packets to help get it. So, this is why it’s a time-consuming trial and error sort of thing. Maybe 20-30 minutes or more of trial and error with this menu will get you there… eventually.

5) MAC filters

I used to advise people that this was a good means of protection. I did so under then philosophy that nothing is %100 safe, and a MAC filter is a great deterent. Basically a MAC filter means that the router only allows connections to computers that it knows. Every network device has a MAC address - a unique identifier. This is hardware-based so the router really only talks to computers that you physically know about. Well… sort of.

To crack it you basically need to just pretend to be one of those computers it will let it. Which ones will it allow? That’s easy - any computer that’s currently on the network. So using any sort of network profiling too - I’ll use KisMac again as an example but certainally others would work too. View the clients on the network, and use one of their MAC address.

How do you do that? This is called MAC spoofing, where esentially you pretend to have a different MAC address. There are a bunch of ways to do this. Here are a few ideas, none are gaurnteed to work, but have in the past in some form or another…

• Using linux or Mac OS X - you can check out what your MAC address is in your config files. This has worked on an older red hat distro - where these config files were saved some place like /etc/network-scripts … something like that, you’ll have to google it. 
• Here’s a fun way to do it - use Virtualization! Grab virtual box or something like that (maybe vmware fusion, haven’t tried though) inside your virtual machine there’s yet another glorious configration file with … you guessed it… the MAC address which you can freely change (to something on the network, in our scenario)

Other considerations

• This stuff is pretty serious, I’m relaying it for ethical purposes. Don’t go be a douche and cause trouble.
• Working in a Virtual environment is good, that way it’s not your computer if things get nasty. Try it out though - see if you virtual MAC address appears on your router, it’s quite possible you’ll only see your computer’s as by default many virtualization environments treat the vm’s as a private local/sub network - with your computer as the access point.

Be safe and ethical! Happy hacking!

A new category has been added for product reviews. To start things off, here is a short list of products from 2008 that are worth getting geeky over…

#4 Palm Centro

You’re probably realizing this is a list of toys, but oh well. The Palm Centro is by far the best cell phone I’ve had. As a Verizon customer I am discouraged by the crippled software they’ve had on most of their phones. But with the Centro, it’s all open - free to add your own images, ringtones, mp3s, games - all FREE FREE FREE. The phone itself works well, the keyboard isn’t terrible - and it’s reletively reliable. But hey, it doubles as a portable nintendo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A1VhnjHgD4 — that video of mine has over 8000 views and climbing - it’s certainaly a hot item! Also check out the inMotion mobile audio kit by Altec Lansing.

#3 iPods

Well of course. The iPod touch has become quite a nifty little gadget with the App store. I am still a fan of the iPod classic too, which is one of the few devices capable of holding my 100 gigs of music. Games, movies, podcasts - it’s heavenly!

#2 Eee PC 900

The Eee PC 900 is a great little computer. The pros are the price, the size, and the fun. The cons are the performance and Xandros - the lame OS that is ships with. Throw on Xubuntu and maybe a little ram, and you have yourself a good little machine that’s fun to tinker with. I wouldn’t recomend it to everyone, but if you’ve got some geek in you - go for it!

#1 MacBooks

As a lifelong Apple diehard, it’s hard to review the MacBook in any sort of unbiast way. Simply put, my 13″ MacBook is the best computer I’ve ever owned, but I hope that’s saying a lot. Not only is my machine feature-packed, it’s dependable. It’d been dropped down stairs, left in the car, and brought everywhere. It’s also easily upgradeable, which is big for Apple.

Mimi

This is a PowerMac 7600 upgraded with a Sonnet Crescendo G3 card and LOTS of ram. It has 4 hard drives, a cd, zip, and a floppy. Extra hard drives are cooled by two fans all on a seperate power supply in the lower case. One computer, four hard drives, two cases, unlimited fun.

Running

• Mac OS X
• Voice Recognition

Lessons Learned

• You can install OS X on an older machine, or at least an older machine with a G3 upgrade card.
• A 300mhz mac can run Mac OS 9 running Windows 98 running Mac OS 7 running Apple II running DOS. EMULATORS RUNNING EMULATORS! See Larger Screenshot

ABOVE: Mac running Windows running Mac running AppleII running DOS

here’s a quick how-to for installation. It’s kind of an annoying job, but not impossible. Here’s the way it works…

2 gig’s of memory (the intel mac mini takes PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM)

using a putty knife or anything really flat, run along the edge of the case, pressing in the clips and pushing the case and interior apart

pressing the two black plastic clips together, you can slide of the springy airport unit pictured here. i left it attached, the swing it out of the way

i’m not sure what it’s for - but this tiny wire in the front needs to come out. not many “how to” guides tell you about this, but it will need to be taken out

this part is kinda tricky. there’s a huge black plastic housing for the cd rom and hard drive - that whole thing needs to come out. it’s held to the bottom of the computer with 4 tiny scews at each corner. there’s on larger one, so be sure you watch where they come from. if possible, keep the screws in the holes so reassembly will go smoother. otherwise it’s a pain to lay the tiny screws into the hard-to-access holes.

after you’ve unscrewed the four screws you can lift the black housing off. this is where you’d be able to replace the hard drive or optical drive if that was what you were doing. but we’re interested in ram. below is a view of the ram on the board. it is essentially laptop memory. bank 0 is the lower bank 1 is the top. just pry out the metal clips and swing the memory up and out 45 degrees

you’ll notice the black housing with the drives actually plugs into the board almost like a super nes cartridge. use caution with this (well with all of it) get everything back into place, and plug the “mysterious tiny wire” back in - and be SURE to test it out. on my installation i must have not pressed the memory into the board securley because it only recognized 1gig of memory. the “system profiler” will show you the contents of each memory bank so you can assure that they are both functioning. do this before you completely reassemble the computer so you don’t have to do it twice like me!

screw the black housing back in, put the airport unit back on it’s spingy and carefully click the case back onto the computer. and that’s about it!

enjoy the new ram! here’s a few more tips:

* i think mac os x “optimizes” itself for the system it’s installed to. a lower memory system may be optimzed to use more virtual memory rather than ram which now maybe you’d want your system using your memory more for a little extra speed, and relying less on disk virtual memory. in linux i believe this is called “swapiness” i don’t know any way to do this in os x rather than run an installer that “optimizes system performance” but in reality this would be a good opertunity to reinstall a fresh copy of OS X or upgrade to the latest and greatest.

* back up just in case!

* keep the memory in the mac mini paired. in other words, you’ll get more performance by using a 1gig/1gig combo than a 1gig/512mb combo or something. the memory i HAD in there was two 256mb’s paired. now it has two 1gb paired for a total of 2gigs running optimally. when buying memory keep this in mind. the worst you can do is go buy just ONE gb because you’d have to sacrfice 256mb and live with a system that’s running 1.2 gb that is NOT optimized. i’d settle for two 512mb before that! but if you’re spending the money, just max out the machine with 2gb. supposedly that’s the most it’ll ever run.

good luck / be careful / don’t sue me if you break your system