Technical Happenings

iLife 09, IPhoto Review

I have had iLife 09 for 5 days.  I’ve been using IPhoto and the new features are well integrated and the faces technology is very impressive.  I started testing by uploading to  flickr, facebook and the mobileme gallery, all worked first time and the process was (as you would expect) very simple.   I had downloaded the 3rd party add-ons to Aperture, which do the same processes, but these were just not as slick.  I then wanted to test faces, but needed to leave my computer on overnight to process my pictures (12,000).  You then just select a picture and name a person.  Even without any learning the faces algorithm does a great job, but its real power comes when you train it a little; it displays a selection of faces, that it thinks match and you just click to say correct or incorrect.  Once i had it trained it displays 100’s of photos it thinks the face is in and on the whole it is correct.  Its a great way to see your pictures, but, also makes you feel a bit old when you pictures go back years.  I’m sure an aging timeline could be easily integrated.

How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk

The following has been copied form an article that can be found at ‘How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk‘

1. Turn off Time Machine with the big switch in the Time Machine System Preferences panel.
2. Eject the old Time Machine disk, unplug it, and re-insert it to force it to re-mount as a regular drive.
3. Use Disk Utility to wipe the new drive completely.  Give it a single partition ( Apple recommends using GUID partition maps to avoid Time Machine trouble!) and a new empty filesystem.  Time Machine requires the filesystem to be of the type, “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.
4. Give the new drive a unique name so you can keep them straight when you’re copying.
5. Plug both drives into your Mac.  You should see both in the Disk Utility sidebar.
6. Select the “Restore” tab in Disk Utility. This built-in OS X application can create a perfect block copy of your Time Machine drive, no third-party tools required.
7. Drag your old drive from the sidebar to the “Source” box.
8. Drag your new drive from the sidebar to the “Destination” box.
9. Click “Restore” and observe the warning – this will copy all data from your old Time Machine volume to the new drive, destroying its contents!
10. Wait a long while a
11. Once it’s done, unplug the old drive and turn Time Machine back on.  Make sure that it located the data on the new drive by clicking the Enter Time Machine item in the dock and looking at your old data.
12. Consider telling Spotlight not to index this new drive or at least the “Backups.backupdb” folder.
13. Once you’re satisfied that the new drive is working, you may want to use the old drive for something else.  If so, turn Time Machine off again, plug in only the old drive, and erase it with Disk Utility.  Don’t switch back and forth between the two Time Machine drives or you will become hopelessly confused!

WD TV HD Media Player

WD HD TV

Ive been considering the Apple TV, PS3 and a number of other media center devices, but for now i have brought the WD TV one.  I do not really need a games machine and the Apple TV does not play all the formats i wanted.  Also this costs less than £70.  What i liked about it was that it enables you to plug in your USB key or USB hard drive and play back multimedia from them at up to 1080p on your HDTV via the HDMI / composite outputs. Its fairly small at 1.6- x 4.9- x 3.9-inch and will be easy enough to take to friends to show off films or pictures.

Its had stacks of use over the Christmas period and even plays some format not advertised as supported such as m2ts .

I think I’ll end up with the Apple TV later on, but think the current  version is overpriced