~/the/cole/orton

wireless time machine backups without an apple time capsule

if you’ve got some macs around the house, an airport extreme, and an extra external hard drive laying around - you’ve got all the pieces to get wireless time machine backups setup - no time capsule needed.

here’s what you’ve got to do:

format the external hard drive by firing up disk utility - give your drive a name - and format it with the file system of your choice (i chose mac os extended / journaled - just because i only have mac’s around under my roof - as it should be!).  it’s easier to format the drive before you hook it up to the airport extreme because hard drives hooked up to the base station are inaccessible via disk utility.  by formatting the drive before you hook it up to airport extreme’ll save you from having to unplug or plug in the drive at least once. i learned this lesson the hard way. once you’ve got it formatted - go ahead and plug in your external hd to the usb port on you base station.

now, fire up the airport utility - and make sure you airport extreme base station’s firmware  is up to date. at the time of this post was 7.4.1. once your airport is up to date go ahead and open up the advanced mode - click ‘disks’ - and make sure you’re newly formatted is showing up on the ‘airport disks’ pane. just for the sake of this post - click the ‘file sharing’ tab within the airport disks configuration utility and make sure ‘enable file sharing’ and ‘share disks over WAN’ are checked. this’ll help when trying to find the ‘airport disk’ when we go to setup time machine on our mac(s).

alrighty, now that our airport disk is setup - head on over to your mac(s) that you want to setup your time machine backups.  you can try to add the disk attached to your airport now within time machine’s preferences - but it wont show up. don’t worry, here’s the trick:  first open up a new finder window.  you should see your airport’s base station name located in the ‘shared’ section within finder.  enter in your airport password if prompted.  with your airport extreme still highlighted in finder double-click any folder that showed up after you authenticated to access your airport.  now, hop back over to time machine’s preferences you should see your airport disk as a selectable hd.

viola - you should now be setup for wireless time machine backups - without a time capsule!

watchmen

so. i saw watchmen last night. i wanted to preface this review - noting that i’ve read the graphic novel 3 times now. if i could quote my tweet last night, which details my thoughts shortly after seeing the film.

alrighty - so why’d i say this? well i’ll say again - what i said in the above tweet - i never ever ever ever - after finishing up the book - thought, “man - that was bad.” at about 9:45pm last night, after catching the 6:30 showing, i said, “man - that was bad.”

what happened?!?

i think i’d fallen in love with the material, the anecdotes between chapters, piecing together the panels together in my head…the TRUE ending to the novel (don’t get me started on the ‘movie’ ending!)…

heya - for those who had read the novel before seeing the film - am i just off base? did you enjoy it? did seeing the ‘plot’ on film piece the novel together for you? the plot in the book was always somewhat hard to follow (hence why i’d read the novel 3 times…)

alrighty, enough of me whining, here’s what i did like about the film:

- the casting: WOW - malin akerman looked like laurie, jeffrey dean morgan looked like the comedian, give jackie earle haley a wig and he was a spot on walter kovacs. great job!

- the soundtrack: WOW (again) - dylan, simon & garfunkle, joplin…epic! hearing ‘all along the watchtower’ as nite owl and rorschach approach veidt’s antarctic lair gave me chills. although hearing leonard cohen’s ‘hallelujah’ as dan and laurie get it on was…weird.

the cinematography: WOW (again, again) - i can’t wait to watch the blu ray - and put up my absolute watchmen - and compare a panel to it’s ‘film’ form. these shots are almost SHOT FOR SHOT - exact copies of dave gibbon’s panels.

update: quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

twit.am

as many of you know - i’m a twitterholic.  when i tweet out this blog post - it’ll be my 2,327th tweet… i am also a rabid twit.tv listener as well - mainly listening to this week in tech and macbreak weekly.  now, although they sound the same - twitter and twit.tv - are completely different and not related at all.  this week in tech gets me through most monday mornings, however there have been times when i forgot to sync my iphone to itunes sunday night/monday morning before i head downtown.  that’s where the twit.am iphone application comes into play.

at it’s core - the twit.am iphone app - streams the website twit.am (which you can listen to in itunes) - to your iphone.  the app also give you a schedule of twit.tv programming.  the app was recently updated to include the mibbit chat.

the killer feature - is the new bookmarks tab - that gives you access to: twit.tv, techguylabs.com, leoville.com, the twit wiki, the twit army, and odtv.me. yup that’s right - you can get access to odtv.me streams - on your iphone now!

if you’re unfamiliar w/ odtv.me - it’s a site that was developed by a handful of volunteers in the twit army - that captures leo’s live streams from live.twit.tv.  which is leo’s ~24x7 live video network.

can’t get enough of leo? get him and his wonderful programming on your iphone with twit.am.

mint.com (warning: this site won’t help your stinky breath)

with everyone freaking about money, the stock market, and your savings these days - every little cent saved can go a long way.  mint.com is a free site that allows you to track your finances - with a pretty sexy interface.  hey, it got me excited to see where all my hard earned cash is going…

simply plug all of your accounts (checking, savings, investments, credit cards, loans, property, autos, etc…) into mint’s site - it will then analyze all of your transactions on the corresponding accounts - and give you at a glance views of your spending and savings habits.

i found out that you may need to tweak the initial catorization of you spending mint determines - changing what mint thought as a grocery purchase - when all actuality - that transaction was on a tank of gas.

mint also has some pretty slick budgeting tools.  a budget is somewhat of a new concept for me - but i wanted to start “setting” one in 2009 - and mint helped me achieve this goal.  long gone are the days determining your spending on pen and paper.  since mint analyzes all of your spending - it will group certain transactions, say your netflix monthly charges with any itunes purchases - into an “entertainment” group which you can then set a monthly budget on.  mint will then alert you if/when you start approaching your defined amounts.

you can also tell mint to remind you when certain bills are due.  giving you a couple days notice before that gas or credit card bill is due.  most accounts sites are probably already doing this for you, but if not, mint can remind you on those accounts that don’t have this feature.

mint will also compare your bank account and credit card rates/awards to hundreds of offers. they advertise that they “find [a] typical user thousands in savings.”  i have yet to try this - call me lazy/dumb/stupid - i just don’t want to open another checking or credit card account.

for all of you cool kids with iphone’s - mint also has an iphone app, here. the iphone app gives you an overview of your accounts, budget for the current month, cash flow, and alerts.

just a little caveat - from what i hear - mint.com doesn’t work for all checking accounts - mainly credit unions…sorry.

quit reading this - go try mint.com out for yourself! tell them i sent ya’.

new to twitter? things you must do…

i’ve been slowly seeing more and more of my friends on twitter lately.  i’ve been at the twitter game for quite some time now - for, oh, about a year now… here are some things i’ve learned from twitter that i would like to share with all the new twitter’ers.

make twitter whatever you want it to be.  you do NOT have to answer the question you want it to. that being “what are you doing?”. people who answer that question often tend to be the worst people to follow.

ah ha! i said follow. so - you ‘follow’ people on twitter. creepy, right? basically, when you ‘follow’ someone on twitter - all you’re doing is subscribing to their posts (or ‘tweets’) they make on twitter.

there are a number of ways to ‘tweet’ - via the web (at twitter.com), via your phone (tweetie on the iphone is my current fav), txt messages, adobe air apps (if you want to take twitter to the next level - install tweetdeck).

always use the built in reply buttons - which is the 180 degree arrow in most twitter applications/websites.  this keeps the conversation intact. and when i say conversation - i mean - when someone sends you a tweet, say a question, you can reply back to them with your answer.  using the built in reply buttons - keeps their question - and your answer intact.  making it easier to follow that conversation if at any time you want to go back to it.

re-tweet ’tweets’ you find interesting.  you’ll see this a lot via a “RT” or “via @username”. the preferred way amongst us ‘twitterholics’ is the “RT”.  twitter limits your posts to 140 characters - so the “RT” takes up less of the message.  a re-tweet always includes the original persons @username - as well as your @username.  the benefit here is - the original person will see your RT - and see where it came from.  when you re-tweet an original message - that person is more likely to follow you.  i’m hoping you’re goal by using twitter is to gain more followers - so more people will see your messages on twitter.

DM where appropriate.  a DM is a direct message - which is hidden from everyone other than the user you specify to receive your DM.  use DM’s when you want to hide your message from everyone else.

if your business/company is not on twitter - they’re missing out.  i’m no marketing guy - but i believe there a certain cost to attaining new ‘eyeballs’ to your content/advertisement.  i believe the term is CPM, or something… use twitter to send out promotional offers, special discounts, etc.  the ideas to promote your business are endless.

that’s it for now - i may post updates on this post when new ideas come to me.  update: better yet - for those who have been on twitter for awhile, and know i missed something, please add your suggestions below.

as always, feel free to leave a comment below.