Hurray! I just realised that my larger external hard drive enclosure takes a SATA drive, so I can use the existing 500Gb drive to replace the 250Gb drive in my iMac, then install a new 1.5Tb external drive for backup.

Why do I need more space? Simple - I just installed the entire Logic Studio set, and lost about 50Gb of hard drive space on the internal drive.
Hrmm. I should probably try to find a larger IDE hard drive for the other external drive. 300Gb just isn’t very much space anymore. That or a SATA-IDE adapter. Or… maybe put that 1.5Tb drive into the Time Capsule and use it for all the backups? No.. too dangerous to put all the backups on the one drive..

I just found out today that the $250 upgrade to Logic Studio that I was planning on buying no longer exists. I’d have to buy the entire set again for $650, with no discount for previously spending $1500 on Logic Pro 7.

Strangely, because I upgraded from Logic Express 7 to Logic Pro 7, I can get a $400 upgrade.

How does this make any sense? Why am I rewarded for spending less money? I must call Apple Australia about this and hassle them. I’m not above trying to save $150!

Don’t mention Firewire, Apple.

Horrific. Apple has been eating Microsoft’s lunch in the public mindspace for what seems like years now, with the ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ ads doing a lot to push the Apple brand back into the mainstream. They portrayed the PC as confused and out of touch.

So, Microsoft release a couple of aimless, confusing ads with Jerry Seinfeld and are met with a resounding chorus of ‘Huh?’ from the geek crowd.

And what do they do next? They scrap the campaign and pretend it was all part of some master plan.

Good work, Microsoft. Nice way to not come across as confused and out of touch!

Today I made my final payment on my Macbook Pro. Hurray for stuff!

Of course, I won’t be buying a thing until late October when LittleBigPlanet comes out, due to the expense of the Vibiemme. Well, I guess I can afford a tamper, right..?

…apparently I can!

I ordered a 500Gb Time Capsule on the weekend and installed it a couple of days ago. A Time Capsule is an Apple product that combines an 802.11n router and print server with a large hard drive suitable for network storage or (for Macs running Leopard) automatic backup.

The backup runs about as well as I’d expect over a wireless network considering that it’s not just copying files, it’s also doing comparisons (I see about 2-4Mb/second), and the 802.11n wireless speed is obviously a lot faster than the old 802.11g Airport Express that I was using (I’m running a 5Ghz n-only network with a 63-character WPA2 key).

The best thing about the upgrade, though, is that after reconfiguring my network so that my rubbish Netcomm ADSL router is running in bridge mode (meaning that the Time Capsule does my PPPoE login and does all the NAT for the network), the Back to my Mac feature that I was so looking forward to in Leopard started working!

There goes my productivity…

Seriously, Apple.

What.

The.

FUCK.

Tomorrow is the Macworld keynote, where The Steve tells us all what we’ll be buying this year.

I have a tradition. On this day I turn off my IM client, ignore my tweets and refuse to visit any Mac-related sites. Then, when I get home in the evening, I start watching the keynote speech and experience what the audience did that morning. It’s heaps of fun, and far less enjoyable if I already know what Apple has announced.

So… don’t spoil it for me.

If you want to join in on the Jobsian fun, visit this page to be emailed a spoiler-free link to the keynote once it’s up.

Make a mosaic, automatically. Use source images from Flickr, Google and a bunch of other sources.

And it’s free.

The annoyance of the weekend for me was Time Machine (OS X Leopard’s builtin backup solution) falling over on my MacBook Pro. I had it configured to back up over the wireless network to a drive that was connected to the iMac, and it had been working fine for about a month, but all of a sudden it started getting stuck with a ‘Preparing…’ message. Rebooting didn’t help, removing the old backup folder and recreating the prefs didn’t help. Annoyingly, it still works fine on Crumpet’s laptop and the iMac itself.

I spent too much time trying to get it to work, before switching it off and going back to my old solution, which was a simple rsync script to synchronise my user folder with the iMac’s drive. It doesn’t let me go back in time like Time Machine does, but it does work 100% of the time, and that’s what’s important to me.

That makes two Leopard features that are horribly buggy for me - Time Machine and Back to my Mac. Apple really need to start doing public betas of their operating systems instead of treating paying customers as beta testers. Roll on, 10.5.2.