A few requirements

• An up to date Mac and preferably an up to date Time Machine backup.
• Windows 7 on DVD, get it here (available until August 20,2009, although can be installed after).
• 8GB  of space although I would recommend about 25 so you have some room to play with.

Lets get stuck in

1. Restart your Mac and close any apps that automatically start.
2. Open Boot Camp Assistant via finder and click continue at the intro screen.
3. At this stage choose how much space you want to give your new OS, as mentioned above around 25GB is good, although feel free to choose more or less if you know how much you will need. Once your happy click partition.
4. Insert your Windows 7 DVD and click the option to Start Installation.
5. Once your Mac restarts you will have to select which partition to install on. Select the one named Bootcamp you don’t want to accidentally choose the wrong one so pay close attention.
6. Choose drive options and “Format” press ok when prompted.
7. Once Windows 7 has installed it will reboot and you will need to take the DVD out.
8. Your nearly done just select your language etc and finish the installation, connect to the internet and Windows will download the latest updates and a video card driver, yep after this its time for another reboot.
9. All done your ready to go, depending on you Mac hardware you may have to look at getting your sound drivers setup. Just hold option when you turn your Mac on to choose Windows 7 or OSX.

Check out these cool and artistic Snow Leopard Wallpapers. They ship standard with OSX 10.6 but you can download them all from a link over at Creative Bits.

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Last week we showed you how to get Windows 7 running on your Mac, but iTunes won’t be able to sync your shuffle. This is a solution both for those with Windows 7 installed on Mac and PC. To fix the problem you will have to work through the following steps.

1. If your Shuffle is connected to your Mac/PC then disconnect it, close iTunes.
2. Close ”ITunesHelper.exe” in the windows task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL).
3. Download Sharepod
4. Reconnect the iPod Shuffle and start Sharepod, you should now be able to see your iPod.
5. With Sharepod still open start iTunes.
6. Your iPod should be visible in iTunes, select options and uncheck iTunes autostart, check hard drive usage.
7. Accept changes and close iTunes, do not eject your iPod using the iTunes interface.
8. Close Sharepod and disconnect your Shuffle before you restart you Mac/PC.

Thats it your iTunes will now be able to place all your podcasts and music on your shuffle just like normal. You will no longer need Sharepod so feel free to uninstall it.

I recently had to burn a 704MB .avi (divX) file to a 700MB CD through my MacBook. I was pleased to find that although the default OSX Mac burner won’t overburn you can easily do this through a few terminal commands to bypass the overburn block.

1. Firstly create a directory with a short name (will be easier to type into terminal) that only contains the file you wish to burn, remove .nfo files (if a torrent file) or previews/covers leaving just the main .avi file. I called mine “movie”.

2. Open terminal (click finder and type it in if you haven’t used it before).

3. Browse to the directory above movies, enter “cd /user/downloads” where the directory containing the files you are burning is /user/downloads/movie (cd simply stands for change directory). Terminal will then display that you are in that directory. If you get stuck here because you haven’t used terminal before comment below and I will help you out.

4. Create an iso of the movies folder, in terminal enter “hdiutil makehybrid -o isofilename movie/” and your .iso will be created from the files in the folder movie. The progress will be displayed in terminal (doesn’t take long).

5. Enter your cd or DVD into the drive and burn using “hdiutil burn isofilename.iso” (while still in the same directory, which you will be if you follow the steps above). You will not be given the option of what speed to burn the disc at (in most cases this fastest setting is fine),  status will again be displayed in terminal while burning and verifying the disc.

6. Once burned you can delete isofilename.iso if you don’t plan on making any more copies.

Mac OSX Cougar

A possible upcoming release? probably not.