Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Online storage using Webdav

Published on 23/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments Tags: , .

One of the main reasons I had contemplated .Mac was the iDisk, 10Gb of online storage. But, with my webhost, I get 500Gb of storage, which increases monthly, and I have the option of turning on Webdav.

What does all this mean? Well iDisk is basically a webdav folder on apple’s site with some preconfigured settings, directories, some nice integration into some of the apps, and isync support. If you can do without the isync support, thanks to the apple finder, you can mount a webdav folder on a web server as a network disk, and use it almost the same way you would your iDisk.

So I have an “iDisk” I can use almost exactly the same way, but it also supports ftp, sftp and rsync.

Continue reading ‘Online storage using Webdav’

Leopard Upgrade

Published on 23/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

Leopard looks great, and more than likely I will be making the upgrade. I am just posting this to whinge about the timing. I bought a macbook in mid september – if I had waited 2 weeks, I would be able to upgrade for $9. Don’t know if I am mad at me, apple or just a bit ticked at life. Ah well I will get over it soon enough, probably when I spend $129 on the upgrade.

I also just became a wiitard, so that takes the sting out of most things and is a great distraction from everything else I should be doing.

Dreamhost vs .Mac

Published on 21/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I was seriously contemplating .mac, it was actually the catalyst that made me register a domain and host this site with Dreamhost. DotMac is a pretty attractive offering, it’s integration is beautiful, but it is simply way overpriced.

And a side note, register for the trial, because you get to keep your .mac ID and using iChat will still work.

With .mac, for $139 AU I get 10 gig of storage, email, webhosting and other stuff I can’t remember right now and didn’t really interest me. With dreamhost for $99 US I get 500Gb of online storage, 200 emails, webhosting and my own domain name. And domain squatters are some of the most evil, simple minded, people you can find on the internet. It took me 4 weeks to think up this domain, and it wasn’t the best I could do, I thought up some freaking awesome town names that were all gone, not to proper sites, but to directory lists and squatters. !@##$ing squatters.

Dreamhost also have awesome technical support, and an excellent control panel with one-click installs. Seriously, I installed wordpress in less than 2 minutes. And dreamhost are not paying me to write all this. I am open to that, but I am pretty sure they are not.

So the integration between osx and .mac is pretty cool, but I can’t think of any other reason to fork over the money.

I even went thirds with a couple of mates on this host, (that’s why I don’t control the front page,) so for about 3 bucks a month I host here. And I have found workarounds to the integration issues that matter to me.

Until .mac is free, dreamhost whips the dotmacs pants.

Codecs for OSX

Published on 20/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: .

I know VLC plays all types of media on a mac just fine, but if you want to be able to work with the files using iLife you need quicktime codecs for the media you want to use.

You can look all over for individual codecs for each type of file you want to use, eg. XVid, DivX, etc. I just found Perian. It’s like the ninja monkey of mac codecs, or the “swiss army knife” if you go with the website, but I like ninja monkeys.

Seriously cool, one package which auto-updates for most codecs, though you will still need flip4mac for windows media stuff.

Moving from Blosxom

Published on 11/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

I have moved from blosxom to wordpress. I could do most of the same things with Blosxom, but it was a massive hack. Why wordpress? It was a one cick install from dreamhost, the the simple answer: laziness.

There was no direct import for blosxom so I needed to do an rss import, and I have unfortunately lost the comments previously posted. I also haven’t imported every post, some seemed fairly pointless in retrospect.

New host and a new flavour

Published on 11/10/2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

I have decided to move my blog to my newly registered domain at dreamhost. I am hoping to increase the frequency of my posting again, but the flavour of my entries will be different.I still find myself regularly using computers and having to solve technical problems which are worth documenting (or at least ranting about), the difference is the nature of those problems, and the time I have to solve them.I am now almost exclusively using macs, so most of the new content will be mac based. And as I have non-technical priorities in my current work environment I only spend small amounts of time solving technical issues, so posting may be a little less regular.I have already lost the readers I had with my hiatus, and perhaps no one will ever read the posts, but heck I might as well do something with this space.