Apple Mac Laptops

me.com or mobileme.com?

It looks like we may have a treat in store for our apple mac laptops! Macrumors.com reports that it “appears” that apple may have purchased the me.com and / or the mobileme.com domain names (there is apparently a technology trail). Rumor has it that the tired .mac service may be revamped alongside the anticipated iphone generation 2 launch.

I for one am looking forward to this. As a regular old user of an apple mac laptop, I took the free trial of the .mac service for a spin but was not duly impressed. Perhaps I should have been but for my novice purposes I really just didn’t get it.

If there is a revision to the .mac service I will definitely take another look!

Formatting Western Digital 1TB Drive for Mac

If you have a family it is likely that you have mini DV tapes or even 8mm (how old is that) tapes cluttering up every drawer in your home. After switching to a Mac, I vowed to conquer the tape clutter and get my memories orgaized.

The first step was to find a suitable external drive to hold all of that media. My requirements were simple:

  • large capacity hard drive
  • firewire 800 – this one was key, if I wanted to import directly from my camera onto the hard drive I needed to connect both the camera and the hard drive to my computer. My video camera uses a firewire 400 to connect. Because my Mac only has one firewire 400 port, I needed to make sure that my chosen external hard drive was capable of using firwire 800.

The choices were many, and I read through several reviews to come to my decision. Ultimately I chose the Western Digital My Book 1TB Premium Edition II Triple Interface (model WD10000C033-001). This external hard drive met my requirements. In addition it is a RAID drive – which means that there are two 500GB drives enclosed in one case. I have the choice of running the drive as RAID 0 in which case all of my data will be spread across both drives and I will get close to a 1TB capacity. However if one of the two drives fail then all of my data will be lost. Alternatively, I can choose RAID 1 and all my data will be stored to one of the drives and a copy of my data will be stored on the other drive. Thus, if one of the two drive fails then I will have a back up.

To be continued …..