New web site http://howsecureismypassword.net/ is a quick and easy way to see how secure your password is.

A new web service exists today that according to it’s creators can crack most wpa keys in around 20 minutes, and email you back with the results, all for the bargain basement price of 17 dollars. In their own words:

“WPA Cracker is a cloud cracking service for penetration testers and network auditors who need to check the security of WPA-PSK protected wireless networks.

WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, but running a respectable-sized dictionary over a WPA network handshake can take days or weeks. WPA Cracker gives you access to a 400CPU cluster that will run your network capture against a 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords. While this job would take over 5 days on a contemporary dual-core PC, on our cluster it takes an average of 20 minutes, for only $17.”

You can find out more about this new cloud based web service HERE

This is a tutorial on how to install OS X 10.6 on a Dell Vostro 1510 and 1520. It is mostly for my own sake when I crash one of my laptops and cant find my Time Machine backup. There are actually quite a lot of tutorials out there on how to do this on various other hardware setups, however I had a hard time finding info about Vostros as Hackbooks. This is  surprising, as they are so similar to real Mac books. Hopefully others will benefit from the months of research and trial/error it took me to get these installs just right. The Dell Vostro 1510 and 1520 are almost perfectly matched to the specs of a Mac book Pro 15 with:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T6670 (2.20GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)

15.4 inch WXGA Anti-Glare LED Display

3GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz, 2 DIMM

Integrated 1.3MP Webcam and Digital Mic

Dell Wirelessâ„¢ 1397 802.11b/g Mini Card

NVIDIA® GeForce™ 9300M GS 256MB

The most compelling reason to create a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro is price. I purchased this laptop directly from Dell for aprox. $650.00 and if I had purchased the same specs directly from Apple, I would have payed over $2000.00

You will need the following:
1. Dell Vostro 1510 or 1520
2. A retail Snow Leopard Installation disk
3. Snowboot Boot disk available here or here
4. Either the 1510 or 1520 zip files which includes DSDT, boot.plist and all the kext files needed for a perfect install.
5. Chameleon boot loader available here

The first step is to burn the Snowboot iso to a cd. Then boot the Vostro from this disk. Once the system is booted and the drives are displayed, eject the boot disk and insert the retail Snow Leopard disk. Wait for the drive lights to stop flashing, and hit F5 to refresh the drive list. Select the installation disk and hit enter. Once the installer boots, select your language and the in  the upper menu bar select utilities, disk utility. Select your drive and partition with a single partition. You can name it anything you like as long as the volume name does not include spaces. I used MacintoshHD for my volume name. In the options tab select GUID partition table instead of MBR. Next allow the system to complete partitioning and exit the disk utility. Then complete the installation as usual. Once the installer completes and the system reboots, replace the installation disk with the snowboot disk and reboot. When the drive list menu shows up select the volume you installed SnowLeo to (MacintoshHD) and boot. At this point you should be able to see the welcome screen. Go thru the rest of the installation process and user creation. Once the installer completes and it boots to your desktop, copy the 1510 or 1520 zip file and the chameleon installer to your desktop. Run the chameleon installer and make sure it is installing to the correct drive. (MacintoshHD) Then extract the correct zip file to your desktop. Next we do the following:

1. Copy the files in /Vostro1510/Extra or Vostro 1520/Extra to /Extra on MacintoshHD

2. Copy com.Apple.Boot.plist to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.Apple.Boot.plist overwriting the one that is already there.

3. Copy dsdt.aml to root of MacintoshHD

4. Delete /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext

5. Delete /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext

6. Copy VoodooPower.kext VoodooHDA.kext and VoodooPS2Controller.kext to /System/Library/Extensions/

7. Delete /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Keyboard.prefpane

8. Copy included Keyboard.prefpane and Trackpad.prefpane to /System/Library/PreferencePanes/

9. Run Kext Utility to repair all extension permissions and create the necessary kext caches.

10. Run disk utility and repair permissions for your Snow Leopard volume (MacintoshHD)

11. Reboot into a working 32 bit Snow Leopard

12. Enable QE/CI for your graphics card. If you have a Intel Graphics adapter it “SHOULD” just work. On my Vostro 1520 I have a Nvidia GEForce 9350M GS which works correctly with the included com.Apple.Boot.plist that has the kernel flag for graphics enabler turned on. Otherwise search Google for a supported enabler for your setup.

13. All that’s left to do now is enable the wireless card with the included shell script(drag on a terminal window and follow instructions) reboot and run software update……

Currently I have everything working except the media card reader and the integrated biometric finger print scanner.

***Please note:

For support using this guide, please refer to the insanely mac forum located HERE

***Update 10.6.2 breaks wireless, simply rerun the broadcom script in the zip file and then rerun kext tool and reboot.

Apparently the Vostro 1510 works WITHOUT a DSDT.aml file so ignore that portion of the tutorial if you DO have a 1510

I did NOT create or modify the included files or utilities. I simply collected them from around the net and packaged them in the included zip files for the sake of convenience. Thanks to all who DID create the included files and tools without which none of this would be possible.

I DID purchase a legitimate copy of OS X 10.6

Under Leopard, to combine pdf’s, you drag thumbnails from a PDF document open in Preview to the sidebar of another PDF.  A red line appears beneath the page thumbnail of the file you’re dragging to, showing you where the new page will be inserted.

Snow Leopard works a bit differently in that if you drag thumbnails from one PDF window to another, place them below the other document’s thumbnails, and save, you wind up with a document that contains just the pages you dragged into the sidebar.

The trick is to drag thumbnails on top of a thumbnail in the document you’re dragging to. This combines the pages. If you want to rearrange the pages, then you just drag them where you like-, they’ll stay within the combined document.