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I was looking through the ringtones on iTunes today when something struck me as odd. A 30 second ringtone sampled from a current chart tune will cost me 99p. The whole tune will cost only 79p. How come?
If you have a mac then I’d suggest buying the whole tune and trimming it down to size using Garageband. There are instructions on how to do this in this very blog. Use the search feature to find the post.

Well I finally took the plunge.  I’ve retired the 1tb Western Digital My Book back up drive and replaced it with a shiny new 2tb Apple Time Capsule.

First impressions are good,  it’s simple to use and so much faster than the old drive.  After plugging it in and running through the simple set up process both macs prompted me to use it as a back up location for Apples Time Machine utility.  This means both the Mac mini and MacBook are running back ups every hour.  I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know all my data is safe (assuming the house doesn’t burn down).

A tip for anyone using a Time Capsule for the first time.  For the first back up hard wire the computer to be backed up to the Time Capsule using an ethernet cable, it’s far quicker than using the wireless connection.  450gb backed up in under 24 hours which is pretty good in my eyes.

Another huge advantage to using this device is the dual wireless mode.  I can run both G and N standards at the same time unlike my BT Home Hub which slows to the speed of the slowest device connected.  Sounds trivial but trust me, it’s great.

In my recent blog post I described my frustration at losing nearly 600gb of drive space on my 1tb Western Digital My Book World.  After speaking with Western Digital for over an hour it turns out this drive isn’t compatable with the Mac operating system.  Strange, I’ve been backing up 2 Mac computers to this network drive for a few months now.  However, when you want to delete files is when the compatabilty becomes a problem.

The Mac operating system creates an invisible folder called “.Trashes” where it moves all files you want to delete.  Think of it as the Trash can on a Mac or the Recyle Bin in Windows.  Because this drive is network based I can’t see any invisible folders meaing I have all my deleted files hidden away rather than removed.  I belive this is where my missing 600gb of disk space has gone.

Lucky for me I know a man who can use voodoo magic to sort this problem.  Thanks J.

This morning I took my iPhone 3GS off its charger at around 06:30.  Listened to this weeks “Trance around the World” podcast on the train for about 40 minutes whilst surfing the net for 20 minutes.  I then took 2 phone calls on my walk to the office totalling about 20 minutes.  On my arrival the iPhones battery meter showed 85% energy remaining.  That’s not bad I guess, it was used quite heavily.

A third phone call came in about 09:30, a short call of around 5 minutes.  This last call must have charged the built in power plant as the meter is now showing 94% energy remaining.

Wow!  I don’t think my mains charger could juice her up that quick.

I’ve recently been playing with region codes on my MacBook’s DVD drive, mainly to “watch” region 1 DVD’s.  Imagine my horror when I tried to change back to my native region 2 and was confronted with Error 70001.  What the f!!k does that mean I thought?  Am I trapped in region 1 world?  I hope not!

It turns out that it’s a simple thing to fix.  I was trying to change the region code back using a disk that supported 2 codes, region 2 and 5 I believe.  Even though I instructed my MacBook to switch to region 2 it didn’t like the disk, giving me the Error 70001 message.

All you need to do to get around this is to find a region 2 only disk and use that to switch region codes.  I’m now safely back in region 2 world.  The end.

I own a Western Digital MyBook World external hard drive and up until recently I’ve been impressed with it.  OK, it’s a little slow but it’s a good work horse and running via my router means any computer on my home wifi can access it.  It’s primary use is a back up drive, backing up both my Mac Mini and MacBook.  Recently, it’s been trying my patience.

Last week I wanted to erase all data from the drive and redo my back ups from scratch to cut down on multiple incremental back up files.  Seemed like a pretty straight forward task until I noticed after erasing all files it showed only 45% free.  Being a Mac user I know that the Trash Can needs emptying after such an event but even after that it still shows 45% available, that’s over 500gb missing.

If I reformat the drive that should fix it.  Do you think I can discover how to format a Western Digital MyBook World?  Hell no, their own website, forums and various other sites don’t mention a way of formatting this drive.  I hope I can figure this out because over 500gb missing is making me sad.

Any one know of a quick fix?

Now the wife has an iPhone she’s found a new lust for music and videos.  This coupled with the fact I’m ripping my entire DVD collection to my Mac Mini means digital storage space is becoming scarce.  I’m using a rather small Western Digital Passport drive at the moment with a storage capacity of 320gb.  The reason I opted for this was my music, movie and photo collection could easily be taken on the road with me and accessed using my MacBook.

I could buy a larger capacity 500gb version but something tells me that will be gone very quick.  I could buy an Apple Time Capsule for backing data up and use my existing back up drive, a 1tb Western Digital drive as my primary media drive.  Trouble is, the Apple Time capsule is mighty expensive.  Instead I think I’ll buy another 1tb Western Digital drive.

You just can’t have too much digital storage these days.