Print to PDF in Windows 7
doPDF is simple, lightweight, installs in seconds and 100% compatible with Windows 7. It may not be feature-heavy, but it meets the need, and I like it.
If converting a document to PDF for archival or sharing is something you need to do, check out doPDF 7.0.
Hacking Time Machine
This past week I was the unfortunate victim of hard drive failure on my 1stgen Macbook Pro. After looking through my local NAS and finding that my most recent backup was done in April, I kicked myself a little bit. I have everything available to me to do regular backups, but like most people I am just too lazy. I decided that I wanted to try and get Time Machine to perform backups to a network share instead of a local drive. A simple terminal command was all that was needed to make my network volumes show up in Time Machine.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Just changing this preference has worked for many other people, but I get the a message from Time Machine stating "The backup disk image could not be created." Nothing on google or the apple support forums seems to give any good info on the situation.
Any ideas?
Handy RAID Calculator
Have trouble remembering which RAID does which? I sure do! I mean, really a numeric naming system doesn't suggest that much information about which type does what?
Fortunately, iBeast provides this handy RAID Calculator.
Redhat's online documentation provides a good refresher as well.
Changing Meta Types in iTunes Files
So I'm off on a road trip next week, and I've downloaded a number of "spoken word" MP3s to listen to while I drive (it's an 8 hour trip). The only problem is that now they're mixed into my iTunes library, and when I hit shuffle on my iPod, every 3rd or 4th song will be a chapter of a book. It would be useful if iTunes would let you identify any MP3 as an "Audiobook" but they'd rather you buy your books through them, so they don't expose that functionality directly. Here's instructions on how to re-type your MP3s as Audiobooks for iTunes...
Also, if you want to re-type video, or other MP4 files -- say to turn a downloaded video into a "TV Show" check out Lostify for Mac. It won't work with AVIs though.
Enabling WebDAV on OS X
I won't re-write the article, but this weekend I wanted to turn on WebDAV on my Mac mini, and this article pretty much covered it for me. The article talks about using iCal, but do the steps and see the FAQ for additional tips on regular file sharing.
The only note I'd add is that Digest authentication didn't work for me in OS X 10.4.10 -- I had to use Basic authentication.
FAT32 over 32GB on WindowsXP
In Windows XP (might have actually happened in 2000) Microsoft introduced an artificial limitation to FAT32, preventing you from formatting any volume over 32GB in that file system. It instead forces you to use NTFS. A few quick points on NTFS:
- While Microsoft has been unable to enforce any patents on FAT-based files systems because of plenty of prior art (and they have tried, and failed) they can require licensing payments, enforced with patents, for NTFS. Although FAT32 is technically capable of formatting and addressing a volume up to 2TB in size, Microsoft has convinced its customer base into believing that NTFS is required for large volumes.
- NTFS is readable on plenty of non-Windows platforms, but not writable. This means that when you format a USB hard drive to NTFS, and try to use it on a Mac or Linux, you'll be quite frustrated. If, however, you use a Mac to format the volume to FAT32, Windows will have no issues at all writing-to and reading-from the entire drive -- even beyond the 32GB "limit."
If you haven't got a Mac on hand to format your drives, you should check out this great little app called Fat32Format that runs from the Windows Command Prompt. There's no author listed in the article, but he did a fantastic job of solving this problem, and thus has my eternal gratitude.