Formatting an External Drive for Mac OS X and Windows

I do a lot of video editing. Anyone who does video editing knows that this activity burns through hard drive space like a match on a gas-soaked haystack. I think right now, sitting on my desk, there are 11 or 12 terabytes worth of hard drives. And they're all full except for the new ones I got today. All those hard drives are formatted with NTFS, which means they are fully usable on my PC laptop, but read-only usable on the iMac. I've been using the iMac more and more lately, so I need to be able to go back and forth with the drives.

And that brings me to the formatting problem. Formatting the new external drives as NTFS is workable on the PC because, well, it just works. If I format them for the Mac, though, they're unusable unless I buy a product that makes Mac-formatted drives visible on the PC. Not gonna happen.

So, what to do?

Turns out exFAT is perfect for this. Searching around, I found someone else with the same problem, which is how I found out about exFAT. Good stuff. The disadvantages listed on the Wikipedia page are not particularly relevant to me. (I have no plans to put more than 2.8 million files in a folder.)

Now my new external drives are cross-platform (well, at least Windows and Mac OS X cross-platform) and I have three more terabytes of free space. That should last at least a couple of months.

Amazing Art, with Pumpkins

Check out these amazing pumpkins.

These remind me of the "totally amazing cakes" you see linked from time to time. They're usually described as just "totally amazing cakes", but they're not just amazing cakes. They're actually "totally amazing art that use cake and frosting as the medium". The same is true with these pumpkins. Amazing art, with pumpkins.

(via Lidge)

November is the "Do Something" Month

I've noticed that November seems to be the month people set aside to "do something". NaNoWriMo is a good example, as is No Shave November. Plenty of other activities seem to set aside the month of November to do things.

I think it's because all the other months have things going on to interrupt and steal attention from something that takes a whole month to do. Either way, it's a good concept because it puts a finite deadline to get a particular thing done. And as it turns out, I have a couple things I want to get done that need a finite deadline to get them done.

One thing I want to do is write an Android app. I've started and stopped on several apps, but still have yet to finish an app and get it on the Android Market. I love programming and it's been a while since I've done my own programming project just for me. So this next month will be for that. I'd say I'm about 90% decided on the app I want to write.

The second thing I want to do is do that one-month photo project that a lot of people were doing back in August. But, I plan to just use my phone's camera. We'll see how that goes.

The last thing will just be incidental, but I want to get work on this blog moving. I plan to be blogging the progress of the above projects, so work on this blog will just flow naturally.

However it goes, it should prove to be quite a productive month.

Mobile Posting

If I'm really going to be serious about blogging, I'm going to be posting from my phone quite a bit. So far the Blogger app for Android is pretty simple to use. I like it.

Reboot.

It's time to reboot my blog. The last time I was seriously blogging on my own site was about six years ago. (Wow, that's a long time.) But it's not like I stopped creating content. I just stopped posting it to my own site. The content I used to post to my blog are the exact same things you can now find on Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr, Google+, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. Taken all together, the content is pretty much the same as what I used to post to my blog; it just lives in different places now. Now I'm interested in bringing it all back together again.

I've started a couple of different blogs now just to see which engine I like using the most. This one is Blogger, but I have another WordPress one I've been playing with. The original idea was to re-aggregate all that content back into one site, and I mostly succeeded with the WordPress version. However, I'm finding that I don't actually want everything just mirrored in one location. I'm starting to want to actually blog again, so I may stick with Blogger for doing that. The only reason Blogger is of interest is because it's just so simple. We'll see how it works out.

I plan on treating this blog like I did my original blog. Just write and see who shows up. No direction, no theme, just posting stuff I find interesting. I'm not, however, interested in managing a community, which is what my old blog started becoming. I just want to post and see what happens.