A quick update:

School has started and is going well. Today was Monday #2. I have been biking to campus, and I’m really falling in love with it. It’s a great workout. Classes are exciting. I’m looking forward to Graphic Communication, which I have tomorrow.

The WUOG Podcasting page which I have been working on for the summer launched this past weekend. It was a fairly big job. Podcast Generator made it a lot easier. Also, I made a screencast of the new system: It’s on YouTube.

A little bit of narcissism and this green search engine (write-up later?) led me to find someone that found my Time Machine article useful. That’s genuinely rewarding.

It looks like things are slowing down. Or that could be the dreariness and the rain. Regardless, I will continue blogging soon.

-Jason

I installed Linux today. More specificly, Ubuntu linux. Linux as a whole is the combined effort of thousands of programers making an operating system. It is completly free (as in money) and free as in anyone can write their own version of Linux.

It’s fairly similar to Windows, but there are some definite differences. Overall I like it, but it will take some getting use to.

There was a bit of a snafu trying to get it installed. I almost lost all of my pictures, but after about 5 hours of restoring, they were back. It was a close call.

I’m getting settled into Athens for another semester. I’ll be riding a bike to school this year. It should be out of the shop by tomorrow.

I wrote this post before the one about Time Machine but it didn’t get posted. Anyway, here it is.

Moving into the new Apparent is plugging along. Hopefully I’ll be done tomorrow. Once I have things arranged physically, I can begin organizing digitally. I got a 750Gb hard drive for my birthday; already having a 250Gb drive will push me to 1Tb. This would be enough room for roughly 30 thousand albums. The actual setup will be a bit more complicated. Here’s what I want the organization to achieve.

• Complete backup of my Macbook
• Installation of Windows with plenty of free space for programs
• Installation of Linux with a starter amount of space for programs
• A media partition that directly represents what gets put on my iPod
• Seperate document partition for easy backup
• Seperate page file partition for better performance
• Extra space dedicated to future possibilities including recording television shows

I’ll post the final breakdown once it’s finished.

Busy Bee!
Jason

I wrestled with this all day long. Hopefully this post will help people in my position.

Setup: I have a Windows Desktop and a Mac Laptop. There is plenty of space on the desktop so I do not own an external hard drive. I want to backup my laptop wirelessly using Time machine to a remote drive on my XP machine.

What I thought: I would need to have a separate partition formated HFS+ to use Time Machine. Most of the day was spent finding out that HFS+ and NTFS (Window’s File System) can not exist on the same drive. Don’t ask me why.

Why I thought this: Previously, when attempting to backup to a network drive, Time Machine gave me “The Backup Disk Image could not be mounted.” I automatically assumed Time Machine could not write to Windows.

Why I was wrong: Time Machine creates a “.Sparcebundle” and saves files there. Apparently this can be saved on NTFS. The problem I had was creating this Sparce bundle in the first place.

My Solution: Thanks to this site I was able to solve the issue. Here’s what I did.

1. Select the location for the remote backup. I chose the partition I created TimeMachine (T:).
2. If you have not enabled “Unsupported Network Volumes,” follow this tutorial.
3. Mount your network drive and select it in Time Machine.
4. Start Time Machine (Menu button > Backup Now) and watch your remote location.
5. A file is created with the structure ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle. Copy this file name.
6. On your Mac, open Disk Utility. Click “New Image.” Use the following settings:
7. Save As ComputerName_MACAddress
8. Volume name can be whatever you want.
   ***EDIT: Custom volume size must be the last value set***
9. Change partition to “No Partition Map”
10. Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
11. Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac.
12. Save. Move this file to your remote location.
13. Tell Time Machine to backup again and it should be working.

Good luck! If you found this article helpful, visit my sponsors.

Hopefully the rest of my computer upgrade won’t warrant a blog post!

Long overdue edit: Thanks to everyone who has commented! It’s so great this article is being found and is helpful. If you’re trying to get this to work, there are some very helpful comments. In particular, Chris points out these three points:

1. The MAC address has to be the ETHERNET adapter’s MAC Address and “not” the Airport’s MAC address.
2. The final file you copy will be in this format: ComputerName_MACAddress.sparcebundle
3. .sparcebundle is added to the file name by the Disk Utility, not you and does not need to be removed.”

Also, my desktop computer has been busted for over a year now. I’ve been running for luck not backing up my macbook and using it as my one and only computer. Sorry I didn’t do my job in keeping up with this post.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Jason

ps: If you found this helpful, please visit a sponsor.

I’m out of my old appartment and couldn’t be happier. My birthday was yesterday, which was nice. I was happy to get a lot of happy birthdays. I have a vistor in town, so I’m showing her around Athens.

School starts on the 18th, so I hope to have time to work on this site before the start of the new semester. There have been a lot of bumps. I might be moving in the right direction now.

-Jason

Moving is terrible. Especially when it’s super hot outside. We got the entire downstairs cleaned out today. A couch, recliner, a couple of tables, and a large tv. We’ve vacumed and cleaned most of the floor as well.

I’ve hardly even touched getting the stuff out of my room. I think I’m going to disassemble some things that won’t fit in the room and simply store them under my bed or in a closet.

There’s a post about the New Facebook coming up in the next day or so. It’s written, I just want to get it right before it gets posted.

-Jason

And I don’t like that very much.

In the next couple of days I’ll be working on using a different color scheme and different graphics. I’m going to try and soften up the edges of the content areas as well.

I got a lot done at WUOG today. I’m pretty happy with how Podcast Generator integrated into the existing design.

I’ll be going to a friend’s wedding tomorrow. They’re a great pair and I wish them luck.

-Jason

If you’re looking for a little distraction, you might want to check out the Titled Background Designer. While it’s not brimming with images, the colors, scaling, transparency, and rotate options open it up quite a bit.

Also, the New Facebook design is viewable if you click that link. Doing so will change your profile to the New view. It’s a HUGE change in terms of information organization. It takes quite a bit of getting used to, but it has come definite advantages.

End Transmission.
Jason

I have been working on a few things recently. Mostly maintenance and what not. I’m working on updating my passwords. I’m trying to consolidate. You’ll also notice that I’ve been blogging more often. A lot of things going and the laze of summer has made it hard to keep it going, but I’m trying to get back into the swing.

Also, I not only have a room but also a roommate for next year. This is a step in the right direction. This Wednesday I’ll be in Athens and will begin boxing up my old apartment and moving into the new. There will also be work on WUOG Podcasting and some other odds and ends.

For the site, I’ve been working hard to get it standards compliant (it’s not perfect, but better) and transition to the new blog. I have to run a test, but I will be pulling the trigger on that soon. Afterwords, the search page is next on the chopping block. There are going to be multiple themes created for this site, and I’m going to employ a”;chooser” so the viewer can pick the one they like the best. Hopefully this isn’t too far down the road.

-Jason

My birthday is fast approaching and for it I ordered a new hard drive for my computer. $120 buys you 750gb. Once installed and removing the hard drive it replaces, I’ll have a terabyte of storage. This is enough capacity to hold the entire sequence of DNA for 1,250 people. Although, mine will mostly be filled with music, high resolution photos, and videos.

This also represents a 220% increase in overall capacity. It seems unthinkable that I will ever need so much space, however, that’s what I said when I bought my last hard drive.

Getting a new hard drive gives you the opportunity to reevaluate your computing needs. I am currently using Windows XP on my computer, and have become increasingly dissatisfied with it. While I do not think I will abandon it completely, I will certainly install Ubuntu Linux and start making the transition. It could be a beast to get to the confidence level I have with Windows and Mac OS X, but I think it’s a smart long term decision.

To test it out, because I am mostly impatient, I installed it on my Mac using Virtual BoxI like it so far, but my mac can’t handle running two operating systems at once.

Also in the works is an updated blog. Serendipity has served me well, but after using Wordpress, I realize it is a much more robust platform for my blog. The problem is importing the information from the my current blog to the new Wordpress blog. It looks like I’m going to lose all the comments left. Not that there were a ton, it’s still sad. Also, it will be hard keeping this blog running while moving Wordpress to the same address. I’ll try my best, though. The next couple days will be spent on this transition. The first step is to get the new blog to look like the rest of the site.

I guess that’s it for tonight.

-Jason