Week 1 - Sunday, 13th November

General Technology News

Written by Rayan Nadeem



With Elon’s recent acquisition of twitter, there have been many changes to the platform. However, the two most significant so far have been the downsizing of the comapny and the introduction of paid verification a.k.a. the “blue check mark”.


The downscaling of the company caused a outcry amongst Twitter users, yet many saw it as necessary, including Mr. Musk himself. He said “there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day” on the platform earlier this month. However, many were still enranged, especially over the short notice many employees were given and the seemingly random choices on who to keep and who to let go - “It’s really a coin flip for everyone at this point” said Twitter employee Simon Balmain whilst talking to the BBC.


The introduction of paid verifcation on the platform was also very controversial, with many taking to the platform to voice their concerns for the future of Twitter. A popular view was that it would lead to an increase of fake and “scammy” accounts as the blue badge would no longer hold as much value. The other side of the debate had a more understanding point of view on the matter, saying that they knew where Musk was coming from on this. As the company was no longer in a profitable state, the paid verification system would bring in alot of much-needed revenue for the company.


It is obvious that there are many changes still to come to one of the world’s most popular social media platforms. Whether they are for the better or for the worse, that is anyone’s guess. What do you think? Is Twitter falling down a rabbit hole of free speech, or is there more to this than meets the eye?


Hackintosh: An introduction

Written by Muhammad Shah

The word “hackintosh” defines running MacOS on hardware which Apple itself has not designed for it to be run on, i.e. on anything other than Apple devices. Yet for those who choose to go down this painstakingly slow path, the end yields something incredible, which still amazes many even though it has been alive for over two decades.


To clear up any legalities, it is not illegal to build your own hackintosh, although certain parts of the process require utmost care to ensure you stay on the safe side of the law. What is illegal is mass producing hackintoshes and then selling them to unsuspecting customers, as Psystar found out in 2008. They were sued by Apple for $2.7 million for illegally distributing copies of MacOS which they have no right to. Luckily for us, the average hackintosh user has Apple on their side, funnily enough. All the OS images used in today’s hackintoshing era actually come from Apple itself, which ensures that (at least for personal use) there are really nothing to be too worried about.



Until about 2018, the dominating figure in the hackintoshing community was the Clover bootloader. A bootloader is basically a computer program which is responsible for loading all the necessary OS data into the main memory, in the correct order. Clover basically allowed the user to customise their bootloader to their hardware and effectively tell MacOS that “I am a mac”. MacOS drivers known as kexts are widely available thanks to the work of opensource developers which aim to give functionality to otherwise unsupported hardware in MacOS.



Since 2018, the new kid on the block, OpenCore, has taken the scene by storm. It promises faster loading speeds, increased reliability and simpler setup. The hackintoshing community was and still is thriving thanks to it. In recent years, more and more people have begun to see hackintoshing as a feasible, customisable alternative to buying a Mac, with many even using it for their daily work devices. Another advantage is the ability to boot multiple OSes as the hardware isn’t locked down for support by Apple, so in many cases, users are able to achieve triple boots, having a machine which is capable of running Linux, Windows and MacOS, something incredibly powerful for developers. But by far the biggest advantage of a hackintosh is simply the cheaper cost over buying a Mac. Almost any 10th generation intel laptop and desktop or below can at the very least boot into MacOS and thanks to extensive work from developers, have full support for all hardware. For example, here is my HP Pavilion x360, a 10th gen i3 which I have upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and an NVME SSD. I am currently able to use all of my hardware except the microphone and HDMI (which isn’t really a big deal). Such support for even the lowest end hardware makes it incredibly accessible to anyone who is willing to put in the time to fine tune their configuration.


So how do we get started? I will be taking aid here from the Dortania Guide, created by the maintainers of OpenCore. This is an increible resource for the hackintosh community, making it easier than ever to create a custom configuration. The most important step is to know your hardware. Compatibilty with MacOS in terms of laptops is unfortunately limited to those with 10th generation or earlier Intel CPUs. This is most because of GPU accerleration support, as Apple no longer uses Intel CPUs in their Macbooks, with the 2020 Intel Macbooks being the last supported. As a result, the graphics processor on 11th gen Intel CPUs and later in not compatible with MacOS any longer since Apple has not bothered adding the necessary driver for it. As far as Ryzen goes, almost every AMD laptop is going to be incompatible since Apple just does not use AMD APUs. This is not to say there is no hope. The ASUS ROG 14 is somewhat supported thanks to it having a dedicated GPU and a MUX switch which disables the integrated AMD GPU. Unfortunately this is a huge drain on battery life, so it is not really suitable for everyday use.


Desktop users on the otherhand are relatively well supported. Almost all Intel and AMD CPUs will work to boot, but as said before, 11th gen AMD APUs will have no graphics acceleration. Luckily, GPU support is much nicer on desktop, with most PCs with an AMD dedicated GPU (most of the RX5000 series and the RX6500 and above) being able to run flawlessly. NVidia on the otherhand is tricky. The only supported Nvidia GPUs and the 1000 series in below, but if you wish to use a more modern MacOS such as Big Sur or later, a long work around is needed. Even then, some apps and features may not work as expected. As far as other hardware goes, almost everything else will have atleast some functionality, with the exception of Intel based microphones.


So what sort of experience can you expect? Well, in my own case, MacOS has generally been a significantly better experience than Windows. Battery life on my laptop exceeds 6 hours, whilst on Windows I was averaging only about 4 hours. This is mostly thanks to the features you can unlock in MacOS, including the ability to undervolt or overclock. In windows, the traditional overclocking software, Intel XTU, does not let my CPU's power configurations to be changed as it is not a "K" or "H" model but instead only an i3 1005G1. In MacOS, thanks to two opensource utilites, I was able to unlock this feature. the first being RU.efi allows you to effectively "hack" you BIOS and disable the Overclocking Lock. Whilst editing you BIOS might sound scary, as long as you know what you are doing, it is generally safe. Another tool called VoltageShift now untilises the unlocked BIOS and allows me to adjust the voltage supplied to the CPU. In my case, I reduced this voltage, which might sound counter intuitve. One might expect performace to drop in this case, but in reality, I saw an improvement of around 5%.


The reason for this is that under heavy load, the CPU reaches a max threshold on its frequency, which generates a lot of heat. To protect the internal components from this heat, the CPU automatically throttles to reduce the temperature but this is at the cost of performace, meaning it si only actually running at around 80%. With undervolting, whilst the CPU might only reach around 95% of the original max, the heat output is significantly less (as this is the graph for heat output to power input is a curved quadratic). Therefore, the CPU is actually able to sustain this 95% load, which is actually higher than the original 80%. This also has the added benefit of lower power consumption and improved battery life, as I experienced.


Hopefully, this brief introduction managed to explain in simple terms what the modern Hackintosh scene looks like and which you can expect to experience if you decide to join in on this interesting journey. Without a doubt, there is a lot to learn on the way!

Programming News

Written by Joel Swedensky

Firstly, programming language updates:


In other news, Github Copilot - the AI tool, powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 released by Github in October last year - is being sued. Si nce is launch, the self-described "AI pair programmer" has been controversial, as Github trained it on public code across its platform - without, in many repositories, license to do so.


[W]e con­tend that the defen­dants have vio­lated the legal rights of a vast num­ber of cre­ators who posted code or other work under cer­tain open-source licenses on GitHub


Many licenses frequently used in open source projects on Github - such as MIT, GPL, and Apache - require that the author is credited, which of course Copilot never does: it infamously copied the exact source code of Quake III's fast inverse square root function, including comments with swearing. The team has filed a class-action complaint in San Fransissco.


In happier news, Windows Subsystem for Linux has reached version 1.0.0. WSL is a tool from Microsoft that allows you to run Linux on Windows without needing a Virtual Machine. Despite Windows being such a popular operating system, Linux is generally preferred among developers, as it gives more control. WSL lets many developers have the best of both worlds - allowing Linux to be run inside of Windows.


With the release of v1.0.0, WSL is now officially stable and even more accessible, especially on Windows 11 where it is available in Microsoft Store.