He’s not Heavy, he’s my Piano

I mentioned to my lovely wife that I’d like to get a piano for our new house. She jumps on the internets an finds a piano, for FREE. So we rent a truck and go and pickup the piano. It took 4 of us to get in in the house, the thing weights close to 500 lbs. Seriously. It’s a little out of tune but it’s in great condition. I’ve put the pictures up on my flickr page.  As cliché as it sounds, Craigslist is THE source for all things cool.

Picture-taking, Radio-playing, Call-making Phone

My previous cell phone comes from the era of New Radicals and the Y2K scare. It was definitely time to upgrade to something new. I was holding out on picking up something that would take decent photos and have a better battery life than my old phone.

I think I’ve found the best phone that does all the above at a reasonable price. The Sony Ericson w810i. It has a built-in 2.0 megapixel camera, an FM radio and MP3 player. It syncs beautifully with my Mac and takes the same memory format as my PSP. (Memory Stick Duo)

I wanted to have a small camera that I could take with me when I was out and about to capture the interesting things I see. I’ll be updating my flickr page with photos from my camera. Enjoy and Happy Holidays.

127.0.0.1

Our offer was accepted on our new home! We move in on the 7th of November. The house is 1 1/2 stories on about an acre of land. We’re really excited and can’t wait to invite our friends and family over to visit. We’ve got great plans for this home and it will be a great place to raise Kari.

Here’s some pictures:

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How to Zen a Parallels VM

This process was discovered researching how to Zen a Boot Camp partition. Those instructions can be found here.

One of the concerns when trying to deploy a Zen image is the HAL. Our base image has a standard single processor ACPI. However some of our new machines are dual-core, and as such need the ACPI updated. Corey Webb, our Zen guru, created an add-on image to swap out this ACPI to Multiprocessor. I stumbled across this when I was having an issue with an IBM T60 that wouldn’t wake from sleep. Thinking this might help our success with imaging the Intel Macs I applied the add-on and was met with great success.

Taking this one step further, I noticed that my Parallels VM of just a standard Windows XP install had a ‘Standard PC” HAL. I asked Corey to create an add-on image that would swap out the HAL with ‘Standard PC’. That’s it!

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Just boot your VM off the zen imaging CD, pull down your base image and an add-on to replace the HAL. You’re done. Once you’re up and running you can send ctrl+alt+del to login from the VM menu in Parallels. After installing the Parallels Tools (an MSI that could be deployed to the maching via Zenworks) you can press (in this order, holding each one until they are all depressed) alt then ctrl then fn then delete.

How to Zen an Intel Mac Part III

See previous endeavors

Zen and Intel Mac Part I
How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II
How to Zen a Parallels VM

This week we’ve discovered some additional noes about getting a Zen image onto (into?) a Boot Camp partition. The process is well documented but is rather time consuming. The 3 biggest parts are 1) swapping out the ACPI HAL from our base with a multi-core ACPI. 2) The boot.ini pointing to the 3rd partition on the Mac HD 3) Using the sync tool in rEFIt to sync the mbr after imaging.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to test if pulling down an image directly is possible. (img rp $PROXYADDR //$PROXYADDR/baseimg.zmg a1:p3 + an add-on image with Multiprocessor ACPI is a hint)

Here’s a basic rundown:

From Start to Finish

1) Prepare the Intel Mac
a) Bootcamp, NetRestore, rEFIt

2) Prepare the add-on images:
a) Create an add-on image for XP drivers, correct boot.ini (partition 3) and correct muli-core ACPI

3) Prepare the Windows Disk Image
a) Install the Zen base and add-on images using the ZenWorks Imaging tools. Shutdown and boot into Target mode
b) Create an NTFS master disk image (base.ntfs) using NetRestore Helper

4) Restore the NTFS disk image to the Bootcamp partition

Future Deployment

Once you have a base NetRestore image, you can simply follow the following directions.

1. Install Bootcamp on the Mac meant for deployment.
2. Partition the HD as you like.
3. Restart into OSX and restore your base NetRestore image to the Boot Camp partition.
4. Install rEFIt and restart
5. Resync the MBR if needed and boot into Windows
6. Let sysprep run.

Additional Notes

You can’t use a Macbook as the main imaging machine. The keyboard does not work with the Zen imaging CD. Nor does an external keyboard. This limits you to an intel iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro.

Once the XP drivers have been installed you can press the following key command for Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Fn+ctrl+option (alt)+command (Apple)+delete

To right click, after the XP drivers are installed press the following key command:

Right command (Apple)+Trackpad button