Category — How To

I’m a big fan of Time Machine. It’s not perfect, some like myself want to ensure they have an offsite backup as well, it doesn’t play perfectly with FileVault, and you can’t boot off the backup if you’re in a mission critical situation. Despite those few issues, with Time Machine, there’s no longer an excuse for not backing up all those digital family photos, extensive music collection, and rest of your digital life. If you haven’t been bitten yet… you will. It’s only a matter of time.

One of the frustrating things with Time Machine however can be the amount of space it starts to eat up on your external drive. Storage continues to get cheaper but I hate to toss my 500GB drive for something bigger just so I can let Time Machine do it’s thing.

Fortunately, there is a GREAT tool to help you squeeze the most out of your drive, GrandPerspective (VersionTracker, Main Site). GP is an excellent utility to graphically represent the space you’re using on disk. Better yet, it is smart enough to ignore the clever file referencing Time Machine uses to keep things in order, and in turn, can give you an accurate picture of your drive.

Just download the utility, and run it on your Backups.backupdb folder on your Time Machine drive, and you’ll quickly see if there are particularly large chunks being eaten up on your drive.

For me, GrandPerspective quickly identified a folder in Library/Application Support/Mozy which was eating up about 50% of my backup drive. It turned out, this was a temporary folder Mozy used to store files before they were uploaded to the Mozy backup server. Since this folder was always changing as Mozy gradually uploaded my system, Time Machine was dutifully preserving multiple versions of the contents of the folder every time it ran a backup. Blocking this folder from the Time Machine preferences has made my Time Machine backups far faster and far more space efficient which leaves more room for the important bits.

If you’re running out of space on your drive, give Grand Perspective a try.

We have a Mac mini, Hi-Fi, and iMac. The Apple remotes for the first two are a critical part of our home entertainment setup and they’re intentionally paired so each remote only controls 1 thing or the other. How’s a guy to keep these things in order in a clean and classy way?

Moo Stickers to the rescue!

Before

Ambiguous Apple Remotes originally uploaded by -DjD-.

After

Now Unambiguous Apple Remotes originally uploaded by -DjD-.

One of our biggest goals when moving Across the Pond was to maintain connections with friends and family despite the distance. Fortunately, thousands of miles and a 5 hour time difference is a cake walk in the digital age.

For phone, our tool of choice has been Skype. Empirically, I’d estimate that average folks are only marginally aware of Skype which is unfortunate considering how much freaking money you can save if you make even a handful of international calls (and often domestic as well). To make things even better, Skype has just released new flat rate calling plans for various regions in the world that makes it an even better value.

Let’s break down our setup, what it lets us do, and how much it costs.

Internet Connection
First of all, we need a DSL or broadband internet connection. It doesn’t need to be blazing fast either as Skype doesn’t hog too much bandwidth. Highspeed internet is a fortune in the UK but I’m not factoring that cost here as we also use it for TV, Movie Rentals, regular Internet Access, etc.

Skype Phone – £90
You don’t need to have this, but it makes life easier. This particular phone has a base station which plugs in to our internet AND to our UK landline. The phone itself wirelessly talks to the base station like any other cordless phone. That is, you can’t connect it directly to a wireless network if you were at a friend’s house or Wi-Fi hotspot. If you have other requirements, there are other phones that may suit you better.
Benefits: Don’t have to be sitting in front of the computer to talk. The Mrs. can talk to her fam on the Skype phone, while I talk to mine using Skype on the computer.

Calling Plans – $2.95/month
Used to be (a few weeks ago), the standard SkypeOut rate was right around $0.02/minute. That assumed you were calling much of the developed world and sometimes mobile lines were excluded from that low-low price. With no clear indication of the rate when we placed the call, we’d occasionally get stuck paying $0.20/minute or so. Not the end of the world but certainly not preferred.

Enter the new monthly subscriptions and we are now paying a killer $2.95/month for unlimited calls to landlines and cell phones in the US or Canada!

SkypeIn Lines – $24/year each
Since it’s nice for our family to be able to call us as well, and we haven’t expected each and every one of them to setup Skype, we also have local SkypeIn numbers. These numbers are US local numbers, one for Ohio and one for PA, that automatically route the call to us here on Skype. Since we have a Skype phone (see above), we don’t need to be in front of the computer to answer the call. With one of the paid subscriptions above, each of these numbers is only $24/year.

Total Monthly Cost
Figure the phone hardware will last at least 2 years and add in the other monthly recurring costs (excluding internet) and you come to about $15/month for unlimited calls to the US and Canada, unlimited calling from the US to here, included voicemail and other odds and ends. All in all, not too shabby!

Update 11May2009: I’ve posted a screencast demonstrating some basic aspects of how iTunes manages your music library and how to then share the library with another user. Consider this iTunes Library 101 for those looking for a visual way to follow along!

Well it doesn’t have to be the Mrs. really. Just any other person with a separate user account on your Mac.

You see, Apple’s done a decent job of giving each user a separate workspace (it’s called your Home Folder) for all your pics, docs, tunes, flicks, email, passwords, and the list goes on. Normally it’s great. One login and you’ve got access to all your stuff, and you don’t have to worry about messing up the other persons. Need to switch back and forth? Fast user switching has you covered. The problem arrises for those special cases where you don’t want two (or more) separate iTunes libraries for example. Or maybe you want to share your iPhoto Library or Address Book in the same way.

Apple should definitely make this easier on folks by flipping a preference somewhere, but in reality, with a little know-how, you too can share a single iTunes Library across multiple users.

Let’s get started.

Hang on a sec… time out. Before you go messing around with your pristine music collection you do have a backup ready just in case? Right? Bueller?… Bueller? Oh right, of course you do. You’re using Time Machine. Carry on.

Step 1) – First things first. You really want to have all your iTunes content (music, TV, movies, etc) in a single library. I suspect for most folks this will mean needing to copy a few tracks from one user’s library to another so I won’t dwell on it. If you get stuck, just hit up the comments below.

Step 2) – You need to move your iTunes Library to a folder on your computer where all users can access it. I use /Users/Shared but you could also use an external firewire or network drive.

Apple has a detailed article on Moving your iTunes Music Library so check that out for specifics. Essentially you’re going to tell iTunes where you want your new library to be, and then use the Consolidate Library option to move it all there.

Step 3) – So far so good. Now, for each other user account. Hold down the Option Key while launching iTunes. Instead of opening directly, a dialog will ask you to ‘Choose iTunes Library’. Hit Choose Library and browse to wherever you saved your library in Step 2. Rinse and repeat for each user that needs to access it.

Step 4) – It’s worth double checking the permissions on the new folder just to be sure you all have access. Browse to the iTunes Library folder and hit get info. For me this is /Users/Shared/iTunes. In the sharing and permissions section at the bottom you’ll want to add all of the users using the library with Read & Write Privilege.

Well, hopefully that helps. I’ll go into a bit more detail on how we’re sharing the iTunes library and syncing multiple iPods, contacts, calendars, etc to it later. In the meantime, let me know if you’re stuck.

Assumptions: Everyone’s setup is different so if you’ve fiddled with your library in the past and have some special circumstances, take extra care to ensure your music is backed up. If you get stuck, plug away in the comments below.

Also, note that sharing a library means sharing playcounts, playlists, ratings, tags, metadata, etc. If the you absolutely need to rate Fergie’s My Humps a 1 star while the Mrs. gives it a 5, prepare for a rate-off. For us the benefit of having a single library and not needing to worry about syncing purchases between the two accounts is a better proposition.

For the few months leading up to our move to the UK I’d been fine tuning our home entertainment setup. Finally, only a month or so before packing it all up to move I had it perfected (almost). Here’s the basics of the setup. Stay tuned for Part 2 where we’ll see how it’s all working over here in the UK.

Front view of the home theater setup. See here for a closer look at the kit.

For a while we had an old TV, DVD Player, TV Antenna, and VCR. Wow… old school. Gradually things started to change. We picked up an Infocus IN72 projector on Woot and ditched the TV. At first it was meant to be temporary, but the large screen, high resolution, and ‘poof it’s gone when you turn it off’ benefits were all compelling. Route the sound through the Hi-Fi and you’ve got the beginnings of a nice setup. Come to think of it, that likely marked the beginning of a quest to perfect it.

The Plan
I wanted a setup that would:

1. Be simple to setup, use, and maintain
2. Work internationally (compatible video formats and power)
3. Take up as little space as possible
4. Be flexible enough to support a wide range of content

The Setup

I’ve managed to put this all together with a few items gradually acquired over the last year and a half.
Mac Mini – $600
iPod Hi-Fi – $300
Nintendo Wii – $250
IN72 Projector – $400 (after rebate via Woot.com)
RCA Selector Box – $40

Features
One of the amazing things to me, and the reason for plucking a bit more down for the MacMini, was the flexibility of this all. AppleTV could have done some of it, but SlingPlayer was a must have and I didn’t want to fool around trying to hack it to bits. Anyway… the MacMini let’s us:

• Watch Movies, TV Shows, and listen to Music via FrontRow
• Rent and watch Movies via iTunes
• Watch US TV via Slingplayer and our stateside DVR.
• Watch DVDs, Joost, and Netflix video on demand (unfortunately the latter is only available via BootCamp)

Simplicity
The best part about all this is that it’s simple. It’s easy to use and it’s relatively few components which means less to buy, less to take up space, less to pack up when you move, etc.

Switching between components couldn’t be easier. The video sources are piped directly into the HDMI and Component Video inputs on the projector. A single button toggles back and forth between the two. The little RCA selector box handles the audio switching. At first this seems like an extra step but has the added benefit of being able to queue up some iTunes music and leave that on while Wii Bowling. It’s easy enough anyone can figure it out.

Well that should cover it for now… Stay tuned to see how things transfered to the UK only a month or two later. Hint – it’s even better than before!