Apple Time Capsule

Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 18, 2010 in Apple

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

Tags: absolute pleasure, acer, Apple, Apple Time, aspire, backup, Below, capsule, delivery, desktop, device, digital, easystore, everything, firmware, Happy, imac, imacs, inplace, mac, Mac Day, macbook, macbookpro, machine, macs, mention, mybookworld, parity, picture, pleasure, post, pro, raid 5, setup, shelf, storage, style, time, time capsule, time machine, today, Western, western digital, worst case

Happy Mac Day !

Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 17, 2010 in Apple

Well after much consideration, I finally took to plunge and bought a 27″ iMac.

I’ve been running Mac OSX on my PC now for a good few months, and I’ve also got a MacBook Pro. A couple of things were holding me back, first of all gaming ability. As you are probably more than aware, I game….alot ! and the majority of games come out on the PC. Now I know you can run Parallels desktop, and similar wine based software to allow you to run up Windows games on the mac, but there seems to be only a handful of games that run 100%.

Currently I have the option to boot up my Windows 7 drive in my PC and all is good. I was aware of bootcamp too, however until last week I’d not put this to use.

As mentioned, last week, I was going on a VB.net training course and had to put Windows on my Mac, in case I needed to run through anything on a evening….installed windows XP, installed the Bootcamp drivers, and everything ran very smooth

Another announcement 2 weeks ago which helped sway my decision was the announcement of Steam coming to the Mac in April, and they would also be bringing with them the Valve games. They’ve also said that if you already own any of the Steam games, eg Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, there is no need to repurchase them !

So the decision was made at the weekend and I bought and iMac 27″. I decided to go with the Quad Core i5 version as I don’t plan on replacing this for a couple of years. When I say I bought 1, I actually mean that I ordered 2, and C wanted one too, as our current machines are around 2 1/2 years old.

I decided as we will have 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pros, it was only sensible to get a Time Capsule too. We do currently use our 2Tb Acer Aspire EasyStore for the majority of our storage, but through it would be advantageous to have the Time Capsule for the “what if” factor.

As you can guess by the title of this post, today everything has turned up !

Below are the images of the unboxing of both the iMacs and the the Time Capsule apparently turns up tomorrow.

The huge brown boxes

Unboxed from said brown boxes

Unboxed

The Keyboard

Keyboard and Mouse

Again, the keyboard and mouse

This is how slim the magic mouse is

and this size of the keyboard

Size of the screen, compared to my 15.4″ MacBook Pro

The spec from the box

Finally in place

C with the original PC in place

Both in position

and finally to give you an idea of the screen resolution, below is a google search ! Look at all the white !

Finally, how is it ?

Let me tell you, it’s huge, it’s fast, it’s deadly quiet, and it’s Apple !…..so yup it works really well. The mouse and keyboard are taking a little getting used to, apart from that, I’m loving it !

Tags: 27", acer, alot, announcement, Apple, aspire, based software, bootcamp, capsule, consideration, core, couple, decision, desktop, easystore, everything, game, half life, handful, i5, imac, imacs, images, keyboard, mac, Mac OSX, macbook, macbook pro, majority, mouse, Parallel, parallels, PC. Now, place, plunge, pro, quad, screen, Size, steam, storage, team fortress, time, time capsule, Unboxed, unboxing, valve, week, windows, windows games, windows xp, wine

M-Audio Fast Track Pro

Posted by Ub3rG33k on Apr 18, 2009 in Tech

Over the post 6 months or so, I’ve become heavly involved with recording audio for a number of projects we work on, over at Fictionshed. If you listen back to the earlier podcasts (Fictioncasts), you’ll here me say, that you don’t need any specialised equiptment to record your voice, and a standard PC, with cheap mic will do…..the rest of this post will be me eating my words.

Due to getting a not the quality I wanted from the cheap headphone/mic combination, Tony kindly lent me a mixer and a couple of mics. This did improve the quality, however gave me some hard background noise.

In January, and with the ScutterCast in mind, I decided to splash out and get myself a MacBook Pro, as this was the only way I could find to do an enhanced podcast. The sound quality with the MacBook was a massive improvement, however the internal mic gave me a “roomy” type sound to my voice, which has been ok, however I needed something a little more direct.

After weeks of looking at the Samson C01U, the SL300 USB Studio Microphone and even the Samson G-Track, however Tony suggested I get the same as him, which was the M-Audio Fast Track Pro, as I already had the mic

Well Friday it finally turned up, and due to spending my Friday evening editing together the latest ScutterCast, I’ve only had chance to get to play with it today.

All I can say, is this thing is MINT ! It’s exactly the sound I’ve been wanting, it’s crisp, it’s clean, and NO background noise !

I now feel I’m set up to record the machinima project, this will also mean a lot less editing on the ScutterCasts, as I usually spend an age increasing the volume on my voice.

My setup is now as follows

MacBook Pro
M-Audio Fast Track Pro
AKG D650S Microphone
Stand & Pop Shield