Author: rolfje

A Bigger Time Machine without Changing History

2008-09-07 rolfje 104 Comments

I had a 160GB drive holding my Time Machine backups. Because I wanted to backup external disks, and still wanted to be able to travel about a year back in time, I bought a 1TB USB disk. Stephen Foskett wrote a great article about how he migrated his TimeMachine backup to a larger disk, but it’s lengthy and misses one essential step.

I decided to give you the short version, this blog post describes how I migrated Time Machine to the new disk without losing any data in 11 easy steps.

Apple, Software

OSX: Formatting a 1TB USB Drive

2008-09-07 rolfje 7 Comments

I just bought a Maxtor Basics 1TB drive, and found that I could not seem to format it using the Leopard Diskutility. Then, I found this page which contained the golden tip. I’ll save you some reading:

Open Apple’s Disk Utility
Click on the drive (not the partition in it, if there is any), and select “Partitioning”.
Select “1 partition” and then press “Options”.
You’ll see that “MBR” is the default, which is what’s causing the problem. Select the middle option “Apple Partition” and you’re good to go.

Screenshots included. It’s in Dutch, but the location of the buttons are identical for all languages.

Apple, Hardware, Software

Remove formatting from clipboard

2008-09-05 rolfje 1 Comment

In Windows, there is a great tool called “PureText” which sits in your tray, and can remove formatting from copy/paste actions if you want to. In stead of pasting into notepad, and then copying it again, you now can use the Windows-V combination to paste without formatting. It works in any program, and I’m a fond user of this little gem at work.

In OSX, you can do this with a key combination, Option-Shift-Command-V. Besides being the silliest and most awkward key combination ever to do a simple paste-action, it does not always do the job properly. I found this great tip where a simple applescript removes formatting from the items in your clipboard.

Apple, Software

A Weekend of Crashes

2008-08-31 rolfje No Comments

This weekend was a lot of fun. Saturday night I got to fly Leo’s Walkera 60B electric helicopter. That’s one piece of impressive (and scary) machinery. Although it feels easier to fly than my 4#3B, I still “managed” to crash it. Luckaly the blades can be easily replaced, and after tightening a bunch of screws and replacing a pin in the main gear, it was good to fly again. We flew 3 times, and had to repair the helicopter after each flight 🙂 I hope I can treat you with good shots of the Walkera 60B next time, there are not many high-quality images of it online.

Mine are real.

2008-08-27 rolfje 3 Comments

As Seth Godin pointed out, “Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.”

Just to let you know, all my mail is hand typed, including the “Kind Regards” and my name at the end. You may find it silly, but I think it shows that you care. I always think about my greetings, and I even try to vary them every now and then. Having a default greeting underneath every mail, wether the content of that mail requires it or not is just plain silly.

Almost just as silly as the disclaimers people put in the mail, thinking that it has any legal value, or even thinking somebody actually reads those.

Next time you receive a mail from me, keep in mind that my greetings are actual, meaningful, honest greetings, personally written from me to you. You may have noticed that I am never “yours”, because then I would be “truly” lying.

And yes, it als gives me an opportunity to leave them out, or tone them down. You’re allowed to check your mail now. Go and feel special.

Fun

Macbook Pro Screen update issues

2008-08-18 rolfje No Comments

My wife has this great Macbook Pro 15″, and I “don’t mind” using it every now and then. I noticed that when running on batteries, screen updates are a bit strange:

When scrolling down a webpage, the page get garbled. Scrolling the garbled piece out of the window and in again sometimes fixes it.
When resizing a Finder window, the icons in the window flicker a lot, you can see them being cleared and redrawn.

I noticed more people having these problems on several forums, and I also read that resetting the PRAM could fix it. Well, I just reset the PRAM and it seems to have fixed it, indeed.

I used the method mentioned on Apple’s support page, which tells you to shut the computer down, and boot it up holding the command, option, P and R keys. As soon as you see it shutting down after you’ve started it up, release the keys.

This is all I did, and it seems to have fixed it.

Apple, Hardware, Software

Anything you say…

2008-08-14 rolfje No Comments

…can and will be used against you.

I got an email with a great link to a blog post containing 2 links to great presentations on why you should never talk to the police, even if you’re honest, or want to help, or have an alibi, or whatever. Never, ever answer any questions, no matter how trivial. Although this is an American presentation, it definetely applies to a great extend on Dutch and probably a whole lot of other European laws aswel.

Thanks to Pim for sending me this link. I really enjoyed the talk by Professor James Duane, he is a great presenter and a very articulate speaker. I’m jealous of the people in his class, it must be one good teacher.

Uncategorized

Censorship: here to stay

2008-08-12 rolfje No Comments

For those of you who think that media and information are free and uncontroled, guess again. Lately I have been seeing more and more incidents of large corporations hiding information, and even telling other people to hide it for them. I think this is plain wrong, and the guys involved should have been fired or punished otherwise.

If you have information which is of interest to the public, and somebody is making you sign a paper with which he can force you to shut up, you should think twice (and then not do it). Not because of the money, not because of the information itself, but for the sheer principle. Information should not be controled in that way. By anyone. It is dangerous.

Read More “Censorship: here to stay” »

Apple, Microsoft

New Helicopter to Master

2008-08-10 rolfje 2 Comments

A friend of mine and me ordered 2 Walkera 4#3B electric model helicopters 3 weeks ago. Last frinday, they finally arrived, and this weekend we had some good fun flying them.

If you think flying a PicooZ is hard, don’t even start thinking about one of these. It looks easier on the youtube video’s than it seems. I have some experience with RC models (mainly cars and boats), but flying this helicopter is really hard. I can not get it to hover steadily, I need some serious practice to tame this baby. 🙂

I just took my camera out to shoot make some action shots of the heli’s in the air, when one of them crashed so hard that the tail boom broke. We ordered some spare parts for both ‘copters, they’ll arrive somewhere next week. In the meantime you can check out some of the photographs I made of my Walkera on my desk.

Hardware

Turn your iPhone into a Drive

2008-08-10 rolfje 1 Comment

My Nokia 6300 behaves like a flash or thumb drive when I connect it to a computer using an USB cable. I think this should be standard functionality nowadays. Cellphones are replacing the Filofax and MP3 players. I can read mail on my cellphone, take pictures and movies. It contains an 4GB memory stick, sometimes even more. So why do I need to carry this silly thumbdrive with me?

Apple, Software