Talamathi

I have been having a bit of an ongoing discussion with a friend over Time Machine. A lot of this has been about the problems Time Machine currently has, and where it can/should go. What little I know about ZFS has made me think it could play an important role. This kind of feeling usually tells me I need to learn more about a topic. Often it often means my initial suspicions are wrong, but so far there haven’t been any disappointments yet. Just today, I came upon the blog post “Why ZFS Matters to Mac Users”. It feels like I’ve read this before, but it’s relevance strikes more much more, now. Currently, the most notable to me is block-level checksumming to detecting errors the ability to handle snapshots efficiently and quickly Clearly, ZFS is much more than this, but with my mind on how Time Machine could be better those seem like useful thing to keep an eye out for as ZFS becomes much more prevalent in the Mac world. Technorati Tags: Mac , Time+Machine ...

It looks like I was beaten to the punch on my first ever hint submitted to Mac OS X Hints , but I thought I’d still post it here. One of the new features in Mac OS X 10.5.2 is a new menu extra for Time Machine . This is actually more functional to me than the original Dock icon; it tells you when you last backed up, and when it is backing up, how much is being copied over. Heck, the menu icon even has a little animation while it’s backing up. Why doesn’t the Dock do that? Anyway, compare for yourself. The dock menu is on the left, while the menu extra is on the right. The one missing thing, you’ll notice, is the ability to browse other Time Machine disks (not exactly a problem of mine, as I only have the one). You can still get this from the menu extra, though. Just hold the option key at any time while looking at the menu. Technorati Tags: Leopard , Time+Machine

Thanks to Entourage 2008, I finally got to try out Time Machine to do a restoration. Let me point out, first off, that I happen to like Entourage (and in fact, I’ve had a pretty favorable impression of Office 2008 in general). However, when I let it use iSync to handle my contacts, each one got duplicated. This problem can only occur (I think) if you tell Entourage to go to Preferences > Sync Services, and check “Synchronize contacts with Address Book and .Mac”, which is off by default. Today I decided to give Leopard’s iChat a try. I’ve been an Adium user for a few years now and would recommend it to anyone who asked, but I thought it was time to give iChat another try. That’s how I noticed there was something weird with my address book: both iChat and Adium use the address book to map AIM and Jabber contacts with actual names (obviously, Adium can handle a lot more than that). Mostly iChat saw what Adium was seeing, but due to a few various ...