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Fix iMessage on Yosemite

Posted on 17th March 2015

Apple-logoFirst off, Happy St. Patricks Day!

It has been a question that many Hackintoshers have been trying to solve since the release of the Yosemite betas last year. How do we get iMessages to work? Many have tried and many have failed. What has seemed to lack is a good comprehensive guide covering a wide range of scenarios.

This guide over at Tonymacx86 is a pretty detailed resources and should help you get your setup going. You are best to use the Clover Bootloader as is seems to handle the manual values as well as NVRAM much better then Chimera/Chameleon. I will note the chapter I followed for each setting in my setup.

Anytime I would try to sign in to Messages, I would get the “An error occurred during activation. Try again.” message. This was good news for me since I just had to make sure Clover had the right serial numbers and so on. Some situations will still require you to call in to Apple to have them whitelist your serial and some other values. For my situation, all I needed to make sure I had valid was:

  • Product Name (SMBIOS and found one matching my hardware using MacTracker) Chapter 4.2
  • Serial Number (Generating one in Clover Configurator and verifying at Apple Selfsolve) Chapter 4.1
  • SmUUID (Generating a random one using uuidgen in the terminal even to know my board did not exhibit the Sid bug) Chapter 5
  • ROM (Using MAC Address of my ethernet minus the colons) Chapter 7.1
  • MLB (Serial number that I generated plus 5 random alpha/numeric characters) Chapter 7.1

I also made sure that all of my configs for iMessage and iCloud were deleted prior to doing anything as to make sure I started as fresh as possible. (Chapter 3.3)

Note on the SmUUID. It is better to generate a unique SmUUID and not assume that your motherboards will work with Apple’s servers. Just run uuidgen from the terminal 4 or 5 times and use that value in Clover Configurator. Also make sure, as is detailed in chapter 3.2, that your ethernet and wifi are labeled as enX and showing as Built-In for this to work right.

Once all of these were set up with correct values, I did need to change my Apple ID password. Once reset, I was able to login and send/receive iMessages once again. Once you have correct values, you will want to always use these with your particular motherboard/cpu combination as to not blacklist that system in the future as long as Apple does not change their verification process again.

And finally, a big shout out to jaymonkey who has spent countless hours keeping his guide up to date. Without his collection of information, iMessages would not be functioning on Yosemite Hackintoshes.

 

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Columbus Neighborhoods: Worthington

Posted on 5th October 2014

I have been privileged with the opportunity to portray the character of Ezra Griswold, an important pioneer that helped plan and settle the town of Worthington in 1803. Worthington is now considered to be a suburb of Columbus, but is it’s own City in own rights.

Ezra Griswold was a good friend with James Kilbourne, the man whom envisioned the settlement of Worthington. Together, with the established Scioto Company, these men created one of my favorite parts of the Columbus area.

I was lucky to be able to attend the private community premiere on this past Wednesday. The episode is one of the best they have done in the series. I suggest that you take a peak at the following extended trailer.

The full episode will premiere on TV tonight at 8pm on WOSU, and will be on rotation thereafter. I hope that they release the full episode online at some point and will share it here if they do.

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Archie Bush – Mysteries at the Museum

Posted on 26th March 2014

ArchieBushJune of last summer, I had the honor and privilege of portraying a minor character in the televised story of the curve ball, which aired on The Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum. We were asked by Tracy Martin of Martin’s Base Ball Museum to come out and participate in the filming of this segment. What I did not know is that I would be getting more camera time than I had bargained.

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App of the Month: Fluid

Posted on 18th March 2014

fluid_logo_iconHave you ever wanted a stand alone Pandora or Google Music app for your Mac? Perhaps one for FaceBook or some other web service. As diverse as the Apple App Store has gotten over the years, popular web services like Pandora and Netflix do not have a stand-alone app that you can run outside of Safari. For some of us, that is perfectly fine. For others, having those services running outside of the current Safari (FireFox or Chome included) session is a good thing. Why? Perhaps you are running a dual-screen setup and want Netflix to run on the other screen. Sure, you could just run it in another window or another browser entirely.  But what if we could do that cleaner, neater, and just plain cooler!

In steps the App of the Month: Fluid

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Building a Install and Recovery Drive for Your Hackintosh

Posted on 15th March 2014

DiskWarrior IconRunning a modern Hackintosh has become fairly simple and straightforward these days. With the help of websites offering everything from installers to hardware compatibly charts, building a dream Mac is easily done. There is still a chance that something could break. It could be caused by a bad install, update, or even worse, a bad hard drive. What is fairly difficult is the fact that running hard drive diagnostics outside of a fully bootable Mac install may only allow you to test the physical drive. What about if is not a physical issue and is file system related?

That is where a great program from real Mac fame, DiskWarrior comes in to play for most. Sure, OSX has a built in drive verification utility and you could boot into single user mode and run fsck, but what if those fail? What if you can not boot into OSX at all? DiskWarrior does give you a disk image that can be booted off of, if it is a real Macintosh computer. It will not boot on non-Apple hardware. So what do you do then?

You boot to your recovery install of OSX.