Macintosh

Drobo + Time Machine = WIN

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Yesterday I got a Drobo to use with Time Machine. I only got the USB 2.0 model, since I have it connected to my Airport Extreme 802.11n base station. I ordered it with 2x 1TB drives.

The Drobo is perfect for Time Machine backups, since they grow continuously. When you run out of space, you can simply add another drive to the Drobo to increase its storage capacity. Adding a drive to the Drobo is very easy – simply snap off the faceplate and insert a 3.5″ SATA drive into one of the empty drive bays until it ‘snaps’ into place. You don’t even have to shut down the Drobo. It will immediately recognize the new drive and start using it.

The Drobo has some advantages over traditional RAID devices, like my TeraStation. Most notably, it doesn’t need any setup when you add a new drive – it simply reconfigures itself and starts using the additional storage. The TeraStation also doesn’t support Time Machine without some ugly hacks that don’t work reliably. With all 4 drive bays filled with 250G drives, the TeraStation is a lot more difficult to expand.

Drobo

Aperture tip: track photos uploaded to Flickr

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I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.

Smart Settings: Uploaded to Flickr (Photowalk 2)
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.

Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.

Beach Access

Running a virtualized Mac

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VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is out and it lets you run Mac OS X Server (not client) in a virtual machine. It took some work, but I finally maaged to get it working.

Although I don’t have a Server license, Apple makes it available to Apple Developer Connection members, so I was able to download the disk image from the ADC member site.

If you try to install directly from the Leopard Server DVD image, you’ll find that VMWare doesn’t let you choose a .dmg file. To get around that, open the image in Disk Utility and convert to DVD/CDR Master. VMWare will then let you install from the resulting .cdr image.

If you try to use the default settings for the virtual machine, the installation will fail. VMWare has posted instructions for successfully installing Mac OS X Server. The important thing is to customize the VM settings, remove the IDE hard drive and add a 30GB SCSI hard drive.

When you start the installation, the installer won’t find any drives to install the operating system, so you’ll have to open Disk Utility in the VM and erase the virtual drive. Once you do that, the installation will proceed smoothly.

MacOSX Server in VMWare
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Spaces & Window Management

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I’ve noticed a strange problem on my MacBook Pro where the Finder wouldn’t bring its windows to the front when I click on it in the dock and ‘bring all to front’ didn’t work in any application. For a while I thought one of my login items or extensions was responsible for it. When I logged in as a different user, everything worked normally.

It turns out the problem is caused by turning off the option ‘When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows…’ option in the Spaces preferences. Once I turned it back on, everything started working normally.

Expose+Spaces.jpg

prMac simplified my workflow

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A lot of the news I post at MacMegasite comes from prMac. Until now I received the news articles via email and would clean up, reformat, and post the items manually. Recently the people at prMac released a Drupal module that automatically retrieves and post news. For the last few days I’ve been having it automatically post news, since I haven’t been available to post anything myself.

Widespread problem with NVIDIA GPUs

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The dead display problem I had with my MacBook Pro last month seems to be widespread. However it looks like it isn’t limited to Macs. According to Engadget, “significant quantities” of NVIDIA’s laptop GPUs have been failing at “higher than normal rates”. Laptop makers have apparently already been given an updated GPU driver which kicks in fans sooner to reduce “thermal stress” on the GPU (I notice that the fan on my MBP seems to run more often since the motherboard was replaced).

A waste of time

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It turns out that my work on Watermark was a complete waste of time. After I released it, everyone told me that Aperture has a built-in watermark feature (which I was completely unaware of), hidden in the export format window. If I had known, I wouldn’t have released it. I most likely won’t release any future updates since it landed with such a thud.

Watermark

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The Watermark plugin is fully working. I’m now working on the documentation and I hope to release it in a day or so.

Baby Bird

Here’s my first official copyright marked picture, which I took today. This baby bird is nesting outside my neighbor’s window.