Been reading alot of classic science fiction recently. Here is a collection of some of interesting artwork used for covers.

When I started freelancing I need to make a new beastly computer that could handle tons of storage and be the central base for all of my projects. The two most important things I was concerned with my system were speed and budget. I had been following the osx86 project on and off over the last couple of years and after seeing successfully running production machines running I was to tempting to build one of my own.

As a part time homebrew/mod hacker I felt making a Hackintosh would be a great exercise, very educational, and also enrich my geek cred.

Total Budget of Project: $700

Parts list for machine

• DFI Blood Iron MotherBoard
• XFX9800GT Graphics Card
• Gskull ram 2 dimms 4gigs total
• Coolmaster Power Supply
• Antec 900 Case
• SATA DVD Drive
• RETAIL DVD of OSX10.5

First you will need to create a boot cd that will allow the bios to read the OSX  dvd.

Once the system has been booted it will run threw the normal installation.

After the machine tries to restart you will have to boot to the boot312 cd in the dvd drive. Once that is loaded target the the correct drive to boot. Most systems its 80.

After selecting boot drive I recommend loading the os in verbose mode by typing “-v” or  “-v -f” before starting the boot. This will allow you to see all the loading process under the hood this will help nail down what hardware device might be causing issues due to kext conflicts.

Once system has successfully booted install the following:

• Chameleon – This will now replace the boot 312
• Drivers… recommend looking at the OSX86 project for these downloads.
• Depending on what version of install disc you have install combo update to take system to the latest version of the os.

Once you have the system up and running its more of less a full Mac, I highly recommend adding a sectioned drive that you can clone and restore with if you plan on messing around with different kext and or osx updates. Personally I use CarbonCopyCloner and it has already saved me a couple times.

I have been running the machine with virtual no issues for almost 5 months now. The 2 main issues that I have and sleeping and restarting the machine.

Last week I completed a email campaign that I was only brought into only to code. I felt that the process followed was generally flawed that the team took. I started with a finalized approved design which I was suppose to code into a mailer. From the beginning I started noticing flaws in the designs and how the design would be translated into many of the the popular web clients of today like Gmail for example.

Often I think people and small teams rush the designs of the mailers and don’t fully understand what it takes to develop and what will be rendered by each client. Most web based email applications won’t properly read divs, background images, or even external style sheets. With these short comings and designers unaware of these limitations or bad and unexpected things can happen.

When creating a mailer its important to first and foremost take your audience into consideration. Are they main using web based clients like gmail, yahoo, etc.? Are the checking there mail on the mobile devices? Or they simple just using a desktop client like Mail (OSX), ThunderBird, or Outlook? All of these and a combination should it most cases be assumed.

Rules of thumb to help achieve the audiences viewing of the mailer

At the of the top of the design provide a link for the subscribers to see a web version. Most mailers these days are filter and end up in junk mail boxes or the software is smart enough to hide the images. Leaving your pain stacking work looking like a blob of random text bits. Having this link at the top will give the user and easy way to view the mailer as it was ment to be presented.

Keep it simple. Since most clients ignore CSS  including background images your going to have to get old school with some tables. By keeping the design simple you will be able to get you message across to the widest audience. I good example of this is UrbanDaddy.com’s mailer(seen below).

Allow the users to easily forward and print the mailer.