Daily Archives:November 9th, 2008

A sense of freedom…

No, this is nothing to do with politics. It only needs much smaller things to make me happy… like the fact that I have a new hard disk in my laptop.

When I bought my MacBook Pro – two or three years ago, now, just after they first came out – I thought that a 100G drive equalled lots of space. Since then, I have gradually moved my video-editing stuff onto external drives, then my music, then my photos, and then quite a few of the larger applications.

But, despite regular cleanups, I kept finding myself running out of space. It’s never really a good idea to run a filesystem with less than about 5-10% free, and I was regularly hovering around the 1% mark. So this week I called up the local Apple dealer, handed over a couple of hundred quid, and I now have 320GB to play with!

That doesn’t give me enough space to put everything back on the internal drive, but it’s a lot better than it was, and I can stop worrying about data corruption as my applications run out of swap space!

Aaaaah.

A tip, though – I has the OS installed on the new drive and used Apple’s excellent Migration Assistant to copy stuff from the old drive to the new system – this brings across your user accounts and data, applications, network settings etc – all very smoothly.

However, it’s really intended for those setting up a new machine and copying their data from an old one. As such, it doesn’t assume that you have a licence on the new machine for any Apple pro apps – Final Cut, Aperture, Logic Pro etc. It copies the apps, but not the licences. So if you use this system to migrate to a new drive, remember that you’ll need those serial numbers handy afterwards!

Toy of the day

A quadrotor, or quadrocopter, seems to be the cool new thing at the moment for remote-control enthusiasts.

They look a bit like this:

They seem to be very stable, so are a popular camera platform:

I must find an affordable one of these somewhere! And they’re wonderful things if you want to fake a UFO sighting:

Lots more videos out there if you search YouTube – or have a look here.

You can make one yourself, of course, if you have the time, or you can buy them from someone like Draganfly if you have the money. Me, I don’t have either 🙁

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser