Received the Dell Mini 9 yesterday, and the 2 of the 3 upgrades a day earlier. I replaced the SSD hard drive; 32G from the stock 8G that comes with. Then I replaced the 512M stock ram with a 2G module I bought. I followed a guide to install OS X on this device, took about 4 hours for everything, including getting the ISO onto a portable USB2 hard drive, loading the syslinux and DellMiniBoot onto my 64M thumb drive, booting up Darwin and doing the install dance, then loading DellEFI onto the OS X install.

Works great now, like a charm. Only issues I really have with it are:

• The single quote (‘) key is in a really weird place, to the right of the space bar.
• The right shift key is to the right of the arrows, which is really weird.
• The keyboard is pretty cramped in general, I’m not exactly sure what % of typical this keyboard is, but it feels about 90%.

That’s it for now! Everything with OS X worked out of the box, pretty amazing.

I’m going to be competing in the USBC Open Championships bowling tournament July 13th and 14th, 2009. It’s in Vegas, so I thought I might as well make a week out of it, considering I’ve never been; I just booked tickets and hotel for July 12th-17th. I plan to play a few poker tournaments while I’m there, should be a good time.

Anyone interested in witnessing greatness?

Man, I hope my freaking mini comes by then. April 30th is the latest estimate, grrrr.

A friend recently gave me her Olympus Digital Camera, worried that she lost all of her photos on the xD memory card. She had recently taken a significant amount of photos, and at some point the camera marked the card as “not formatted”, and only gave the options to reformat the card, or power off the camera. Attaching the card to a computer via a memory card reader yielded similar results.

After some research, I found PhotoRec:

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License.

Very simple to use software, was able to not only find all of the images currently on the media card, but about 1GB of since-deleted images as well. Pretty nice software, I sent them a donation.

So, I bought the Mini 9, still about 3 weeks before it comes, but I knew I’d want to upgrade it. So I recently purchased:
Super Talent 32GB SSD and 2GB ram module to replace the 512MB ram module.
8 cell 77WHr battery, to replace the built-in 32WHr 4 cell battery.

I expect both of these to come before the mini, but that’s alright…