Time Machine Now Works with Airport Extreme USB Drives – Mac Rumors

At last!

I’m finally able to use my USB Lacie disk attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station with Time Machine.

Although the first backup is a tad slow (obviously it depends on how big is the backup), subsequent backups seems to work very well.

I have to eat my hat for what I wrote some posts ago about Apple not fulfilling advertised features…

Well done Apple.

No, I’m not talking about a software emulator like WinUAE or Cloanto’s AmigaForever…

At the beginning of February ACube Systems released the MiniMig, a small (12×12 cm) board that try to reproduce the mighty Amiga500. This is achieved thanks to the use of a Spartan FPGA and an onboard 68000 processor from Freescale.

The original idea and project came from Dennis van Weeren who kindly put his work under an opensource (openhardware?) licence.

ACube Systems then assembled all the pieces together, packaged them in a nice box with a brief user guide and started distributing the board.

You can see a review of the Minimig here.

There is also a page on Wikipedia about the Minimig.

(BTW, 12×12 cm is approx. the size of a CD-ROM, hence the title of this topic)

Yesterday Apple released update 10.5.2 and other updated components for Leopard.

The update is huge, more than 341MB of download.

With this update Apple fixes a big number of bug and introduces some new features. Mail, Finder, Spaces, Time Machine, Airport… the list is very long, you can read the full description here.

The update process went on smoothly, my MacBookPro rebooted a couple of times and then all was finished. I can notice a speed improvement on the overall system responsiveness and many of the bugs of Leopard are gone (or so it seems).

All good then?

No, unfortunately not.

I was waiting for an update that would enable the use of  my external Lacie 500MB disk connected to the Airport Extreme Base Station to be used together with Time Machine. Before the update, fiddling on the terminal, I was able to use the external HD with time machine but the speed was awful sloooow… Now, after the update there is no way to use the HD… every time I start the backup process I get an error telling me that an error creating the disk image occurred.

I begin to suspect that uncle Steve is forcing us to buy its new toy… Time Capsule… but I’m a bit disappointed about that.

Dr. Michal Schulz published on his blog the first screenshots of the Open Source reimplementation of SLB. This is the first step for booting AROS on Sam440ep.

Michal picked up the Bounty for porting AROS on ACube Systems‘ Sam440ep platform. Judging by the continuos progress report we can read on his blog it seems that Michal is very skilled and that a working AROS port will be ready very soon.

As promised, this is my little review of my new MacBook Pro.

This is a CTO MacBook Pro: Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.4 Ghz, 200 GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk, 15.4 Widescreen display.

It took approximately 3 weeks to arrive at the Apple center were I bought it. It’s a very long time but it was ordered near Christmas so this maybe slowed down the shipping.

The overall aspect of the MacBook Pro is very cool. The keyboard and the display reacts to ambient light (on darker ambient the keyboard light up and the display decrease its brightness and vice versa). The quality of the LED display is very high. The keyboard feels quite comfortable but needs some time to get used to it.

Leopard is very fast on this machine. It boots fast, it reacts at user input fast, it runs every application that I tried fast…

Perfect? well, we are closer to perfection than any Windows PC I ever used (including one laptop with Vista Home Premium) but… as everything made by humans, there is still room for improvements.

I had, for example, some troubles with a USB LACIE disk connected to the USB port of my Airport base. Sometimes the Finder has problems connecting to it from the side bar while connecting trough the “Connect to server” menu item works every time. The WiFi speed is not as fast as I was expecting (I have only the MacBook using the wifi network and the Airport base is just one room away from my living room). Anyway the speed is enough to stream audio and video from my home server with no glitches.

The new iLife suite that is included with Leopard is very powerful and easy to use. The only application that disappointed me is the new iMovie. It surely is easier and faster than the previous one but it lacks completely many of the effects and plugin support of the previous version. Fortunately Apple has put iMovie ‘06 available free for download to every iLife ‘08 users.Time Machine alone is worth half the price of the Leopard upgrade. It’s very well done. The only drawback is the fact that, currently, it supports only external disks connected directly to the machine and not network drives (I know, there is a simple hack to use also network drives but it seems to work not very well… probably that’s why Apple disabled them).

To write about all the things I like of this MacBook Pro and Leopard I would need a couple of day chained at the keyboard… so instead I will write about the things I dislike (fortunately much less writing to do).

• Why the HELL Apple removed del DEL button??? Having only BACKSPACE is real nonsense.
• The same can be said about the left ALT button. Now to digit the @ character I have to use two hands. So now I can’t type and drink at the same time
• Only 2 USB ports. Nahh… adding another 2 USB ports was so difficult?
• No TV out… the only way to connect to a TV is through some adapter hooked to the external DVI connector.
• No way to eject a disk manually. I mean… a simple hole to force the ejection would be enough… but maybe slot-in readers are not designed for that.
• No SD/MMC card reader.

That’s all for now.

Happy new year to everyone!

May you enjoy peace and serenity with all the people you care.

Finally! A modern browser released for AmigaOS 4.

The port was done by my friend Andrea Palmatè, a very skilled programmer, author of the AmigaOS 4 port of mPlayer and other nice programs. You can find more details on its webpage.

Ok, it’s only the core engine.

Ok, you must specify the URL at the command line.

Ok, it’s a bit slow (because of the use of SDL, I think).

Ok, It lacks a proper interface… for now.

But it’s a huuuuuge step forward for the Amiga platform. Thanks mate!

I urge anybody who still care about software development (and software developers) on Amiga to donate immediately using the Paypal button on Andrea’s homepage.

If you, like me, celebrate Christmas, please receive my best wishes for this day. May you spend this time with your family, friends and all the people you care! 

Yes, my new shiny MacBookPro is finally arrived!Well, actually, it’s arrived last sunday and in the last few days I tested it extensively. I will post my impressions in the next few days. For now I can only say that it’s very fast and smooth. Leopard feels very good and “advanced” compared to the other systems I own.

Anyway enough for now.

Just a short update. It seems now that my line is again at 20 Mbit… let’s hope it will last, this time. Fingers crossed