I was feeling rather smug as I finally managed (bothered) to set up wireless hard disk sharing on my imac and MacBook Pro and it was very simple. The aim was to plug my external hard drive into the Airport Extreme base station and use that for backups and for general access. The background is that Airport (wifi) was set up on the iMac in my bedroom before I got a laptop and I was originally trying to share the broadband connection between the iMac and an older G3 iMac in my sons bedroom. I never got that working though and let things lie for a while until I finally bought a laptop.
After much changing of settings over a period of time, it was bugging me for weeks, I finally managed to enable wifi internet sharing and that was a huge relief. I had expected the Airport set up to be a breeze but it wasn’t as I had to make small changes to individual, tucked away settings, prior to it finally working, changes that a novice like me would have never been able to work out without a bit of lucky checkbox ticking.
Setting up was simple. I basically followedthese instructions…….you have to scroll down a bit to find them on the page. This has made the attached hard drive accessible on my laptop. I spent ages trying to work out how to access it until I realised that it shows up as the base station name in any finder window and not as the hard disk’s name…doh. This has several potential benefits. Firstly, I can in theory (but not in reality – see later) try out Time Machine for backups, secondly I can access everything on the hard drive without having to plug it in and thirdly, I can use other backup solutions and set scheduling if Time Machine turns out to be awkward.
So, having set up the whole thing I eagerly headed over to Time Machine preferences and things appeared to be in order, the app recognised the disk to be used and started the backup procedure only to stall almost immediately…….an error message telling me that the disk could not be mounted despite it being recognised. Time to start again and redo the whole thing but no joy again, same error message. I searched around on various forums…’shorten the disk name’ being a frequent answer so I did but it was still not working. An hour later, having tried various other possible solutions, I just gave up. It’s disappointing but not disasterous as I can put plan B into operation and give Super Duper a run out for backups. There is a free version which does the basic stuff whilst the paid-for one adds scheduling and incremental backups, which appeals.
Later on that night came the big experiment. A full HD clone via SuperDuper over wifi to the shared disk. Kick off was 8.25pm and by bedtime, 11.45pm, it had only done about 20% of the clone backup. My goodness, it is painfully slow. So slow in fact that I decided to abandon the idea completely. The next day I bought a 500gb external Iomega drive (which comes pre-formatted for mac), disconnected the other drive from Airport and reverted to basics. The good thing about the Iomega drive is that it is huge and that it supports Firewire for faster data transfers. It’s also plugged into the MacBook Pro which makes backups a hell of a lot less time consuming. Next step was to repeat the HD Clone exercise. Started at 4.45pm and was finished by 6.05pm which is a tad more acceptable. All future incremental backups should be much quicker. Crikey, wish I’d never bothered in the first place, sometimes all that wireless stuff sounds good on paper but in actuality, can be a pain.
I have 1Password installed at home on my laptop Mac and it is excellent. The iPhone sync facility enables me to keep both apps in tune and works flawlessly. I reviewed both a few months ago and gave both glowing reviews. However, the 1Password applications for Palm is, and how can I put this, ah shit, there’s no other way but to say it straight…it’s pants in comparison. Whereas the desktop and iPhone versions are smooth revving Porsche 911′s, the Palm version is a wheezing, spluttering 1.1 Micra that hasn’t been serviced for 10 years.
Oh dear. Our recent good run came to a crashing halt as we lost at bottom of the table Hamilton, our second defeat of the season to them. They must wish they could play us every week.
MacJournal
With the forthcoming Palm January event I have been trying to rack my brain thinking of something fairly revolutionary that Palm could (and would need) to come up with to get everyone’s juices flowing with anticipation. I think most people would speculate that the next gen palm devices will be of a biiger screen design and that the much loved qwerty front facing keyboard is going to disappear. There’s not enough room for a treo like keypad on an iPhone or HTC HD like device without making it huge. If Palm are aiming at the media-centric market then a bigger screen is becoming a pre-requisite too.
