OSX on Mini Final Status

After months of screwing around with trying to get OSX installed on an HP Mini 110, I'm giving up for now. Here's what I have unsuccessfully tried:

1. Netbook Installer Method 
2. Netbook Installer 2 Method 
3. Using a USB DVD player with a Chameleon Bootloader
4. Making a Snow Leopard LiveUSB
5. Imaging my running VMWare image onto the disk

At this point, I'm just going to upgrade to a larger disk and run OSX in a Virtualbox. There are too many other cool things I can do without spending another month imaging and reimaging USB keys and hard drives.

Hopefully a newer easier method will emerge.

OSX on an HP Mini

For the last few weeks, I've been working on deploying OSX on an HP Mini 110-3030NR. I've run into some (really tons) of issues and clever tricks and will spend the next few days posting about them in the hopes of helping others attempting the same process.

Here's what I've got:

• The HP Mini (awesome netbook by the way) - currently running Windows 7 Starter. I've upgraded the RAM to 2GB and not much else.
• A working VM image running OSX (I used the Snowy_vm method). Make sure you shut off power management and if can't get it to work, try it on a different computer. It wouldn't work on my i5 but had no problem with my core duo.
• A retail copy of Snow Leopard
• one 80GB USB drive (I originally tried this with an 8GB SD card but found it too small to hold the installation DVD
• one copy of Netbook Installer

I'll post back once the OS is installed.

The Mal'Ganis Auction House

I found this post on the "My Auction House Banker" blog that shed new light on why certain glyphs sell for different prices:

http://wowbanker.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-do-glyphs-fallback.html

Sums up my experiences pretty well and explains why sometimes terrible glyphs rise to the top of the craft queue. I'm going to take a whack at building something to control for that behaviour.

In other news, GDKP runs have taken off - I'm looking forward to buying a new warlock suit made out of TOTC drops.

AddonSilencer

Well, my first (and probably only) attempt to upload an addon to Curse was rejected. 


For the last little while, I've been bothered by the amount of addon spam generated by addons like Gearscore generate. On EJ's forums, Burghy posted a script that makes you stop communicating using the addon communication channel:

/script SendAddonMessage = function() end

I used this for a while and it certainly quieted things down. Since I always execute this whenever I log in (because GS sends a ridiculous amount of data to everyone), I figured I'd hack together a basic addon to perform the same function.

Bear in mind, I would disable this if you are a healer running healcom or the like. Personally, I don't want my addons talking to anyone else, so I'm more than happy to shut Carbonite / Gearscore / Forte up for good. If you're in a big guild or pug alot, give it a whirl.

AddonSilencer

(Edit - updated link address, free hosts suck)

What to do with WG Marks

So here's my first dilemma, I've got 35 Wintergrasp marks and some T5 gear. I've basically got two possible options:

1. I can replace Hood of Hexing with Titan-Forged Hood of Dominance
   
2. I can replace both the Boots of Blasting and Belt of Blasting with the Titan-Forged Slippers of Dominance and the Titan-Forged Cord of Dominance

At first it seems like a no-brainer. The WG helm has a meta gem and I know from reading the EJ Affliction post, that that alone is a huge upgrade. The three sockets on the belt of blasting still make it reasonably useful (although worse than pretty much everything epic).

So I plugged the numbers into Excel and found that the belt and boots are better. Why? It comes down to this; the increased hit and spell power on the two items are significant enough to offset the increase from the meta gem. I guess I'll be keeping the stupid looking ZA hat for a little while yet.

DING! I finally hit level 80. Finally, after a swearing a thousand times that I'm not going to level my warlock, I've got my third (and now favorite) character to 80. Now all I have to do is respec and gear up. In mostly level 70 gear (I upgraded a ring at level 78), I've got just over 1800 spell damage and 10% hit in SL/FG spec.

Back from the dead

After a very long hiatus (and rerolling and leveling an alt), I've decided to pick up my main again. In the last week, I've gotten to level 77 and can once again fly.

So far, the only downside of leveling a well geared warlock 5 months after the release of the expansion has been having to replace perfectly good T6 level shoulders with stupid looking Dungeon set 1 shoulders.

Argent tournament dailies are awesome for leveling BTW, and you can get Wintergrasp tokens at pretty much any level.