The Day Today

Since I bought my Macbook primarily for my media, I’ve been thinking about how I want to backup and archive my iTunes library. I’ve come up with a solution that works right for me, and once I’m moved and have set up a network in the new flat I’ll be able to make the finishing touches. This solution gives me a backup locally and remotely in a few simple steps.

First, I have bought a 320GB Western Digital Passport. I have set up an rsync that effectively mirrors my main iTunes library onto the external drive, which covers a “local” backup. I have also set up a seperate iTunes library on the drive, called ‘iTunes Archive’. To this I move the TV shows purchased through iTunes that I’ve watched, which means I can remove them from my main library and frees up space on my Mac.

For remote backup, I have an account with Mozy. Unfortunately Mozy don’t currently offer archiving so once something is removed from my Mac (or PC) it’s also removed from my Mozy backup. To solve this I will set up an rsync from my Mac to my PC that mirrors my iTunes library except the TV Shows and Movies folders, which will be a straight copy (no mirroring). This will mean that the PC will effectively have an archive of all of these items. This archive will then be uploaded to Mozy on the next run. Perfect!

The only concerns I can think of are:

• If I make purchases on my PC rather than my Mac (not likely but possible of course)
• until I have the rsync set up with the PC I have to make sure I have my ‘iTunes Archive’ on my Mac as well as the external drive (not a problem as I’m not too low on space yet).

I’m hoping that Apple announce improvements to iTunes at the upcoming WWDC in June, such as better management of TV Shows and Movies and perhaps a proper iTunes Server solution. By the way I am loving my Macbook Pro, and also really pleased with the WD Passport and can’t recommend either of them enough!

(photo credit - jonbro)

I can get angry. Angry at a major lack of innovation in the computer industry. Sure, we have our terabyte hard drives, 100″ screens, and quad core CPUs, but still our operating systems and hardware fail to respond to simple commands in a timely manner. I’m talking about stopping and ejecting when the computer is confused.

It’s happened to everyone. You’ve put a scratched up CD in the drive, and the CD drive decides to whir the disc around at high speed to figure out what’s up. All fine so far. Then you press eject and… more times than not, the drive will keep spinning the CD, freeze up the computer, and generally make your life a misery. Eject should mean.. spin down and eject that disc now.

Even worse is when the disc starts out okay, you begin to copy a file across from it, but then it hits trouble. Rather than being able to press the stop or cancel button and get an immediate resolution, it’s more common to have it freeze up your operating system (or at least the shell aspect of it, on the Mac Finder will freeze but other apps run okay) but still not actually “stop”.

What’s up with all of this? Make stuff happen when we tell it to happen.

I recently purchased a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive, and decided to try running Linux on it. I’ve not succeeded yet, as Linux always seems to come up with challenges for me, but the guides over at PenDriveLinux are a great place to start. It’d be even better if they explained each step as I’d find it easier to learn rather than just follow instructions. I think the issue I’ve currently got is with hardware compatibility, but I’ll keep trying and let you know how I get on.

I’m trying to keep up with any rumours regarding new Macbook Pros, and closely follow any announcements that Apple may make around the release of their next operating system. According to this article on MacRumours, there may be some upgrades to the Pro laptops around January 2008 - they’re looking likely to have shiny new Penryn processors. This would be perfect timing for me, as I intend to buy my Macbook Pro in or around January.

Within the next six months I will be buying a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m just waiting for the new Leopard operating system, and some money to come through in order to pay for it… In anticipation I’ve already been on the Apple store site and been through the various configuration options. One thing I have been pondering is whether the memory upgrade (from 2GB to 4GB) is worthwhile. I intend to mainly use the laptop for movie playback, photo post-processing, movie making, and Parallels so is this extra memory going to make a difference?

For a start, the extra memory is around £450 (or $700 from the US store) which is very overpriced. The alternative however means having two 1GB SO-DIMMS that become useless to me once I replace them with my own 2GB ones. Based on the results of this memory comparison I am encouraged to upgrade above 2GB, however the cost puts me off, especially when reading how simple and how much cheaper it is to perform the upgrade myself.

Any thoughts readers? In the meantime I’ll hope that Apple announce another MacBook Pro hardware upgrade between now and the day I order it!

My parents are planning on moving up to Scotland soon, and I’ve already agreed to set them up with PCs (possibly a Mac!) and a network once they’re settled into their new mansion house and what I get out of it is a remote server permanently connected to the ‘net for various uses such as an additional remote backup location, online storage, a proxy server, web server, ftp server, etc. I’ve not decided exactly what software to use on this machine, but it’ll probably be a Linux box (if you have any recommendations please post a comment!)

Anyway, I found this article on Lifehacker (great website!) listing 10 uses for a remote server. For those not wanting to click through, I’ve repeated the list below but without the explanations. I recommend clicking through!

1. Back up your data
2. Host a personal Wiki (blog or photo gallery)
3.  Back up your Gmail (or any POP3 email)
4. Synchronise your bookmarks (and documents)
5. Mount a remote drive locally
6. Run a version control system
7. Build an Internet jukebox
8. Set up a virtual private network
9. Remote control BitTorrent transfers
10. Securely proxy your web browsing traffic

Admittedly I hadn’t thought of backing up Gmail or mounting a local drive, and I’d probably do both. It’s all food for thought…

If a cracker has physical access to your router then they can probably reset it to default factory settings (this is often just a case of holding down a button for a few seconds). Alternatively you may not have changed the default settings, the most important of which is the administrator password. If this is a wifi router that isn’t secured then someone within the radius of the wifi can be issued a network address, and access the router configuration and from here can take control of your network. This website has a comprehensive list of default usernames and passwords for routers, which shows how easy it is to get hold of these details. I have checked, and sure enough my router is in there and they’ve got the defaults correct. My advice is to always change these settings to something you will remember, and be aware of anybody with physical access to your router.

Recently one of my hard drives has been failing on me. It’s currently set up as part of a RAID1 array so I’m not concerned over losing data - I also backup remotely so even if both drives failed I wouldn’t be too concerned. It has, however, got me thinking about storage, and what I might replace the drives with.

Initially the thought was to just spend whatever I had originally on the drives (about £90 for two 160GB SATA drives) two years ago on new drives. It seems I can basically double the capacity this way, and get two 320GB drives for this price (in fact, slightly less).

Although that’s an ideal solution I then started to think about replacing my primary hard drive (80GB) with the remaining reliable 160GB drive and considered the complications in doing this. Before long I was looking at building a new PC and then even considering a dedicated Linux box with software RAID5.

Of course this is overkill, and would cost more in time and money than I can really afford. I would, however, learn through constructing such a box but perhaps this can wait until I’m fortunate enough to have my own house and perhaps even my own study for such projects.

If you’re looking for details on setting up a Linux box with software RAID5 then this post on Metafilter is a good place to start. If you want to build a cheap PC then Komplett seems affordable.