With smaller files I completely agree that hard links (or equivalent[1]) make sense. If Time Machine is using something that's readable without their code, great.
I make use of file deltas with rdiff-backup however and without this feature I won't be using Time Machine. The biggest (by disk space) use for me is virtual machine images. I have a ~30 GiB Parallels image that's included in my nightly backup. With Time Machine I could exclude this and setup some Windows specific backup[2] but I quite like being able to just restore the full image should I need to. I've used it a few times and it's very easy to do a full VM restore this way. I don't particularly care about being able to do file level restores for my VM (it only exists for Office, Visual Studio, and browser testing).
[1] I assume that Time Machine will support backing up to non-local and non-HFS volumes that may not support hard links (i.e. CIFS mounts).
[2] I've had many issues getting rdiff-backup and even rsync running correctly under Cygwin (random freezes, fork failures, etc). I know I could play with Amanda, Bacula, etc but I'd rather stick to what I know at this point. Any suggestions and/or success stories would be welcome however.
The second guideline you should follow is to avoid putting small amounts of volatile data into otherwise large and static files. If you have data files that are updated frequently to change a small percentage of the data in that file, Time Machine will copy the entire file, taking up more space on the backup disk. If, instead, you can separate the volatile data into a smaller separate file, Time Machine will be able to back up changes to the smaller file and make more efficient use of backup disk space.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, unfortunately Time Machine doesn't do deltas on files.
I guess this saves me a bunch of time testing out Time Machine, I'm sticking with rdiff-backup. Sure, Time Machine has a pretty UI but this is a show stopper for me. I love the command line and I'm using rdiff-backup on my other machines (Debian Etch) anyway. The software is also open source so I know I can get to the data in the future should rdiff-backup not be maintained.
I have the same problem with a Jabra BT200 and my new Jawbone. The Jabra works well on my Nokia 6230 and the Jawbone works brilliantly. On my MacBook Pro however, both cause bad crackling and latency. Disabling Airport doesn't help.
Jawbone's FAQ says "Right now, we're not supporting PC or MAC Bluetooth compatibility due to the large variability in the performance of computer Bluetooth systems.". That doesn't sound good.
It's totally useless so I'm just using the built in mike with headphones. Vastly superior sound quality than both headsets and no lag. I'm really hoping that Leopard has some magic fix for this.
GTA02 will not have a camera. There are being some ideas thrown around about designing a replacement back cover that includes a camera however. Details are available on the mailing list.
Non-square pixels are actually quite common. In PAL land 16:9 SD is transmitted as 576i (720x576 or 702x576). I'm guessing your SD feeds are 720x480 and need to be scaled to 16:9 (say 854x480 or similiar). This is quite normal for PAL/NTSC compatible feeds. (Again in PAL) there are other aspect ratios that are used on lower bitrate channels such as 544x576 and 480x576.
If you are using something like VLC or mplayer (or even Media Player Classic on Windows), it shouldn't be too hard to get it to look right. Most feeds should have the MPEG aspect ratio flag set and it should Just Work. Otherwise you should be able to force the aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9) in your playback software.
M3U playlists certainly work on my Rockbox. I assumed M3U was a defacto standard way of storing playlists. At worst it becomes a Rockbox and anything else that supports plain old filesystem plus M3U sync util for iTunes:)
I was thinking of parsing the iTunes XML file for checked tracks within either the whole library or selected playlists. And then transfer any playlists which contain the selected tracks as M3U files. Some AppleScript may be required to get iTunes to refresh smart playlists and commit the changes to the XML file.
There used to be a tool called iRiverSync that copied the whole iTunes library and created M3U playlists but it took hours to sync my library (it always copied the whole lot) and now my iTunes library has grown above 40 GB so I cannot use it anyway. I just tried finding a URL but it seems to have disappeared.
iTunes integration is the only thing that may sway me from my iRiver H140 running Rockbox to an iPod despite the lack of codec support. I have stacks of Vorbis and FLAC tracks that I guess have to transcode to AAC+ and ALAC to be able to use them on an iPod. I would most likely have jumped ship ages ago (for the integration) if Apple had added Vorbis and FLAC support to their players.
Drag-n-drop isn't that bad I guess. I'd write a decent sync utility for file system based players (with host side Rockbox cache generation) if I could be bothered. But since I'm sitting here on Slashdot...:)
Ah yes, bug 345529. If my Firefox instance isn't quite new I get the crash whenever adding an exception. I have also had some randomish crashes as well which have completely disappeared since removing Flashblock.
Luckily for me, removing Flashblock and leaving Adblock Plus doesn't seem to have negatively affecting my browsing experience much at all. EasyList does a great job here at blocking both flash and non-flash adverts.
I'm no longer concerned about not having Flashblock. The only real reason I used it was to stop YouTube videos playing automatically and now I've discovered TubeStop. Any site with flash that annoys me (advert or otherwise, typically unrequested sound) gets their tab closed. Problem solved.
Re:A basic article about a 2-year-old OS is news?
on
Mac Systems Management
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, I don't understand... what is this "editor" you speak of?:)
I thought it was just another name for a drinking bird.
Unfortunately your connectivity does seem to be rather experimental as I cannot connect to ipv6.heemels.com.
jasonbookpro:~ jason$ traceroute6 ipv6.heemels.com traceroute6 to ipv6.heemels.com (2001:888:1b30::1) from 2001:388:c02a:1:219:e3ff:fed7:e464, 30 hops max, 12 byte packets 1 sentry 1.571 ms 0.932 ms 1.699 ms 2 sentry-aarnet 42.836 ms 43.22 ms 41.514 ms 3 ge-1-0-0.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au 41.986 ms 42.099 ms 45.768 ms 4 pao-a-bb1.aarnet.net.au 200.842 ms 202.249 ms 203.557 ms 5 p4-2-0-0.r05.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 201.913 ms 203.523 ms 201.023 ms 6 p16-1-1-0.r21.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 201.945 ms 201.588 ms 200.984 ms 7 ae-1.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 201.901 ms 203.475 ms 201.769 ms 8 as-1.r20.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 272.098 ms 277.524 ms 272.914 ms 9 p64-2-1-0.r23.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net 375.862 ms 376.096 ms 370.521 ms 10 ams-ix.sara.xs4all.net 386.863 ms 365.602 ms 365.914 ms 11 0.so-6-0-0.xr1.3d12.xs4all.net 376.683 ms 371.566 ms 376.006 ms 12 ipv6tb.xs4all.nl 376.006 ms 370.688 ms 375.054 ms 13 * * * 14 *^C
It reproduces here in IE 6 and IE 7 (two different Parallels VMs) and works fine in Firefox 2.0.0.4. In Firefox hovering over the buttons and thumb triggers the hover effect for that scrollbar element. In both IEs there's nothing until you mouse down.
Good thing I don't use IE (except for testing what valid XHTML/CSS isn't working today) often otherwise this would really annoy me. FYI I'm using Watercolor 4.3's Ergonomic theme as I can't stand Luna.
I've found Cygwin and PuTTYcyg configured with Consolas 11pt gives a quite usable CLI on Windows. My favourite terminal emulator is definitely Terminal.app though.
MythWeb is also my preferred method of managing my schedules and browsing around the guide.
I have a button bound for Watch Recordings but I rarely use it. I spend a vast majority of my time in Watch Recordings (Live TV is for suckers:)) and the rest in Watch Videos. Both of these make good use of the cursor keys so I find it easier just to use them.
In any case, we both seem to be in agreement that MythTV is rather neat:)
Re:If you're worried about artificial limitations.
on
Best Non-Subscription DVR?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm sorry but I've got to ask the question: How many years since the last time you used MythTV? I find MythTV very easy to use[1].
It's slow and clunky
I run a shared backend and frontend on my Athlon 2000 server which has 3 tuners. When I have 3 recordings active it takes a couple of seconds to start playing a video but other than that..
uses an odd format
My DVB-T recordings come out as bog standard MPEG-2 files. If you're using analog tuners, there are tools available to transcode the Nupple format. mythtranscode even comes with MythTV and has a GUI frontend called MythArchive that can even burn video DVDs.
and has a god-awful interface
I'm running the MePo Theme on my frontend and I love it.
It's so ridiculously focused on TV that you have to go up 5 levels of menus, then down 5 more, to look through the other videos you have available.
This is a gross exaggeration. See the screenshots linked to above. "Media Library" contains "Watch Recordings" which is for TV recordings (third screenshot) and the next item down is "Watch Videos" which lists all my XviD, VIDEO_TS, etc files as they are laid out on disk from my file server (which happens to be the same box).
And to get back to the TV programs? Yep, just as many steps.
Press the back button twice (once to leave Videos, again to return to Main Menu). Or if you have spare keys on your remote, you can bind buttons to jump straight to whatever screen you want.
[1] Yes it is harder to setup than some other solutions and there's far more configuration options that can be a bit confusing (hint: defaults are generally fine).
If you can get your tuners working (I'll assume DVB tuners) in Xine or similiar or even just scanning correctly (tzap, scan), it's an apt-get and 10 minutes of configuring your channels and playing with some preferences to suit your taste. There's many howtos out there on how to do all this.
</rant>
Edit: I forgot the obligatory "I know I'm going to be modded down for this":)
... it drives home the importance of keeping good anti-spyware and anti-virus software updated...
Anti-malware software can only do so much. The real solution is to educate users so they are not vulnerable to social engineering attacks such as "OMG SMILIES FOR YOUR EMAIL", "I need to verify your username and password" and various other ways users are conned into having their boxes rooted and/or their passwords exposed.
Of course locking down corporate workstations is a very good idea. No admin access and a splash of group policies here and there does wonders at keeping the users away from things they can shoot their feet with.
I have tap to click disabled as I always seem to do accidental clicks and drags with it enabled. By placing two fingers on the pad which clicking down the button I can do a right drag. There's no need to keep both (or any) fingers on the pad while holding down the button to keep the right drag active.
I rarely need to do right drags but I have done it in the past and I didn't even think twice about how it should work. I have just tested it with tap to click enabled (argh, turned off now) and the same procedure still works.
Adding multiple buttons to the trackpad would be a major negative for me. Whenever I use a non-Apple notebook I find myself right clicking accidentally. I have to make a conscious effort to locate the correct button to click. With a single button, it does not matter where my hand land when I move to the trackpad.
Slashdot Mirror
Crap. I forgot to preview and/or set "Plain old text" :(
With smaller files I completely agree that hard links (or equivalent[1]) make sense. If Time Machine is using something that's readable without their code, great. I make use of file deltas with rdiff-backup however and without this feature I won't be using Time Machine. The biggest (by disk space) use for me is virtual machine images. I have a ~30 GiB Parallels image that's included in my nightly backup. With Time Machine I could exclude this and setup some Windows specific backup[2] but I quite like being able to just restore the full image should I need to. I've used it a few times and it's very easy to do a full VM restore this way. I don't particularly care about being able to do file level restores for my VM (it only exists for Office, Visual Studio, and browser testing). [1] I assume that Time Machine will support backing up to non-local and non-HFS volumes that may not support hard links (i.e. CIFS mounts). [2] I've had many issues getting rdiff-backup and even rsync running correctly under Cygwin (random freezes, fork failures, etc). I know I could play with Amanda, Bacula, etc but I'd rather stick to what I know at this point. Any suggestions and/or success stories would be welcome however.
I guess this saves me a bunch of time testing out Time Machine, I'm sticking with rdiff-backup. Sure, Time Machine has a pretty UI but this is a show stopper for me. I love the command line and I'm using rdiff-backup on my other machines (Debian Etch) anyway. The software is also open source so I know I can get to the data in the future should rdiff-backup not be maintained.
It's not lupus.
I have the same problem with a Jabra BT200 and my new Jawbone. The Jabra works well on my Nokia 6230 and the Jawbone works brilliantly. On my MacBook Pro however, both cause bad crackling and latency. Disabling Airport doesn't help.
Jawbone's FAQ says "Right now, we're not supporting PC or MAC Bluetooth compatibility due to the large variability in the performance of computer Bluetooth systems.". That doesn't sound good.
It's totally useless so I'm just using the built in mike with headphones. Vastly superior sound quality than both headsets and no lag. I'm really hoping that Leopard has some magic fix for this.
Private keys readable by the www-data user? CGI scripts not checking for "../"?
I wonder what other unlocked doors they have. I hope they are doing a complete audit of their webservers and anything those servers can access.
GTA02 will not have a camera. There are being some ideas thrown around about designing a replacement back cover that includes a camera however. Details are available on the mailing list.
"This behaviour is by design."
Non-square pixels are actually quite common. In PAL land 16:9 SD is transmitted as 576i (720x576 or 702x576). I'm guessing your SD feeds are 720x480 and need to be scaled to 16:9 (say 854x480 or similiar). This is quite normal for PAL/NTSC compatible feeds. (Again in PAL) there are other aspect ratios that are used on lower bitrate channels such as 544x576 and 480x576.
If you are using something like VLC or mplayer (or even Media Player Classic on Windows), it shouldn't be too hard to get it to look right. Most feeds should have the MPEG aspect ratio flag set and it should Just Work. Otherwise you should be able to force the aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9) in your playback software.
M3U playlists certainly work on my Rockbox. I assumed M3U was a defacto standard way of storing playlists. At worst it becomes a Rockbox and anything else that supports plain old filesystem plus M3U sync util for iTunes :)
I was thinking of parsing the iTunes XML file for checked tracks within either the whole library or selected playlists. And then transfer any playlists which contain the selected tracks as M3U files. Some AppleScript may be required to get iTunes to refresh smart playlists and commit the changes to the XML file.
There used to be a tool called iRiverSync that copied the whole iTunes library and created M3U playlists but it took hours to sync my library (it always copied the whole lot) and now my iTunes library has grown above 40 GB so I cannot use it anyway. I just tried finding a URL but it seems to have disappeared.
iTunes integration is the only thing that may sway me from my iRiver H140 running Rockbox to an iPod despite the lack of codec support. I have stacks of Vorbis and FLAC tracks that I guess have to transcode to AAC+ and ALAC to be able to use them on an iPod. I would most likely have jumped ship ages ago (for the integration) if Apple had added Vorbis and FLAC support to their players.
:)
Drag-n-drop isn't that bad I guess. I'd write a decent sync utility for file system based players (with host side Rockbox cache generation) if I could be bothered. But since I'm sitting here on Slashdot...
Ah yes, bug 345529. If my Firefox instance isn't quite new I get the crash whenever adding an exception. I have also had some randomish crashes as well which have completely disappeared since removing Flashblock.
Luckily for me, removing Flashblock and leaving Adblock Plus doesn't seem to have negatively affecting my browsing experience much at all. EasyList does a great job here at blocking both flash and non-flash adverts.
I'm no longer concerned about not having Flashblock. The only real reason I used it was to stop YouTube videos playing automatically and now I've discovered TubeStop. Any site with flash that annoys me (advert or otherwise, typically unrequested sound) gets their tab closed. Problem solved.
Hah. Reminds me of William Shatner's "You'll Have Time".
It reproduces here in IE 6 and IE 7 (two different Parallels VMs) and works fine in Firefox 2.0.0.4. In Firefox hovering over the buttons and thumb triggers the hover effect for that scrollbar element. In both IEs there's nothing until you mouse down.
Good thing I don't use IE (except for testing what valid XHTML/CSS isn't working today) often otherwise this would really annoy me. FYI I'm using Watercolor 4.3's Ergonomic theme as I can't stand Luna.
Nice pun.
I've found Cygwin and PuTTYcyg configured with Consolas 11pt gives a quite usable CLI on Windows. My favourite terminal emulator is definitely Terminal.app though.
Good stuff. I was thinking the same when I read that title.
To those who are missing the joke, see Onyxia Wipe Animation (if you know someone who plays WoW, you may have seen it).
MythWeb is also my preferred method of managing my schedules and browsing around the guide.
:)) and the rest in Watch Videos. Both of these make good use of the cursor keys so I find it easier just to use them.
:)
I have a button bound for Watch Recordings but I rarely use it. I spend a vast majority of my time in Watch Recordings (Live TV is for suckers
In any case, we both seem to be in agreement that MythTV is rather neat
I'm sorry but I've got to ask the question: How many years since the last time you used MythTV? I find MythTV very easy to use[1].
I run a shared backend and frontend on my Athlon 2000 server which has 3 tuners. When I have 3 recordings active it takes a couple of seconds to start playing a video but other than that..
My DVB-T recordings come out as bog standard MPEG-2 files. If you're using analog tuners, there are tools available to transcode the Nupple format. mythtranscode even comes with MythTV and has a GUI frontend called MythArchive that can even burn video DVDs.
I'm running the MePo Theme on my frontend and I love it.
This is a gross exaggeration. See the screenshots linked to above. "Media Library" contains "Watch Recordings" which is for TV recordings (third screenshot) and the next item down is "Watch Videos" which lists all my XviD, VIDEO_TS, etc files as they are laid out on disk from my file server (which happens to be the same box).
Press the back button twice (once to leave Videos, again to return to Main Menu). Or if you have spare keys on your remote, you can bind buttons to jump straight to whatever screen you want.
[1] Yes it is harder to setup than some other solutions and there's far more configuration options that can be a bit confusing (hint: defaults are generally fine).
If you can get your tuners working (I'll assume DVB tuners) in Xine or similiar or even just scanning correctly (tzap, scan), it's an apt-get and 10 minutes of configuring your channels and playing with some preferences to suit your taste. There's many howtos out there on how to do all this.
</rant>
Edit: I forgot the obligatory "I know I'm going to be modded down for this"Anti-malware software can only do so much. The real solution is to educate users so they are not vulnerable to social engineering attacks such as "OMG SMILIES FOR YOUR EMAIL", "I need to verify your username and password" and various other ways users are conned into having their boxes rooted and/or their passwords exposed.
Of course locking down corporate workstations is a very good idea. No admin access and a splash of group policies here and there does wonders at keeping the users away from things they can shoot their feet with.
I have tap to click disabled as I always seem to do accidental clicks and drags with it enabled. By placing two fingers on the pad which clicking down the button I can do a right drag. There's no need to keep both (or any) fingers on the pad while holding down the button to keep the right drag active.
I rarely need to do right drags but I have done it in the past and I didn't even think twice about how it should work. I have just tested it with tap to click enabled (argh, turned off now) and the same procedure still works.
Adding multiple buttons to the trackpad would be a major negative for me. Whenever I use a non-Apple notebook I find myself right clicking accidentally. I have to make a conscious effort to locate the correct button to click. With a single button, it does not matter where my hand land when I move to the trackpad.
Two finger click and (vertical) scrolling works great here in Parallels.
It was definitely an activation issue due to the virtual hardware differences. The same download worked fine on a Windows machine with Virtual PC.