Review: WD PassPort Hard Drive

Another present I received from my parents this holiday, was a new portable hard drive, the WD PassPort. I got the 500GB version, plenty of storage for all my music, movies and work. One of the main reasons I asked for this was that I have run out of space on my 500GB Seagate hard drive which is full of time machine backups, and so on.

After opening the PassPort which was in a stupid heat sealed packaging container, and I cut my self opening - I was impressed at the quality of the product. The design is nice and clean - with rounded corners, it really does make it complete. I received the USB 2.0 version without firewire - I wasn’t unhappy besides If I got a new MacBook, I wouldn’t be able to use it!

First powering it on, I was impressed with the noise. It’s more or less silent! It’s even quieter than my MacBook pro’s hard drive! The transfer speed isn’t bad either copied across a 100mb file in under 30 seconds. It’s USB 2.0, so it’s capable of roughly 480Mbps.

Overall, I’m impressed - apart from one thing. One day, I was sitting at my desk it was just sitting idle - All of a sudden it made a large beep and clicked. Graham Gilbert has said it’s the curse of the WD drives, but mine is still working fine… the data on the drive is backed up in another location just in case..

Overall 7/10.

Top 10 Blogs for 2008

Well, it’s been a busy year for the Internets, certainly has been for me. I’ve discovered many new helpful websites, along with many new friends. I’d thought I’d share with you a couple of blogs that I think are just pretty awesome. Informative, yet - have some awesome backed design. So here are my top blogs of 2008.

1)  Hipsterist.com

I discovered Hipsterist through a friend, it’s awesome website, based on topics, us men like to natter about.

2 ) Nonesuch.com - Journal

One of my favourite musical blogs.

3 ) WPCandy.com

I discovered WPCandy when Michael (who runs the site) followed me on twitter. It’s one of the best (if not THE best) WordPress information sites on the t’interweb.

4 ) WeAreNotFreeLancers.co.za

Awesome site with tutorials, and information run by FreeLancers.

5 ) OllieKav.com

OMFG, A brit? Musical? wtf!

6 ) Viget.com/extend

Blog from developers talking web dev, a good read if you can’t sleep at night. Well, it’s mostly helped me.

7 ) Warpspire.com

Web tips, and a design blog from Kyle Neath,

8 ) Macalicious.com

There are lots of Apple blogs, and information on apple on the t’internet. No website is designed and looks that good compared to this one. The content isn’t boring either!

9 ) 24ways.org

Grids are good, thats what’s this website is run off. Amazingly well constructed.

10 ) Spd.org

Where I last worked, sold a magazine. I constantly read this site for tips, and it really is helpful.

Review: Apple TimeCapsule

This Christmas I received a Apple TimeCapsule for Christmas. The perfect device for me, as I’m terrible at backing up! It’s shocking to know that I never ever normally back up, and to sit at my desk and wait for my laptop to backup via TimeMachine, is a process that I find tedious. My Seagate 500GB external drive is also full of backups and data, so I had no-where to backup too.

After opening the TimeCapsule, I was impressed at the simplicity of the product. Just the TimeCapsule, power cable and the information pack with cd, which contains the airport software. To me, they should of included at least a patch cable to connect your TimeCapsule to your existing modem/router/switch.

I’m connecting my TC to my existing modem/router/wifi/ - as Linksys WAG160N. The WAG160N is a terrible router, don’t buy it. It’s great over LAN but horrible with WiFi. So, yes, I’m connection via Ethernet my WAG160N to my TC’s WAN port.

I then created my own Wireless Network, for which my personal devices will connect to it. These include, my 360, PS3, MacBook Pro & iPhone. - I created a Wireless N network but backwards compatible with g/b for my 360, PS3 & iPhone as they do not have N adapters inside of them.

Once I’d finished setting up, I started the first backup which was 90GB. I started it over WiFi - bad idea. I left it going over night, 25GB completed. I decided to connect my MacBook Pro via LAN (1gb) and do the first backup. MUCH quicker, I cannot tell you, it was done in about 2 hours. Now, my MacBook connects quickly, and does little updates of about 45MB every hour or two.

Is it noisy? You can certainly here the harddrive reading/writing/accessing. It’s about as noisy as a external hardrive, just a bit noiser. It sounds very similar to my Seagate 2007 external hardrive.

Is it reliable? I haven’t restarted it since Chrismtas day. Once you’ve worked out the kinks and the got settings correct (which I have) - everything is ready, and you just leave it.

What about the expandability? Of course the TimeCapsule has a USB port to connect a external drive, I can see no reason why you cannot connect an extra drive, and set timemachine to backup to that drive.

What would I like to see? I would like to see Apple creating a system where I can store my iTunes library on it, where it would be able to download my music, and podcasts automatically. Like iTunes running on your PC, although it’s running in the background on your timecapsule.

Overall 8/10.

If you have any question, don’t be afaid to ask them.

Just a bit late.

I was a bit busy, so I didn’t have chance to wish you all a Merry Christmas (and your related festival in other religions) and a happy new year - so here I am apologising! I’m sure most of you had a merry one. I was lucky enough to recieve some awesome gifts! Including a TimeCapsule and a WD PassPort HD! Yes, I know Christmas is about family and not the presents, but sometimes, it’s about the gifts!

So, what did you guys get?

Tutorial: Shooting a Timelapse

I couple of days ago, I posted a timelapse that I took with my D80. At this current time, the D80 has no intervalometer settings - this means that it cannot pictures every so many seconds, fail? So, we need an alternative to take a timelapse.

How I do it:

I use Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 software to control my camera - it’s a hefty press tag for a simple tether application. Download the free trail, it’s for macs & pc’s! Camera Control is availible for not just only the D80, it works on most of the D range!  D3, D2Xs, D2X, D2Hs, D700, D300, D200, D100, D80, D70s, D70, D60, D50, D40X, D40!

I tell the application,  I want to do a timelapse, and set it to take a picture every 2 seconds until I stop it. [Example Screenshot]

Once you have finished taking your timelapse, we want to snap them together. I use quicktime pro, as it is the only application I know that does this;

 
It’ll ask for how many frames per second, I set mine to 6; but the choice is yours. I will generate your clip, now you need to save it. File>Save>Self Contained Movie. Now you are free to do what ever you want to with the movie. I add music to mine normally, some nice background music.

Timelapse(s) from James Bayliss on Vimeo.

Download files with SSH

Occasionally, my ISP (BT) does lack in connection speed. It’s not necessarily their fault, but one of the links or bridges connecting is slow. I was downloading some large mixes that a friend had done on his server, but I was only getting 40KB/s on a 200mb file, slow. I thought about it, and was wondering how I can use my dreamhost server to my advantage. I asked a couple of friends, and a mate, William told me about the SSH function, wget.

WGET tells the server to download a file of another server. As my dreamhost server sits in a huge data center with huge pipes hooked up to it I can hit speeds that I can only dream of. I know that I can hit high speeds when downloading files from my server, roughly 700KB/s - which is nearly topping out my home internet connection. Once I told the server what to download, i was hitting file transfer rates on 10MB/s on some (server to server).

So how do we go about downloading files then?

First we need to SSH into our server;

user@example.com  - then we enter our password once prompted.

once we are logged in - simply type

“wget [insertthefilelocation]”

After our files have been downloading, simply log into your server via ftp and downloading your files.

Updates: Blogo

A while back, I wrote a review on Blogo from BrainJuice software - They have recently released a new beta. The new version includes a cool bookmarklet which allows you easily insert YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows and other really neat online sites into your blog posts.

In Comparison - I think that Blogo beats pretty much all other blogging desktop software including the likes of Mars Edit.

Download a copy, test it out, and support independent mac developers.

Attempting a 365

So this week I have started a 365 - a simple project in which you take a photo everyday and post it to the internet. It can either be of yourself or the task that your doing that day.

I’m aiming to finish this project  - and I want to finish this project!

Visit my Flickr stream for Updates, Here

1Password Giveaway!

As a thank you gift to everyone who has subscribed, I’m giving away one license of 1Password from AgileWebSolutions (Normally $40). If you not subscribed, just take one second to subscribe and you’ll be set!

I have over 50 subscribers to my blog, and this is more than I ever imagined and I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone. All my friends including guys on Twitter - I would of never thought that I would get this many.

Rules!

1: There is only 1 winner and 1 winner only.

2: No cheating! No double entries.

It will start TODAY! Ending 25th December

How do I enter? ;

Just leave a comment! Anything, and you’ll be entered. If you have any suggestions, I’d like to hear them!

Thoughts: The Sixty One

This week I discovered a new music service through a friend, Michael Yurechko. It’s called TheSixyOne and It’s an online music streaming and discovery service. Kinda like Last.FM but you don’t scrobble music to them. You bump tracks and favourite them creating a radio station for other users to listen to.

They have some pretty large artists like Kanye West and Kate Perry while having lots of small indie artists and electronic people. The way the SixtyOne was setup is that you can browse the site and have your songs play in the little sidebar player. Last.FM sucks as doing this and you have to open another window, and then browse. I have it open on my littleside laptop playing through the day and it’s great! The music that I find is more suited to me than ever before, Last.FM think’s i’m into hardcore heavy metal - which I’m not, sorry.

Overall - the SixtyOne is a pretty amazing site, I defiantly recommend you check it out! When signing up, use the referral name as: bayliss and then we both get some love.