Personal

RealNetworks Rinse application, rinses more than it should

My daughter asked me to clean up her iTunes library. There were lots of duplicate entries in it. So, I googled and found the rinse application by real networks. It claims to eliminate duplicates. Unfortunately, it needs a little work.

My daughter had duplicates of the same file in iTunes. Two entries, one song on the disk. It looks like Rinse doesn't check this. It sees two identical songs and then moves the single song on disk to a duplicates folder.

We had a problem because we share the iTunes folder on our iMac. So, my iTunes now had just 900 songs rather than 5000. Luckily, I went back to my daughters account and reimported the songs from her duplicates folder and everything went back the way it was but it's kind of a silly mistake for the rinse application.

Given all that happened, it's hard to recommend with such obvious flaws.

SeaGate GoFlex 1.5TB external drive review

I bought a Seagate GoFlex 1.5TB 2.5" external drive to backup my home iMac because of an impending house move. I also bought the fire wire 800 cable as it's a lot faster than USB. Once its initial use as a backup drive of my iMac has passed then I'm also looking at using it for a drive with my MacBook Air which has a thunderbolt port. The cost for me was 140 bucks for the drive and 20 for the fire wire cable.

I'm using Superduper to image my iMac hard disk, I'm getting 45MB/sec doing that which is respectable over fire wire 800.

Overall, I like this, I'm hoping I can at least reuse the cables with newer drives as they come out but we'll see. Standards in this space are usually too short lived to be really useful.

Swapped the Insignia RS-N2000 for a Yamaha RXV-564

Returned the insignia today because I couldn't program it with a universal remote control. I ended up buying a Yamaha RXV-564 which is a pretty big step up from the Insignia. It has video up conversion, 7.1 sound. The up conversion converts from SVideo to Component Video so HDMI is out when using that. I bought it as an open item at Best Buy, no remote control, for 275 bucks. No remote control is a big deal because you can't set it up without one. I ordered one just now from www.remote.com for 70 bucks so that's coming this week sometime.

Right now, I have my LCD TV attach to the monitor out component signals. The DVD is plugged in to it using component video and my Tivo is attached with s-video. Normal video from the Tivo won't upconvert. This is working well for now. I can control the volume and mute from the Tivo remote and I can switch video sources.

The up conversion from the Tivo is OK, I'd say, quality wise, there are artifacts, it isn't transparent but it's acceptable given the quality of Tivo output. Anything better wouldn't be acceptable.

I'll update some more when the remote arrives.

iPhone instability looks heap related

Well, it looks like a hard power down fixes it. I did this by holding down the home key and the power button. Since doing this, its working again.

Jungle disk for home backup

I use time machine at home and that works really well on the current level of Leopard. I use a 320GB usb drive and so far it's been a life saver. Works very very well and is painless. But, while it protects me from accidental data loss or a disk failure on my iMac, it doesn't protect against bigger problems like fire, theft etc. We have a lot of digital media with videos and photos and it's growing fast. I was using carbonite on my PC but I only use our PC for rFactor (a game) now. So I need an off site mac backup solution.
I'm using jungledisk. It's cheap 20 dollars plus a buck a month plus Amazon S3s storage fees. It's relatively fast but we only upload changes at around 600kb/sec or 80-90KB/sec. I'm currently watch it do an initial backup of around 120GB and thats going to take a while at that speed. I think it'll work well for home stuff given it's all happening in the background anyway.

WD Passport 250Gb drive review

I bought one of these today in Best Buy for 139 bucks plus tax. I needed more space immediately on the macbook pro just because of vmware images taking so much room. I have a big WD 320GB 3.5" USB external drive that I use with time machine for backups but it's too big to take on the road.

The unit itself is very small, looks very nice. It's a little bigger than an iPod classic, probably same size as an iPod touch. It uses USB for power so there is no power brick to haul around with it. It has a single USB cable and just plugs in to the MacBook Pro. I'm using a left side USB port. I'd read that people had trouble with these because of the power needed at boot but this is working fine for me on battery or on mains power. My MacBook pro is one of the newer ones (3,1 in the preferences) 2.4Ghz core 2 duo. The drive comes with one cable, it's a micro USB to USB cable and is short, about 6 inches long (a good thing, less to tangle up).

Speed wise, well, it is what it is. It works fine, I can run vmware images from it and it's fine for what I want. It's a 10ms, 5400rpm 2.5" drive inside so like I said, it is what it is and for me, thats adequate.

The model number of the drive is WD2500U017-005. Best Buy had another 250GB passport also but it was 209 for some reason and the look and packaging were different but I couldn't see any difference.

I reformatted it when I first plugged it in and switched the partition table to the apple one and formatted to HFS with journalling to avoid any issues. Overall, happy, it as cheap, 250gb is enough for portable storage and it is real easy to haul around when travelling with minimum fuss and cables.

Recommended.