christopherhord

Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

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My new 1 TB drive can has future, please?

In Society, Technology on March 7, 2011 at 9:15 pm

It still sits in its box — I’m that blase about it. The finest storage technology 2007 had to offer — my one terabyte drive. Target had a special — I could get the Seagate ST310005EXA101-RK (Just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?) for $60 bucks. It’s a clearance. I got my 1TB drive because it’s a little old hat now.

I admit it. I’m old. My earliest computers didn’t have a hard drive. You were limited to about 400 Kb on a floppy disk. It went to 800 Kb and we damn near lost our minds over that.

Seagate ST310005EXA101-RK hard drive

Welcome to the party, pal!

So, a terabyte is, on some fundamental level, fantastic and futuristic to me. To be able to get it for $60 at a Target clearance sale is, indeed, an indication we live in wondrous times.

More seriously, the new drive is meant to allow me to comfortably just set Time Machine up to do its thing. I run a backup every night, but I don’t even want to think about the process of backing up my desktop to an external drive anymore for a long time. Time Machine can handle that.

It’s also a test of sorts. The Seagate ST310005EXA101-RK honsetly doesn’t have stellar reviews. Some people complain about noise. Some people have had it die on them very quickly. I read questions about the quality of the electronic components. Still, with storage, it’s OK to fail upwards — it’s still probably the best drive I’ve ever had, and it has a one-year warranty.

So, expect an occasional updates on how this drive holds up. I had a bad experience on a low-end Western Digital. We’ll see how the Seagate compares.

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The Informant: Free or cheap clipboard managers to improve your productivity

In Hardware, Technology, The Informant on February 15, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Huggy Bear, Informant

When you think informer, you think Huggy Bear, now don't you?

If, like me, you do a lot of typing to produce content or code on your computer, then the clipboard is your friend. We all know how useful it can be to take a phrase that you’re going to be using often (especially long, difficult-to-spell phrases) and just drop it into your document or form with ease. But your clipboard can help you a lot more than that and you can probably add useful features for free!

The main thing you’ll probably want in this type of program is some sort of copy history. The great limitation of the standard clipboards on Mac and Windows is the ability to hold only one item. If your clipboard could remember, oh, say, the last ten items you copied, it would be easy to store several chunks of text that you’ll be using over and over. Plus, no copying over an important piece of data by accident. Several programs can also handle images and other data as well. Many offer additional features that make them even more useful. Here are some ways to get started.

On my Mac, my clipboard manager is ClipMenu. This free program adds a memory for up to ten copied objects and can be accessed by a simple icon on my menu bar. It also has the ability to store several chunks of text that you use frequently as “Snippets.” You can group these by topics and give them convenient titles so you can remember them. I’ve only been using it about two weeks but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, with no conflicts with other system resources. Some other popular free programs include Jumpcut and Clyppan. Also, no mention of clipboard managers on the Mac would be complete without mentioning CopyPaste — this grandaddy of Mac cliupboard managers will set you back $30, but it boasts a wide array of features that may benefit power users.

I haven’t explored the clipboard manager offerings for Windows but, during my research, I did encounter an article at organization and productivity website LifeHacker that listed several free Windows options — CLCL, ArsClip and Ditto. ClipMate is pay software, at $34.95, but offers a much larger set of features.

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Western Digital MyBook hard drive, we hardly knew ye

In Hardware, Mac, Technology on February 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm

Disenfranchised in my most recent studio upgrade, it sits forlorn at the end of my table, not connected to anything — a Western Digital MyBook Premium 750 GB external hard drive. It was meant to be a key piece in my new setup — a nice, big drive to hold my Time Machine backups. Instead, it is less than a paperweight. Right now, it’s a brick.

Western Digital is a pretty respected name in the business and the MyBook got more than adequate reviews when it was new. The thing probably came out in about 2007, about the time I got mine. It is moderately small, about the size of a trade paperback book, and stylishly designed.

WD MyBook Premium

WD MyBook Premium

But its first, immediately-obvious problem is that the drive was slow — even for that day and age. Now, four years later, it’s positively pokey. Second was that the included EMC Retrospect Express Backup software was atrocious. Instead of me being able to run nice, consistent, overnight, versioned backups, I too often got processes that froze and crashed my machine, corrupting backup data. I tried other solutions, which were better, but still didn’t provide robust, affordable, reliable backup within my budget (i.e. incredibly cheap or free). Finally, with my new Mac Mini and Apple’s built-in Time Machine, I thought the time had finally come to put this brawny mother into the game.

No go. The Mac Mini could only recognize the drive intermittently. I couldn’t consistently read or write large files to it or format it. It obviously couldn’t be used for backup. I checked a variety of forums to find out why this might be. There were no shortage of people complaining about similar issues — there were just few effective answers. I tried a bunch of software-related fixes but nothing helped. I saw a lot of folks complaining about cheap hardware used in the hard drive enclosure. Many people just yanked the drive itself into a new enclosure and had success with that. Hardware is not my core competency, so that’s a stunt I’ll try some other time.

Western Digital has discontinued the drive so what little support still being done for the model is sporadic and desultory. In several forums, users who wrote Western Digital quoted e-mail responses indicating that WD didn’t much care, if at all. Apple was no more helpful. The only people deeply motivated to solve this issue were us poor schlubs who were affected.

Anyway, the brick sits there, unusable. All in all, it was never particularly useful, given the cost. And I, as a customer, feel ill-used. There are other prominent manufacturers out there like Seagate and LaCie. I’ll try one of them next time.

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Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.

In General, Mac, Social Networking, Technology on January 31, 2011 at 8:39 pm

One of my major goals this year is to streamline my production workflow on my computer. Another is to better unite some facets of my online identity. It looks like my blog is going to be a part of that. I’m just testing a WordPress.com feature to flag my Twitter account when I blog a new post. If you see it, why not post something to say hello at the blog or follow me on Twitter?

I’ve recently added a new desktop Mac to the studio so it should be a fun time, catching up with new technology and otherwise having fun with toys. There will definitely be some reviews.