My trusty G5 of 3-years has finally bitten the dust, with one of the processors inside the Dual Processor Module deemed dead by Apple. The replacement cost of this amounts to that of a new machine since it is now officially out of warranty and as such, the standard configuration Mac Pro is now on the way…

Featuring re-designed internals and Intel Xeon “Harpertown” octa-cores running at 2.8 GHz, fully buffered ECC RAM, and space for up to two optical drives.

The dual Quad-Core (8-cores) processors aren’t the only only bonus in this machine but also unlike the older G5, it sports capacity for four hard drives, up to 1TB capacity for each one.

Dual PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots (for video cards) and dual PCI-e x4 slots offer ample expansion options. I hope M-Audio decide to bring back the Rev 7.1 in a PCI-e format with Leopard support.

As for the HDDs, it will come with a default 320GB HDD. I have a couple 250GB drives lying about so I will setup a RAID ‘mirrored’ pair as the boot drive. This will allow for lower downtime if/when one of the boot drives fail, although the accessible size of the RAID set will limited to the smallest drive, ~250GB. The remaining two drive bays will accommodate my 2x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drives which were running inside my late G5.

This will also be my first encounter in running Leopard as I have been sticking with 10.4.11 for the most part - it has been performing quite reliably and therefore I decided against upgrading the OS on my other machines (MacBook Pro/iMac).

Keep posted for the ‘official’ unboxing in about two weeks…

What is ‘pwnage’ exactly? Usually used as an insult or interjection coupled with a stupid typo typing in “Ownage”, this is used to signify superiority on all levels in online gaming.

The days of using linux to hack the volume limit on the early iPods are no more; instead we are greeted with shiny OS X native applications for the task at hand - all thanks to the folks at blog.iphone-dev.org and their continuing work on this front.

There are two main tools involved in pwning an iPhone: (i) Quickpwn and (ii) PwnageTool. Since the SIM unlocking and jailbreaking of the 3G iPhones are still being tackled, today I decided to ‘pwn’ my iPhone 2G instead of my iPhone 3G.

I first tried Quickpwn v1.1 to take care of my iphone but to my dismay I found that it only jailbreaked it and the SIM unlock feature wasn’t working - which is what I *REALLY* needed.

Therefore, I next tried the PwnageTool v2.1 and this time around it felt like things were working right. Once the iPhone was restored with the custom iPSW, on rebooting BootNeuter kicked in and took care of the SIM unlocking.

You can obtain the files for this here. You will also require the bootloaders for PwnageTool: This guide at lifehacker.com was extremely helpful, with links to many of the files as well as bootloaders.

I am completely taken by Cydia - it is very quick and the download/installing of applications is extremely fast. At times I seriously wonder why installing applications from the Apple Store takes ages instead.

Just received my new ’scope today, and managed to do a probe check, adjust its compensation and intend to start testing one of MARV’s MCUs shortly.

This is the TDS2012B, featuring 100MHz bandwidth, 1GS/s, in-built USB capture to PC (port on back, including free software) and capture to USB stick via the front panel (in various formats), 2CH with color screen.

It’s a step up from my previous 1012 with regards to the color screen and huge bonus of USB. The knobs and buttons have a better tactile feel to them as well. The usual plethora of features akin to any Tektronix are included in the package, as well as a NIST calibration certificate.

Although it seems that many iPhone users have been plagued by software problems I am thankful that the update on my ‘old’ iPhone went well.

It did however take well over 20 mins to download and get to its second ‘reboot’. iTunes did give an error when it tried to ‘restore’ it from my previous backup; a manual redo of this and it was all right as rain.

I guess you may have noticed that I called it my ‘old’ iPhone? Well…*blush* yes, today I did pretty much pay for the new iPhone 3G (16GB) at Carphonewarehouse, but unfortunately they had none in stock.

Just my luck though, they had an order of 3 units arriving on Monday…one of them is mine \o/

So what happens to my ‘old’ iPhone? It’s family tradition I guess…my Mom gets it. I’m going to install her O2 PAYG chip and let her use it whilst roaming abroad. I can top up funds on her account from this end…

Last weekend we visited an Uncle of mine who was inquiring about getting an external HDD, and it had me thinking that I needed to sort out my setup as well.

Last July/August I purchased a 320GB WD My Book USB2/eSATA enclosure, but this was before I got my iMac.

This has a 500GB internal HDD, and for this reason, coupled with the attached 320GB…over the past couple months I had quite a bit of data lying about. To sort this out I ordered two WD 1TB External Hard Drives (USB2.0 Firewire400/800 & eSATA - Retail MyBook Studio Edition II).

What is great about these drives is that since they are FW800, it frees up one USB port on my iMac, and I also found that they support ‘daisy chaining’ since they have two FW800 ports on the back of them.

FW800 is extremely impressive, transferring 450+GB in a matter of 3-4 hours. Sure, some may say that a NAS drive on GigE would perform better, but a long and continuous transfer at full bandwidth would impair downloads and other internet related activity.

Whilst transferring this 450+GB, my iMac remained responsive and I was even able to watch a couple episodes of NCIS, without any noticeable problems with playback. It should also be noted that the drives contain two WD 500GB drives inside, and via the software utility one can set them into RAID0 or RAID1 modes.

Of course, I have them running as RAID0 so that I have access to the entire 1TB of space on each drive (~930odd GB after +hsf partitioning). RAID1 would allow little less than 500GB space since they will automatically, on the fly, duplicate any data stored. In the event that a volume gets corrupted or damaged, the RAID image can be rebuilt from the ‘other drive’