Utterer.org

Not Every Find Is A Good One

Frank — Tue, 01 May 2012 03:58:56 +0000

Went to a Pocono flea market this pass week with a friend. The initial intention was to get a new stash of pickles and just see what’s around. I am still sorting through the stuff I have gotten over the last few weeks so I am not trying to add more to the pile unless it is really necessary. I am also currently making spreadsheets of all my systems and games to lower my chance of duplicates.

But anyway I was looking through a stack of old CD’s and boxed set CD’s and tapes when I came across an actual copy of Howard Stern’s “Crucified By The FCC.” As a long time Stern fan, I remember as a kid hearing callers to the show talking about it and how hard it was to find. This was back when I was like 11 or 12 around 1992 when my dad first allowed me to listen to the show. The quality of box wasn’t the best but it was still good. The price wasn’t wrong either. I checked the box and the insert was there as were two tapes. I figured everything was good so I paid my $5.00 and was on my way. That’s right… 5 bucks.

With my new Stern collectible in hand, I wasn’t able to find anything else worthy of buying that day besides some pickles. It was time to go home and approach my first challenge: Find a tape deck to play this in. You see, the year is currently 2012. Nobody uses cassette tapes anymore or own modern equipment that plays it. Before I could figure out a way to find a suitable way to play this audio, I figured I would check out the full package now that I didn’t have some seller trying to pack up his shit breathing down my back like at the flea market.

The insert was in great condition and provides a bit of the background on the history of the tape and of Howard Stern to that point. After all, it had only been about 11 years that he had been doing broadcast radio in 1991. Once I was done reading that I figured I would see what the actual tapes looked like.

Sure enough, you get what you pay for sometimes when you are expecting a great deal on a rare find. The tapes were unlabeled Memorex tapes and the cover was just a photocopy (although each tape is an individual photocopy of the original tapes (they are specifically labelled part 1 and part 2. Who knows, maybe the original tapes wore away or were borrowed and never returned. I still haven’t played the tapes to see if they are legitimate copies or not. I am going to hold onto the case and the insert though as they are 100% authentic. I still deem this a good find as a Stern fan.

NY and PA Trips – April 2012

Frank — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:03:42 +0000

So I have been taking advantage of the unusually warm early spring we have been having in New York to go to some local thrift stores during lunch breaks or on the walk back to the bus after work. The one Salvation Army close to where I work has been getting some pretty good finds lately. I picked up a brand new Cisco wireless N router for 10 bucks along with some other unique finds that I will mention below.

I went to Pennsylvania a week or two ago to the town I used to live in. When I still lived up in the Poconos there were a lot of big flea markets going on. I wasn’t really collecting games at the time so I didn’t pay attention to the selection. Now with a real lack of quality places to buy crap in the area, a lot of people flock to one flea market in the area mainly. So me and my friend, collector of Audi junk Tyler, took the early morning trip. Right off the bat I picked up a box that just had a Sega Genesis, original GameBoy, a disassembled NES (I think the people who sold it may have been meth tweakers) and a classic style fat PS2 along with a jumble of cables for 10 bucks. Upon further inspection the the PS2 included a power cable and two controllers and seems to work perfectly. I did test out the PS2 originally at my friend Jay’s place but the games didn’t work there. I now suspect that it is due to him not taking as good a care of his games and media as he does his classic cars.

Along with a fresh quart of pickles, I grabbed a couple NES and N64 games from a guy selling them cheap enough. I think the most expensive out of the lot was Donkey Kong Country 64 which was 9 bucks. All the others were 4 and under. Upon leaving the flea market, I realized that I had to take a leak from all the water I was drinking to flush the night prior’s malt liquor out with. I headed for the port-a-potty when I noticed a table selling a Nintendo GameCube. I asked how much he wanted for the system, controller and memory cartridge. 5 bucks. He gave me change for my 10 and I was on my way now a GameCube owner (I never intentionally planned to own one since I have a backwards compatible Wii).

The rest of the games came from this other flea market at a little gaming kiosk this guy behind a counter repairing old consoles was running. The prices seemed fair enough. I got Braindead 13 for Saturn for a buck. I got Beyond Good and Evil for GameCube for like 10 bucks and a couple assorted 3DO games (hello Syndicate for 3DO). So a couple new items to be put away and probably not played for years. But at least I can say I own them now.

The other odd find I got recently was from a Salvation Army. While in Pennsylvania, the one there provided me with a few new Genesis games (totally forgot about the cheap imitation Ex-Mutants) the one in New York has something totally different.. Porno Laserdiscs.

It looks like back in the 80′s this was the real way to say you liked watching porn. The highest quality product was delivered on the Laserdisc medium and I have three of them. They all star the now dead Marilyn Chambers. I got with them some concert Laserdiscs which I am presuming is from the same person. I used them as “bookends” for these Adult Laserdiscs so that I didn’t come across as some 80′s reminiscing perv. Mission Accomplished. My next objective is to try and secure a Laserdisc player for some type of viewing.

One Week… Two Thrift Stores… New York City

Frank — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:19:27 +0000

Had a good haul this week between two different thrift stores. The first is a Salvo near my office that I go to on my lunch break twice a week roughly now that the weather has been phenomenally warm. The other store is a Goodwill that I pass on the walk back to Port Authority on the warm nights this past week when I wasn’t feeling lazy. Anyway, here are the spoils of the week:

A couple notes on the items…

The Metal Gear Solid 2 is the Japanese version of the game still in the shrinkwrap. No idea how it wound up at a Salvation Army like that!
The Leisure Suit Larry is also still in shrinkwrap but I think that means it is worth LESS money.
I totally forgot how much I loved the game General Chaos.
The Guitar Hero guitar needs a dongle for the PlayStation 3 which I didn’t realize at the time. So that one is a loss right now until I get a dongle or the actual game with another guitar.

The total amount spent… $55.73 after all is said and done with taxes…

Deal or no deal?

My Biggest Gripe About Safari…

Frank — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 02:00:59 +0000

MEMORY LEAKS!

This is the result of leaving Safari open with two tabs (one tab had a flash music player open on it).

Hackintosh Resources I Used

Frank — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:40:22 +0000

Here was the more information I promised a post or two ago. These are the resources I used for not only building my Hackintosh but also getting some pointers in the right direction for some problems that were driving me crazy on it.

General Resources

TonyMacx86 – The defacto resource I used to sourcing out parts for my Hackintosh along with all of the tools needed to get it up and running once you have all the components assembled. The forum is filled with people who have seem to have done this 1000 times over.
OSX86.net – I have no idea if these guys are associated with the link I list below but they provide a good number of custom downloads for people with specialized issues, experimental solutions, and general solid drivers, configs and applications to make your transition to Hackintosh go as smooth as possible.
OSX86 Project – Another great resource on hardware and components along with a live forum of people that are asking AND answering questions. Very rare these days!

Links to things that helped me out of some problems.

Problem 1: Hackintosh will not authorize to the Mac App Store, iTunes Store or iCloud. It would throw up an error about the “device or computer could not be recognized.”

My Solution: Had to do a couple of things. First and foremost I had to make sure my onboard ethernet was seen as en0 and my WiFi Adapter was seen as en1. This required me to follow all of the steps shown here (thanks to Mak1 for this post). I had to do all three of the suggested fixes before it was working for me. The part involving EFI Studio was the key.

Problem 2: After upgrading to 10.7, unbeknownst to me my ATI card was only being recognized as an “ATI 5000 Series” rather than a full on Radeon 5770. Because of this, the framebuffer specific for my card (Vervet) was not being loaded and instead a generic ATI Framebuffer. The main symptoms of this happening include: Cider-translated based full screen games (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in my case), any Source engine based game from Steam, and DVD Player would all crash on launch. Also in the dashboard, adding new widgets wouldn’t have the ripple effect anymore. This is attributed to CoreImage/Quartz Extreme not technically loading to the specific frame buffer.

My Solution: My fix was much more simple than I thought it would be. I ripped out all the extra kernel arguments from my org.Chameleon.boot.plist in the /Extra folder that Chimera generates. Here is my working file.

Kernel
mach_kernel
Kernel Flags
darkwake=0
GraphicsEnabler
Yes
AtiConfig
Vervet
AtiPorts
4
Timeout
2
Legacy Logo
Yes
EthernetBuiltIn
Yes
UseKernelCache
Yes

There are other forum resources I followed that pointed me in the direction of using an ATY_injector, using a different framebuffer (they are all monkey names), and a few others scattered on the sites I mentioned above but none of them did the trick. They are more for cards that don’t have an “official” Apple equivalent. The 5770 is a common card on the Apple platform so the built in support was a no brainer. My problem was the kernel arguments I had in there since 10.6.X when I first built the machine were no longer neccessary and needed to be removed.

Hopefully this will help some people out?

Lion vs. Hackintosh

Frank — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:25:20 +0000

My Hackintosh is now fully recognized, graphics card and all, in Lion. For the past week my graphics card (Radeon 5770) was giving me major shit as only showing up as a Radeon 5000 so no Steam games or Cider games would work. A week of research and .plist and .kext hacking later and I am back up and running.

More details to follow.

Xcode Updates Without The Bulk

Frank — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:39:09 +0000

I don’t see this mentioned on any of the sites i normally read so I am going to post it right NOW. So you are running Lion or Snow Leopard and you have Xcode installed through the Mac App Store. The problem is that after it is installed, you have a 2 to 4 GB installer in your /Applications folder. If you delete the installer, you won’t be informed in the Mac App Store when an update to Xcode is released. If you keep it on your computer, you are wasting 2 to 4 GB of unnecessary installer data.

Here are three easy steps that lets you get rid of the bulk of the installer, but still have it show up in the Mac App Store as installed and will let you know when updates are available.

Step 1.

Right click (or control click if you STILL don’t use a two button mouse setup) on the Install Xcode application and select “Show Package Contents”

Step 2.

Navigate inside the package to “Contents/Resources/Packages”

Step 3.

Select all of the .pkg files that are inside the Packages folder and DELETE THAT SHIT. Don’t forget to empty your trash to really feel the effects of those savings.

Congratulations! You have now cleared up enough space on your computer to fit approximately 2 minutes of ProRes 4444 NTSC footage on your computer. Of course if you are using your boot volume to hold video footage, you have a bunch of other problems.

February 2012 Update: With the release of Xcode 4.3 / 4.4 Apple has now made Xcode itself an executable application that is updated like normal applications so no more having to keep an installer on the system along with an Xcode install. This applies to anyone running Mac OS X 10.7.3 and above.

Liveblogging Jersey Shore: Season 4 Episode 12

Frank — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:36:28 +0000

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this is the SEASON FINALE of Jersey Shore. I am ecstatic right now. Here I was thinking I would have to suffer through another two or three weeks of this shit. Instead it all ends today. Today we get closure on the sad state of affairs with the Situation. His bad luck continues to follow him as he was recently ejected from an Apple store after trying to cut in line for an iPhone 4S. We get possibly a hint of things to come next January for what the gang was doing in Seaside this summer. Thanks to everyone who tuned in to the live blog these past few months and suffering through this crap together.

And now without further ado, the conclusion to the Jersey Shore Liveblog… Season Four Episode Twelve.

Liveblogging Jersey Shore: Season 4 Episode 11

Frank — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:44:43 +0000

We are at the home stretch. After this week we have, (clicks on calendar menubar icon…) TWO more episodes left. That means tonight included there are three episodes left. The season is just about over. One more season after this, the show is DONE! DONEZO! I am watching last weeks episode right now. Vinny (fresh off of smooshing Snooki) and the male gang goes to Siciliy to meet his family and and Snooki, Deena, Sammi and J-Woww go wine tasting. Of course the dudes have a normal reflecting time and the girls got bat shit drunk and broke everything they got in contact with. J-woww gets mad credit for calling Snooki out although she proved wrong in the long run as Snooki recently announced on Twitter that herself and Jionni were celebrating their 1 year anniversary.

No idea what’s in store for tonight so tune in to find out! I bet it involves Situation getting into a fight with someone in the house, people getting drunk and a lot of sex!

Not Tonight

Frank — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 01:50:56 +0000

Too lazy to liveblog. Enjoy the episode.