Yesterday I picked up an Apple Timecapsule 1TB, the plan being to have live backups of both my and my wifes computers (losing all of those baby/wedding/etc photos would be a disaster). I will also use it to put the colour printer on the network and my 500GB WD drive, which is where I will be keeping media for the time being.
Initially I plan to set it up as a N only network and my other access point as B/G only (also on a totally different channel) so that essentially only our laptops will connect to the time capsule and supposedly at N speeds making the backups and streaming better.
Eventually I will buy a Drobo and connect that to the time capsule and have the time capsule back itself up to the Drobo periodically, so I will have backups in two places. I also have copies of our photos stored in "The Cloud", so hopefully we're covered for a rainy day. After all as the quote goes, there are only two types of people, those whose disks have failed and those whose disks will fail (or was it backups?).
I havent done anything with the TC just yet though, last night I was consolidating data from various drives onto the WD drive and watching a film, for the first time in a while. Tonight I will hopefully get time to set it up and test it, so I'll let you know how that goes.
Thursday 17 July 2008
Monday 14 July 2008
Microsoft Memory Mouse 8000
I recently picked up a new mouse as the title explains :) and I have to say that so far Im quite happy with it. Its a wireless notebook mouse with a rechargeable battery, it can be used as a standard notebook wireless mouse, i.e. with a USB dongle or you can switch it to bluetooth mode if your notebook supports it and fore go the dongle.
There are some nice things with this mouse though compared to previous ones that I have owned or used, first of all, the dongle also doubles as a 1GB USB disk, which is nice as I always hated losing a port just for the mouse. Secondly it has magnets on the end, which you attach a cable to and the other end you connect to magnets on the underside of the mouse, this then enables your notebook to charge the mouse and in the meantime you can continue to use it as a standard tethered mouse. The first initial charge takes 8 hours or something but afterwards 15 minutes is supposed to be enough for a whole day.
Another good thing with it is that the mouse is supported by windows and by OS X, so has no issues switching between operating systems when Im dual-booting.
I noticed some posts on the internet that there are problems apparently with pairing the mouse but I can say that I havent came across this at all. For me on my Leopard 10.5.4 system I did the following;
Installed the intellipoint drivers
Started bluetooth on the MBP
Took the cover off the bottom of the mouse and held the connect button until the mouse led started to flash green and red
Started the add device wizard from the bluetooth menu on the mbp
I chose mouse and then told it not to use a passkey
After a few seconds the mouse connected and that was it.
The only thing that I havent found a solution for is when I start the MBP and BT, I have to search for the mouse again (not pair it, it already is recognised) it just doesnt pick it up automatically, whereas windows xp does. Something to play with I guess but so far Im quite happy with it.
There are some nice things with this mouse though compared to previous ones that I have owned or used, first of all, the dongle also doubles as a 1GB USB disk, which is nice as I always hated losing a port just for the mouse. Secondly it has magnets on the end, which you attach a cable to and the other end you connect to magnets on the underside of the mouse, this then enables your notebook to charge the mouse and in the meantime you can continue to use it as a standard tethered mouse. The first initial charge takes 8 hours or something but afterwards 15 minutes is supposed to be enough for a whole day.
Another good thing with it is that the mouse is supported by windows and by OS X, so has no issues switching between operating systems when Im dual-booting.
I noticed some posts on the internet that there are problems apparently with pairing the mouse but I can say that I havent came across this at all. For me on my Leopard 10.5.4 system I did the following;
Installed the intellipoint drivers
Started bluetooth on the MBP
Took the cover off the bottom of the mouse and held the connect button until the mouse led started to flash green and red
Started the add device wizard from the bluetooth menu on the mbp
I chose mouse and then told it not to use a passkey
After a few seconds the mouse connected and that was it.
The only thing that I havent found a solution for is when I start the MBP and BT, I have to search for the mouse again (not pair it, it already is recognised) it just doesnt pick it up automatically, whereas windows xp does. Something to play with I guess but so far Im quite happy with it.
Thursday 3 July 2008
10.5.4 out but doesnt solve the 256 colour issues
So 10.5.4 came out and me being the sucker that I am I installed it to see if it would sort out some of those issues I was having. While it does appear to help with the slow shutdowns (no need to remove the sleepimage file every now and then anymore?), it does not fix the issues with Starcraft or Diablo II or any other application that requires 256 colour support for that matter.
There are some solutions floating around on the net, that basically involve replacing the kexts from the 10.5.3/4 update(s) with those from 10.5.2 but this seems like a bit of a kludge to me, so hopefully this will be addressed officially at some point. Hopefully before Starcraft 2 comes out :)
There are some solutions floating around on the net, that basically involve replacing the kexts from the 10.5.3/4 update(s) with those from 10.5.2 but this seems like a bit of a kludge to me, so hopefully this will be addressed officially at some point. Hopefully before Starcraft 2 comes out :)
10.5.3 - Part 2
So I managed to solve the problem albeit by a roundabout route. What I had to do in the end in order to make it work was to first install 10.5.2 and then update that to 10.5.3, so it would seem that the combo updater for 10.5.3 is missing something?
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