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MSI Wind: other items to note

sgw — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:01:48 +0000

hot keys for bluetooth and webcam
upgrading
batteries?
touchpad
other hacks

Why I hate my iPhone

sgw — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:59:57 +0000

No ToDo list
Can’t export to SIM
Often inaudible ring & SMS tones.
Can’t change the SMS tones
Arbitrary screen rotation
Arbitrary multi-tasking
Limited logging of time in SMS messages
Very limited logging of phone call information
no cut and paste
no global search
Very bizarre contact look up. I can’t search by name, I have to scroll or hit very small “index” buttons?
limited bluetooth. Headphones only?
bad call logging. No duration logging?
limited call history
no on-display indication if the phone is in vibrate mode

MSI Wind: Upgrading OS X, updating kexts, and general patching

sgw — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:52:01 +0000

Sorry for the delay. Life is like that. Hopefully I haven’t left anyone with a half-useful OSX MSI wind. :)

At this point, you should have an MSI wind running OSX, but it’s probably not quite useful yet. It should be working, but you may be running an older version of 10.5. When I did this, I ended up running 10.5.2, at a point when 10.5.5 was current. As a general rule, on non-Apple hardware, you don’t want auto-update running. This is very true on the MSI Wind, since an auto-update could render your machine difficult to use.

For my updates, I’ve lived under the “let someone else do it first” philosophy. By checking the web, I can see where people have had problems, and then react accordingly. As things were, I was able to upgrade from 10.5.2 to 10.5.5 without much issue. There are some hacked patches and ktexts that sometimes get overwritten. Paul’s MSI Wind Driver Utility Pack (found here. After doing an OS upgrade, in theory, running the utilities in this distribution should get your machine back to a usable state. Make sure you have the utility pack on your compute before you do the upgrade, of course.

You may run into occasional pains. For instance, in upgrading from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6, some of the standard patches seem to both make the built-in keyboard and the display suddenly cease to function. This isn’t a problem if you know enough to have a USB keyboard and an external monitor handy. Otherwise, you could be very sad.

Paul has a very good write-up on doing the upgrade, as well as using his tools. on his site.

MSI Wind: configuration changes

sgw — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:45:09 +0000

I should note that there are two changes I had to make to my MSI wind to tailor it to my liking.

The first is that I wanted more memory. One gigabyte just doesn’t cut it for me these days, and two gigabytes is the low end of useful, normally. Since I’m intending to use this as a portable computer, and not an everyday computer, I don’t think I’ll be placing as much strain on it as I would on my desktop. Since the MSI Wind supports 2 gigabytes, I opted to do the upgrade. It was a relatively simple, but warranty-voiding, matter of removing several screws on the bottom of the case, and putting in a chip. If you’re not comfortable voiding your warranty, you shouldn’t do this. If you’re mildly technically competent, and willing to take the risk, it’s easy to do. Fortunately for me, I had a PC2-6400 1GB SODIMM lying around. This doesn’t exactly match the memory in the MSI Wind, but it does work, and hasn’t been problematic. The default memory is slower than that, and thought he laptop can use PC2-6400, I doubt it’s taking advantage of the faster speed.

Note that the onboard memory on the Wind is actually onboard. You don’t need to remove any memory to add new memory, you just add it. The word out there is that the Wind will only support a maximum of 2GB, so buying anything larger than a 1GB SODIMM is wasted money, I suspect. However, if anyone out there has put in a larger SODIMM and gotten more memory, I’d love to hear about it.

The other configuration change I had to make was to the WiFi network card. The default WiFi card that comes with the Wind is not supported under OSX by default. At the time that I set up my Wind, the acceptable practice was to remove the standard card, and install a 3rd party card with a chipset that is supported. The Dell DW-1390 and DW-1490 both have supported broadcom chips. At the time I was purchasing, the only difference I could find between those two cards was about $15. I got a DW-1390 off of ebay for $12. Installing the card was easy, though there was a small modification to the motherboard that needs to be made: There is a small mounting nut that is soldered onto the motherboard, which doesn’t interfere with the default card, but doesn’t quite fit with the DW-1390. It was very easy to heat the nut with a soldering iron, and pull it off. Other sites suggest that you can just wiggle it off, but I’d recommend against that, especially since you’ve just voided the warranty. Applying a soldering iron to the nut and heating it just enough to loosen the solder made pulling it off the motherboard with a small set of needlenose pliers a trivial move. If you need to go this route, do it carefully and properly.

A bit after I replaced my network card, Realtek provided a drop-in driver for the WiFi card that is in the Wind. By all accounts that I’ve read, this approach “just works” and is an easy install. I believe the Realtek card is 802.11 B/G/N, whereas the Dell cards are just B & G, so there is a bit of an advantage to just adding the driver. I occasionally consider putting the default card back in, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Adding the memory and swapping the WiFi card was very quick and easy. I believe that doing both took me less than 10 minutes, and some amount of that 10 minutes involved me getting my soldering iron and waiting for it to warm up. The insides of the MSI wind are very easy to get to, and these specific parts are straightforward and accessible. Some of the other modifications out there, such as modifying the mouse buttons, or replacing the touchpad, will take more time and effort. I may do them at some point, but for now, I just wanted a basic laptop.

MSI Wind: OS - prep & install

sgw — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:05:05 +0000

With the firmware installed, I’d been gearing up for how to actually install the OS.

First off, I should mention that, for odd reasons, I had a legitimate copy of Leopard that wasn’t going to use. If you’re doing this install, I recommend that you also obtain a legitimate copy of OSX Leopard. Apple sells it for $129, or you can get it here for $109, with free shipping. I’m not sure about the “New and Used” versions for $80, but you may decide to take the risk.

Having acquired a legitimate version of OSX, you’re now going to put it on the shelf. Search your favorite bittorrent site for a distribution called MSIOSX86.iso. This is a version of OSX that has already been modified to include the drivers necessary to make the MSI Wind run nicely on this hardware. The version I installed was based on OS X 10.5.2, and it may have been upgraded by now. There are ways to get your release upgraded to a current version. Right now, it’s all about having a starting point, and I’ll try to cover the upgrade at a later point.

Many people took to burning the OS image onto DVD, and booting from an external DVD drive. Not having one, and not wanting to spend $60 for one, I looked for other options. The best option I found was very similar to what I found for the firmware: Burn the ISO to a USB flashdrive, and boot from there. I found a great set of instructions on how to do that on Dan Cameron’s site.

The short form of what you’re doing to get OSX on to the drive in a bootable manner is to mount the ISO image as a file system. You then use Disk Utility to “restore” that image onto the USB drive. That will result in a USB drive that is (or should be) bootable on Apple Hardware. However, since you’re not using Apple hardware, you need to do a little extra work, which is not mentioned on Dan’s site. To make the drive bootable, you need to use Chameleon, which is one of the tools you can find at the OSx86tools site. Chameleon does all the appropriate magic for non-apple hardware to boot off the USB drive.

Now it’s just a small matter of booting off the USB drive and installing OSX. First, with the machine powered off, install the bootable USB drive. When the Wind powers up, go into the BIOS settings and tell the machine to boot off the USB drive as it’s first option, and save the bios settings. When the machine restarts, it should see the USB drive, boot off of it, and bring you up ready to install. At this point, it’s a normal OSX Leopard installation, and you proceed as you normally would.

I should note that my goal was to have a netbook running OSX. There are people out there who have set up their Wind to triple boot OSX, Ubuntu, and Windows XP. I considered this for a while, and then realized that OSX would really be the only OS to get used. I rarely need a windows box, and I have plenty of other Ubuntu resources generally available to me. It’s nice to have that option available though. If you’re interested in that, a simple websearch should lead you to someplace useful.

MSI Wind & OS X, upgrading the firmware

sgw — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:02:31 +0000

Assuming you’ve gotten your MSI Wind, the first thing that you’re going to want to do is to upgrade the firmware. My MSI Wind came with version 1.06 of the firmware, which is a bit older than the current. The current firmware is 1.10 (or 1.0B) and can be found here.

I did things a bit backwards, and just dove in on installing OSX. When I decided that I should upgrade the firmware, I had a bit of a problem. The firmware upgrade procedure involves running a DOS utility that will re-flash the firmware, and in installing OSX on my Wind, I had erased the only real DOS machine I had available. Eventually, I was able to burn a bootable DOS image onto a 128Mb USB thumbdrive that I had around, put the firmware on there, boot off it, and install the firmware. I’m not a windows user at all, but I suspect that there is a way that you can boot into a basic windows command line interface, and do the upgrade from there. I leave it to the reader to figure out the best method for them, but I am now very happy to have a bootable USB drive already setup for the next time I have to do this.

At the time I did my install, I went from firmware 1.06 to 1.09, since that was the most recent at the time.. Some of the changes in the firmware have been noted to give the MSI Wind a ~30% speed boost. Another notable change is that you gain the ability to overclock the Wind anywhere from 8% to 24%, simply by pressing Function + F10.
“Simply” is slightly misleading here. You do have to do a little setup in the BIOS, and pre-determine how fast you want to overclock. You have the option of 8%, 15%, or 24%.
Once you select it in the BIOS, you boot into your OS, and then when you press Function + F10, you get overclocked to the rate you’ve set in the BIOS. This is handy for seeing if your machine can handle the overclock. If it can’t, you can back out of it very easily.

I’m not running my Wind overclocked. I couldn’t tell any notable difference for my computer, and generally I want more memory instead of more CPU. Other people seem happy with the ability though.

MSI Wind running OS X - overview

sgw — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:09:29 +0000

For a while, I’ve found netbooks to be interesting items. I’d watched for a while, but they only became interesting when people started making OSX run on them.
Back in December, I purchased an MSI Wind off of Ebay, with the intent of making it a very portable and very inexpensive OSX box. I’d had an extra copy of OSX 10.5 (Tiger) and this was a fine way to put it to good use.

On the whole, the netbook behaves as I’d like, with a few little quirks. There is a webcam, but it’s activated through a hotkey sequence, not directly via software. Bluetooth is much the same. Audio does work, but switching from built-in speakers to the headphone jack (and back) requires a small shell script to be run. The touchpad is overly sensitive, and sometimes problematic. None of these are show stoppers for me, and the machine has many fine features: It’s small and light, yet still usable. It’s very easy to sleep, and it wakes from sleep very very fast. Performance-wise, it seems very similar to my old 1.67Ghz G4 powerbook. Whereas I had been pushing the limits of my powerbook, the MSI Wind doesn’t get as stressed, since I tend to use it in a much more limited way than I’d use the powerbook. One of the best features of the MSI Wind is that it’s cheap, and very hackable. I was surprised at how easy it was to get OSX up and running. Over the next several posts, I’ll detail the bits of knowledge I’ve gleaned from my experience.

Wordpress 2.7 is out

sgw — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:26:39 +0000

I’d been running a beta-release copy of it for a little while. On the whole, it looks like a nice upgrade for the Wordpress platform. Specifically of interest is the ability to upgrade your software (including your plugins) “automatically.” It’s not quite automatic, since you still have to enter in some info, but it does work nicely. The one drawback is that if you have 5 plugins to upgrade, you have to step through the process individually, and update each one in turn.

Aside from the auto-update feature, most of the changes I’ve seen thusfar have been cosmetic. The layout is cleaner. The editor looks like it’s been fixed up a little. Many things are a lot more customizeable. It’s hard to point at brand new features, but lots of old features have been polished, with perhaps some added functionality hidden in the fold.

I’ve been really pleased with Wordpress as a blogging platform. It was very easy to set up (though I’m a technical sort) and very very configurable. There is a good user base out there, and a lot of people contributing plugins, themes, and features. In the past, I’ve looked at a few other platforms, notably Movable Type, and didn’t feel the pain was worth return that I got. Drupal and Plone (which are content management systems, not blogs, but you can do many similar things with them) are also very nice, though often targeted at much larger sites than I’m trying to do here. Wordpress seems to have the features and flexibilty that I want, and with Wordpress 2.7, it looks as though the amount of time I have to spend administrating the system has dropped a lot. If you’re looking for a blogging platform, I suspect you don’t need to look any further than Wordpress.

How to make your rack mount servers more power efficient

sgw — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:54:03 +0000

I was recently asked about building a power efficient server, and it seemed like a good idea to share my advice with a wider audience.

Anyone who has to deal with a hosting facility very likely knows the crunch that they’re running into with power. A standard rack may only have 42 rack units in it, but you’ll be lucky to be able to fit and power 15 servers in that rack, on a standard 30 amp circuit. If you’re careful in planning, I can help you get squeeze a bit more into that rack. I won’t advocate any particular server vendor, but I do believe that you’ll have more flexibility with a custom white-box builder, instead of going with one of the (often pricier) big name vendors.

Overall, you want to lower your power draw per server. With some careful planning, you can lower your power consumption by a fair bit, and still get the same power per machine. Here are a few things to consider:

Can you go with a low power processor? You can often save 30 watts (or more) per core by going with an energy efficient processor. I’ve heard it said that performance will suffer, but in my experience, if there was a loss of performance, it was minimal.
Have you sized your memory appropriately? Every stick of memory increases your power draw. Individual cases may very, but you should consider if you want half the number of higher density chips instead of twice the number of lower density. On a packed server, this can save you up to 10 watts per stick of memory.
Have you removed unnecessary components? Every PCI card you have in the box increases the power draw. If possible, for servers in a datacenter, go with a motherboard that has an on-board video card, and try not to add additional cards to the server.
Did you get the right power supply? Often, you’ll get the cheapest supply that fits in the cabinet. If you can, request a power supply that is 80+ certified. This means that you’ll get a power supply that is 80% or more efficient. The standard power supplies that you would have gotten may only be 65% efficient. Being able to save 15% of your power for a small amount of money usually has a payoff fairly quickly. In addition, you’ll have less problems with heat, and the box should generally run better.
Have you sized your power supply appropriately? Power supplies work most efficiently when they’re close to loaded capacity. A power supply that is 80% efficient is likely only that efficient if it is loaded to 80% or more of it’s capacity. I often see 1U servers that draw 200 watts, but have a 450 watt low-efficiency supply in them. Replacing the old supply with a newer, 80% efficient 250 watt supply should bring your power draw down a fair bit.

Of course, you don’t need to do all of these to optimize your rack, but every little bit counts. The most difficult is sizing your power supply appropriately. You won’t know how to size your power supply until you’ve done all the other optimizations. Using a low power processor will likely be the costliest option up there, possibly adding several hundred dollars to the cost of the server. All of the other options will raise the price a bit, but the cost should be negligible, especially if it lets you get more out of a cabinet, and keeps you from having to buy additional cabinets to hold your boxes.

A small kill-a-watt power-savings example

sgw — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:20:32 +0000

Just to give a real-world example of how I use my kill-a-watt P4400:

The 10+ year old 3com 10/100 network switch I used at home was getting noisy, and I realized that it was probably not a bad time to upgrade it. Power wasn’t specifically on my mind when I went to do the upgrade, though it did occur to me mid-process when I noted that many of the home network switches were very low on power draw. I’ve ended up replacing 10ish year old 3com 24 port 10/100 switch that was built for enterprise use with a 5 port 10/100/1000 switch that was built for home use. How this has played out power-wise with measurements from my kill-a-watt:

Switch	power draw	cost to me	yearly cost to run
3Com	45 watts	free	$70.92
Trendnet	4 watts	$19.99	$6.30

Now, 41 watts may not seem like much of a difference, but it can add up to real money. When all is said and done, I pay about 18 cents a kilowatt-hour, including, generation, transmission, and all the assorted fees that go with it.

The basic math breaks down like this:
45 watts (3com) - 4 watts (Trendnet) = a power savings of 41 watts.

41 (watts) * 24 (hours in a day) = 984 watt-hours

984 (watt-hours) * 365 (days in a year) = 359160 watt-hours per year or 359 kilowatt-hours per year.

359 kilowatt-hours * .18 cents per kilowatt-hour = $64.62/year

or, to refer to the above chart: $70.92 - $6.30 = $64.62/year.

So, by investing $19.99 in a newer, better, quieter, switch, I’ll be saving $64.62 a year. I find myself doing these sorts of calculations on many things around the house. I’m a big fan of old and reliable, but there is a place for new and cost-effective too. I’m in middle of a slow and gradual process of replacing all of my old CRT monitors (which can often draw 100-150 watts) with newer, smaller LCD monitors ( the 19″ LCD on my desk draws 30 watts). If you run the calculations above, you can see that it can add up to real money fairly quickly. To be fair, monitors are a little trickier, since they may not be on all the time. My network switch is though, so $64.62 is real savings to me, and the switch itself will be paid off fairly quickly.