Apple Time Capsule

As mention in my Happy Mac Day post I was awaiting delivery of the Apple Time Capsule ,and as assumed it did arrive today.

I have to say, Apple once again made setting up and installing this device an absolute pleasure !

Below are the unboxing pics

..and finally a picture of it inplace

Now in true Apple style, the setup was flawless, I put it on the shelf, I plugged it in, and that was it ! The iMacs and MacBook Pro all popped up with a prompt saying Time Capsule detected, do you want to set up Time Machine ?

Click yes, input the password and your away.

Did this on all the Macs in the house. The initial backup took a little while, however after that there is a silent hourly backup which you don’t even notice, and it’s good to know my data is now safe !

As you can see from the last image, I’m a little paranoid about my data, on the left I have the 2TB Acer Aspire Easystore, in the middle I have the 500GB Western Digital My Book World, and obviously on the right is the Time Capsule.

I tend to store the majority of my data on the EasyStore as this is set up with Raid 5, giving 1.5Tb of storage and losing only 500Gb to the parity recovery. I did use the MyBookWorld, however upgrading the firmware broke it, and had to spend the best part of a week recovering the data.

So with all this backup, why have I got the time capsule you may ask ?, well let me tell you.

I have a tendency of keeping an extremely clean desktop. If possible I will have nothing on it, however will use it as a temporary file store for the work I’m currently doing. Once I’ve done I tend to just delete everything, and then empty the recycle bin. Unfortunately on more than 1 occasion I’ve needed one of the files I’ve deleted.

Another reason is because C doesn’t tend to use the EasyStore as much as I, and tend to keep everything on her desktop on her iMac and MacBookPro, which means if the worst case happened, she would lose everything !

All in all, I’m very happy with this addition to my network, and can highly recommend getting one if you have a Mac

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Broken my iPod Touch again

Well another week goes by, and I break something else. This week it’s my iPod Touch again.

Over the past couple of days, it’s just been hanging and I’ve had to manually restart it a number of time, however tonight it finally broke…big time !

While syncing my podcasts this evening, it flash on and off a few time, and then all I got was the Apple logo…and this is how it stayed for about half an hour…oops.

So, as I’ve locked up my iPod before, I knew that if it locks up, all I need to do it hold the power and the home button down for about 10 seconds, and this will kill it….I did…and it did !

I fired it back up again, and again, for another 3o mins or so it stayed on the apple logo ! Doh !

Finally I decided, “Recovery mode it is…”, fired it up, kept my finger on the home button, plugged in the cable and waited….and waited, and waited. Previously when I’ve put it in recovery mode, it pops up with the “plug into iTunes please” logo within a matter of seconds, but no, a minute later, still the apple logo !…I was just about to give up on it, and book myself in at the apple store, then the happy “please plug me into iTunes popped up ! Phew !

Plugged into iTunes, and it recognized I’d plugged in my iPod in recovery mode and wanted to wipe it…which was fine as I’d only synced about an hour before.

It got half way through the process, only for me to be met with a Error 1604 !, After doing a little reading it seemed something to do with the downloaded version of the OS..

Anyway, me being me, ignored everything I’d just read on how to fix it, and gave it another try…this time it worked !!!

I had to leave my iPod for nearly an hour to sync everything back up, copy across my apps and music, but we are now all back up and running.

One thing I have noticed with version 3 of the OS, it now remembers where all your icons were when it restores a backup ! Finally !…there’s was nothing worse than restoring a backup, only to spend the next couple of days moving your icons back to the places you like them.

Tags: 1604, Apple, apple logo, apple store, apps, backup, big time, button, couple, couple of days, downloaded version, evening, everything, half an hour, home, home button, hour, ipod, ipod touch, itunes, logo, mode, music, number, plug, podcasts, recover, Recovery, recovery mode, running one, something, sync, time, tonight, touch, version, week

PS3 Hard Drive Upgrade

Around Christmas time I bought a Sony PS3, with a 40Gb hard drive, feeling this would be more that sufficient. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself having to delete demo, audio and video file, just so I can install games.

Last weekend I bought Ghostbusters (blog coming soon), but was unable to play the game as it insisted on installing content to the hard drive before I could play, so time for an upgrade.

I browsed the web and found a pretty cheap “Western Digital 500GB 2.5″ Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB Cache – OEM Scorpio Blue” hard drive, which turned up yesterday and last night I went about the upgrade, I have to say this had to be one of the easiest upgrades I’ve ever done.

Basically, there is a small plastic plate on the bottom, you remove this, your then met by a crosshead screw, remove this, pull up the small metal handle and the drive slides to the right…remove the drive. The drive is held in by 4 screws remove these, replace the drive, and reverse the above steps.

I then fired up the PS3, and was met by the prompt of “New Hard drive, would you like to format”, selected yes, and 30 seconds later I was met by my normal PS3 dashboard, checked the system setting, and I had 465Gb free ! Success !

I was happy that all the system settings were still intact, and all that was missing was any game data.

I then spent the rest of last night re-installing all my games, as everyone seemed to have an update it wanted to download, or had the option to install to hard drive (which I think is a brilliant idea, and glad they’ve finally copied the 360 way), and set downloading all my DLC (DownLoadable Content). With all games that could be installed, all the DLC downloaded, and all games updated I still have over 400Gb free !

I do however have a slight annoyance, I know I could have done a full system backup, and restore, but instead decided to just backup my save game and do a fresh install (far to many years working in the computer industry), however there were a number of games that wouldn’t allow me to copy my save games till memory stick. Street Fighter 4, KillZone 2, NFS Carbon wouldn’t allow me to back up the save games, Street Fighter I can understand as I person could unlock all characters, and then hand around the save game to every man and it’s dog. NFS Carbon, I wasn’t too bothered about this, as I was only 2 races into the game, but the one that really annoyed me was KillZone 2, as I was about halfway through this extremely hard game…..oh well rough with the smooth I guess.

Tags: 40gb hard drive, 8mb cache, annoyance, audio, backup, brilliant idea, Carbon, Christmas, christmas time, computer industry, content, couple, dashboard, demo, DLC, downloadable content, drive, fighter, free success, game, game data, ghostbusters, hard, KillZone, new hard drive, NFS, night, PS3, scorpio, screws, sony, sony ps3, street, system, system backup, system settings, time, upgrade, video file, western digital