12th
March
2008
I’ve discussed this site before, but on the occasion of passing 800 books catalogued I thought I’d give another mention to what is perhaps my favourite website – LibraryThing. This is a simply brilliant site with which you can keep track of your book collection, as well as interact with other book lovers in a number of ways. You can get book recommendations, write or read book reviews, and interface with online stores such as amazon, and even local bookshops if you live in the USA. But it’s not completely American focussed – you can search for your books in the catalogues of a huge number of libraries internationally (including several in Australia) and in a variety of languages.
I especially like the way you can use your LibraryThing data to interface with other websites, like I do with this blog. They also offer widgets and plugins for a variety of other web spaces, although as yet I haven’t found a really good one for Facebook.
Anyway if you have a book collection, take a look at LibraryThing. And if you want to see my profile, as an example of what it looks like then go here.
Categories : Links, books |
12th
March
2008
I’ve begun using Apple’s Time Capsule as my network storage/backup solution and thought I’d make a few comments.
If you’re unfamiliar with it Time Capsule is a network hard drive (500 Gig or 1 terabyte) and wireless router. It’s designed to work seamlessly with Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard and the Time Machine software to backup your Mac, but also works well with Windows as a network attached drive and print server.
Basically I’m using it as an extension of my existing network. I plugged the time capsule WAN port in to one of the ethernet ports of my existing router/ADSL modem. I shut down the wireless radio on my old router and am now just using Time Capsule’s faster 802.11n for my wi-fi connectivity. Through the Time Capsule’s USB port I connected a USB photo printer and another external hard drive (via a USB hub). After running the AirPort setup program on my MacBook Pro and my Vista PC both computers spotted the Time Capsule drive straight away, although for some reason it took a few restarts of the capsule before the USB printer and hard drive would show up. Aside from this, setting up and using Time Capsule has been a breeze. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get my network running the way I wanted to with it.
I decided to use the USB hard drive as my backup disk for my Mac. The first Time Machine backup took several hours but now it does a quick background backup every hour. I have not yet had the chance to look back into the history/restore features of Time Machine but from the demos it looks pretty good. The 1Tb Time Capsule hard drive I’m using as a media server and backup for all my music, movies, photos, home videos etc, and for any other content I may want to access from either my Mac or PC. I’ve now created a second library in iTunes on my Mac which contains my complete MP3 collection so I now have thousands of songs which I have rarely or never listened to before. Expect to see an eclectic mix of tracks in my “Recent songs” list on this site (which is generated using last.fm by the way)
So Time Capsule is great. Combined with Time Machine it is an incredibly easy and effective storage and backup solution. Gives me even more incentive to consider switching my desktop PC to a Mac when I next come around to replacing it. Imagine a 100% Mac household… I wonder if I can?
Categories : Apple, Computers, Mac, Windows |
