If you have a Hackintosh desktop or Netbook, you may want to do a bit of research before jumping into the Mac OS X 10.6.3 system update. Users around the web are reporting everything from easy success to catastrophic failure, which isn’t too surprising considering the hardware diversity of Hackintosh systems.

Simplest advice: Follow the path of someone who has done the update on a machine that is either identical or closely mimics your own build. For anyone that uses sleep, if you want to minimize the likelihood of troubles when updating to 10.6.3 it’s a good idea to move the old SleepEnabler.kext since it will almost certainly cause a kernel panic on reboot when it butts heads with the new kernel.

It is absolutely essential that you backup your existing Hackintosh Mac OS X 10.6.2 install before attempting to 10.6.3 update!

Resources for updating your Hackintosh to 10.6.3:

Prasys: Straight Forward 10.6.3 Upgrade Guide – a nice and easy to follow step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots on updating to 10.6.3

TonyMacX86: Mac OS X 10.6.3 update – Great general advice and information on the 10.6.3 update, what has been problematic, what works, and more importantly: SOLUTIONS to known problems. Highly recommended resource.

Google Spreadsheet: 10.6.3 update and hardware – this is a great spreadsheet maintained by TonyMacX86 that shows hardware and known problems. Definitely worth a look.

LifeHacker: Update a charm to 10.6.3 – for Desktop Hackintosh users who followed the LifeHacker guide in particular. Not particularly informative other than a ‘it worked for me!’ so a strong YMMV, read the comments for a slew of user problems (and successes too).

TonyMacX86 Forums – if you’re banging your head into the wall to figure out what went wrong on your desktop Hackintosh update, this is a great forum to check out.

InsanelyMac Forums – another good resource for questions and answers to various Hackintosh install problems, less personal than TonyMacX86 though.

MyDellMini: Official Mac OS X 10.6.3 update thread for Dell Mini 9 and Dell Mini 10v – if you have a Dell Mini, go to the experts. An excellent guide on updating your Mini to 10.6.3, don’t miss it.

NetKas: Advice on updating to 10.6.3 with ATI cards

Meklort – a leader in the Hackintosh world, most relevant to Netbook users.

If you happened to have followed the LifeHacker guide to build a Hackintosh Desktop you may have the easiest update as a desktop user, although some users in their comments are reporting update troubles with identical systems. Various Hackintosh Netbook reports vary widely, but the Dell Mini 9 and 10v is fairing well thanks to the folks at MyDellMini forums.

If you’re a bit squeamish or don’t want a hassle, waiting a few weeks to update to 10.6.3 may well work in your favor as the Hackintosh community continues to refine and update their techniques.

“Will my Mac play HD video?”

If you have a new Mac, the answer is almost certainly yes. The ability for your Mac to play H.264 High Definition HD video content depends entirely on it’s hardware capabilities. Here are the hardware requirements for HD video per Apple’s guidelines, and my recommendations based on personal experience with smooth HD playback on Mac’s:

Playing 720p Content on your Mac:

To play 720p video at 1280×720 resolution and roughly 30 frames a second, your Mac will need at least the following:
* 1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster processor (Intel Core Duo chip highly recommended)
* 256MB of RAM or more (1GB+ highly recommended)
* 64 MB or better video card

Playing 1080p Content on your Mac:

Playing 1080p is more hardware intensive since it runs at 1920×1080 resolution, you will need at least the following Mac configuration to get roughly 25 frames per second:
* Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster processor (Intel 2 Core Duo chip highly recommended)
* 512MB of RAM or more (2GB+ highly recommended)
* 128MB or better video card

For the best high-def video playback experience, I’d recommend having only the HD video playing and not a bunch of background apps or processes if you can avoid it, this is particularly true if you have a less powerful machine. Having a dedicated machine like a Mac Mini as a media center makes for a particularly good Mac HD experience when hooked up to an external HDTV. Of course if you have a brand new Mac, or a fancy Mac Pro with 8 cores and 12GB of RAM, then you’ll have great playback as well.

Basically, the better the Mac’s hardware, the better your HD video performance will be, the higher the frame rates, and the smoother the video.

If you are interested, read more about creating a Mac Media Center, it’s a lot easier than you’d think.

[ Click for full resolution at 1920x1200 ]

I really like the Aurora spacey galactic themed wallpapers that come with Snow Leopard, so I was pretty excited when I came across this original background picture on one of our readers websites. It’s a great variation of the galaxy theme and looks completely at home on my Mac’s desktop.

Thanks for my new desktop picture Anton!

If you have a bunch of files you need renamed on your Mac then Name Mangler is where it’s at. You can easily batch rename tons and tons of files just by dragging and dropping them into the application. Name Mangler goes beyond just renaming something from file1 to file2 though, there are many more advanced batch renaming capabilities including:

* Find and Replace (find all instances of Blah in filename_Blah and replace with Wow)
* Number Sequentially (file1, file2, file3)
* Change Case (caps to lowercase, vice versa)
* Set an Extension (make all files .txt or the like)
* Add a Prefix or Suffix (Filename.jpg to Filename-trip.jpg)
* Remove or Insert Characters
* and more in the advanced settings…

Name Mangler is free to download and use. It’s donation wear so if you like it enough, let the developer know with your wallet. Name Mangler was free to use and used to be donation wear, but now the developer is charging $10… thank you to treks for pointing this out. You can still download a free trial though.

Name Mangler developer home
Download now

Check your Software Updates! Mac OS X 10.6.3 update has been released and is recommended to install for all Mac OS X Snow Leopard users. The amount of fixes is pretty substantial, here’s the main list provided in the Software Update panel:

* improve the reliability and compatibility of QuickTime X
* address compatibility issues with OpenGL-based applications
* address an issue that causes background message colors to display incorrectly in Mail
* resolve an issue that prevented files with the # or & characters in their names from opening in Rosetta applications
* resolve an issue that prevented files from copying to Windows file servers
* improve performance of Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2 when running in 64-bit mode
* improve sleep and wake reliability when using Bonjour wake on demand
* address a color issue in iMovie with HD content
* improve printing reliability
* resolve issues with recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server
* improve the reliability of 3rd party USB input devices
* fix glowing, stuck, or dark pixels when viewing video from the iMac (Late 2009) built-in iSight camera

Looking through the full list of improvements I noticed a couple of Airport updates:

* general reliability for wireless connections.
* improvements to 802.1X reliability, including closed network connections, and WPA2.

These really caught my eye since there’s been a sizable amount of people (including myself and other OS X Daily writers) that have had various problems with Snow Leopard and wireless connectivity. I’m hoping these will help fix the dropped wireless connection problems in Snow Leopard completely.

You can see the full improvement and bug fix list at Apple.com’s 10.6.3 knowledge base article.

If you are having problems with airport connectivity, try this simple fix for wireless dropping after installing the 10.6.3 update

“Blahblah is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?”

Starting in Mac OS X Leopard, you may have noticed that when you download a file from the web and go to open it, you will get a prompt saying something along these lines.

This is Mac OS X just being safe, but if you always know for sure what you’re downloading it could even be overly safe. You can disable this quarantine message by launching the Mac Terminal and typing the following command:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO

You will then need to reboot (although killing the Finder should work as well) for the changes to take effect. To reverse this and get the file quarantine message back, type:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool YES

Again you will need to reboot (or kill the Finder) to have the changes back.

Here’s a random fact of the day: Steve Jobs drives a Mercedes SL55 AMG, with no license plates. Instead there’s just a plate frame with a little barcode in the middle (apparently the bar code is standard on Mercedes). I guess Steve really doesn’t like the look of the license plate, his car has been spotted frequently around the Silicon Valley and for at least two years now it has been missing the front and rear plates. Failure to display license plates is a $250 fine in California, which makes you wonder how often he gets pulled over and ticketed for the infraction.

[ via Flickr 1 Flickr 2 & Gizmodo ]

You can make your Mac talk to you in various different ways with it’s built-in Text-to-Speech abilities, we’ll cover the two quickest and easiest ways using the simple text editor TextEdit and the command line via Terminal.

Make your Mac talk with TextEdit

* Set the cursor to where you’d like the text to be spoken (default will be the beginning of the document or text)
* From the Edit menu, pull down to ‘Speech’
* Select ‘Start Speaking’

Make your Mac talk with the Terminal

* Launch the Terminal
* Type say hello and ‘hello’ will be read in the default voice that your Mac is set to (Alex is the default)
* Adjust voices by using the -v voicename flag, eg; say -v agnes this sure is a fancy voice!
* You can follow the ‘say’ command with just about anything

Want to play Team Fortress 2, Half-Life, Counterstrike, and some of the other sweet Valve games on your Mac? Apply to be an official beta tester for the upcoming Mac version of Steam. It’s a simple questionnaire that goes through your computing setup and gaming habits, and then you provide a copy of your System Profile information. Beyond randomness (or luck), it seems who gets chosen to download the beta client is based on Valve’s hardware testing needs.

A user on TUAW claims to have applied and received a very quick response with an approval, writing the following in the comments:

Wow..that was quick…I just entered my application and they emailed me back code to get mac version of steam client….within hours of entering !! this is like christmas..I’m going to test out some team fortress !!

Why not give it a go yourself? Head on over to Steam’s Mac beta signup site:

Steam: Mac Beta signup

You’ll need a Steam login to apply, which suggests a preference to those who already own and use Steam, ie: PC & Mac users.

[ via TUAW ]

A classic setup: a MacBook Pro and an iMac. This setup is extra awesome because the owner of the machines was viewing OS X Daily when he took the picture, cool!

[ via Flickr ]