Macking 139

Beware of Giant Laptop Drives
The new perpendicular recording technology used in 2.5" Seagate drives larger than 100 Gb is extremely unreliable right now. Engineers working at data-recovery services say that they have no luck recovering data from these drives. Seagate's own engineers warn the same thing. Many don't believe these disks should even be on the market. You can tell if you are dealing with these drives if the advertising uses the word "perpendicular" anywhere. This is used in 2.5" drives that hold 120Gb or more or spin faster than 5400 RPM.
The recovery engineers also warn against this technology in the 3.5" drives used in desktop models as well, although since they aren't being schlepped around like laptops they don't fail as often.
If you have one of these already, get an external drive or RAID system (not another perp drive!) and do a full backup with daily updates. I use SuperDuper and Retrospect both. LaCie also offers a free program called Silverkeeper.

Speaking of Retrospect
Retrospect is probably going away this year. They have let go a lot of the engineers who would be working on the next upgrade, and they will lose a significant fraction of their Mac market to Time Machine when OSX 10.5 is released this summer. However, there is not much choice when you need to back up a network to a backup server. Stay tuned.
The best solution for home users is to give each Mac its own external backup drive, and run either SilverKeeper or SuperDuper to keep them synchronized. If you feel any resistance to going out and getting an external drive today, consider how you would feel if you started up tomorrow and all you got was a question mark or a grey screen. Remember that all drives die; it's only a question of when.

The LaCie Yugo Drive
Another client lost their drive contents recently, only this time it was their backup drive. It was a properly formatted "Porsche-designed" drive from LaCie, but all the data was lost and it had to be reinitialized. From now on, I will be referring to this as the Yugo drive. For those who don't remember, the Yugo was a car imported from Yugoslavia before the war and breakup of the country. Early in the Clinton administration we bombed the Yugo factory, thus doing the world a favor. The only car on the planet more cheaply made was the East German Trabant, a car with a body made of a plastic like fiberglass, but with waste cotton hammered into it in a process similar to making a felt hat. It is considered toxic waste and cannot be recycled.
The Yugo drives are sold formatted in "FAT16," a Microsoft format, even in Mac stores. The case has no fan or venting, relying on simple radiation to cool off. They get hot. The electronics are as cheap as possible. Worse, they are only $30-$40 cheaper than their good drives, the desktop "D2" series and the "Ruggedized" portable drive. I am officially withdrawing endorsement for the Yugo drives; I cannot recommend them for any purpose at all.
There are external cases you can buy with no drive inside. MacAlly makes some; others can be had from Other World Computing (a good source for external drives and Mac parts generally) but if you have a Yugo it's worth the $35-$60 to get a case and move the drive into it. Send the Yugo back to Yugoslavia (in 1993) where it belongs.
BTW, an interesting piece of trivia about why drives are not sold unformatted in the PC world: XP can recognize a formatted drive larger than 30 gigs, but it cannot format it on its own. Remember, this is XP we are talking about, the current MSOS until Vista.
I hereby award the Planetwide Patience of Job award to all Microsoft users, for their willingness to put up with more crap than anyone should ever have to. Sincere sympathies to the nation of South Korea, who, due to impatience at the development of certain Internet standards in the 1990s, opted to adopt ActiveX for everything they do. As a result, you cannot use a Mac or Linux box anywhere in the country to do business with banks, commerce sites, or the government itself. The award, a combined Wagging Finger and Thickening Thumb of Thuckiness, will be spammed onto every Korean computer immediately using ActiveX controls, and there won't be a thing they can do to stop it.

Another Reason to Dump Earthlink
Earthlink offers a service called WebLife, which includes a web storage and publishing area with one GB of storage space. Although they claim the service is open to "all Internet users," the needed software is Windoze only, and the space available to Mackers is just 10 Mb, 1% of the space that should be available. Oh, but the price is the same.
Once upon a time, Apple allowed Earthlink to give them huge amounts of money to include Earthlink as a default install for anyone upgrading or starting fresh with OSX, but Apple dropped them with Tiger. Maybe Earthlink decided to quit paying, but the more likely cause is the complaints Apple was receiving about how terrible Earthlink was.
There are people in Portland who have Teleport addresses, because the customer base was sold to OneMain when Teleport disappeared, and that in turn was transferred to Earthlink. Some people even find the service still tolerable. Others are happy they got away from Teleport before the fall. My suggestion? Dump Earthlink as soon as you can for a good local provider.

Verizon Is No Better
Verizon simply does not want your business if you don't use Microsoft. Their three prime online services, Movielink, Rhapsody and TotalVid exclude both Mac and Linux users. Be sure to tell them why you are not going to use them, when you sign up for some other service. If you live in their territory and want DSL, however, you are stuck with them so be sure to contact them periodically and tell them of your dissatisfaction. Threaten to leave them for Concast, even though we all know that is simply switching from the frying pan to the charcoal grille.

The Well-equipped Video Server
With the hype surrounding the highly limited and overpriced AppleTV getting so much attention, I thought it worth detailing what it takes to make a proper video server out of an old G4 tower.
While mine is a 450 dual-processor model, it has only eight megs VRAM on the main display card, which is not enough to satisfy the requirements of Google Earth. So, I added the cheapest ATI monitor card to the PCI bus, which lets me send video signal to my 37" JVC TV with flat 16:9 display. These sets used to be appallingly expensive, but thanks to our imbalance of trade, can be had fresh from China for about a grand. The audio output can be fed into your AV receiver, stereo system, or just into your TV's sound input ports.
If I were doing it today, I would look for a Quicksilver or MDD model G4 tower with a speed of at least 800 MHz and 32 megs VRAM. Such a box can be had for around $500-$600, with the MDD models that cannot boot into OS9 costing less than the few which can. You will want to add RAM to bring it up to at least a gig.
Mine has two internal HDs, one 80 and one 120 gigs. Only the MDD model can see an internal drive larger than 128 gigs, but if you first format a 250 drive into two volumes, usually by putting it in a FireWire case, you can then install it inside any G4 tower and it will be able to use both 120-gig volumes.
Worst thing about the MDD model is the extremely noisy fans it has. That was one of the prime motivators for Apple to develop the fan design used in the G5 tower.
Of course, you could always get ahold of a G5 tower for your video server, but now you are talking expense here. You are probably not going to find one for under a thousand dollars by itself, unless it would need you to buy extra RAM and hard drives. The damn thing is a little bulky for a living room setup anyway.
AppleTV cannot stream video from WMV, Flip4Mac, Xvid, DIVX, Real or any other format not supplied by the iTunes Music Store. However, the open-source video player VLC (VideoLAN Client) verison 0.86 has a setting called "Video Device," which will fill the screen of your chosen second display, whether a screen plugged into a laptop or my TV/Mac setup. Of all the video display programs, this gives you the best picture on your set.
You will also need RealPlayer, Windows Media, Google Video player and of course QuickTime Player and iTunes. Most of these will not fill the TV screen with your video image, but will probably leave a window border or visible edges, so you should use the Desktop settings in System Preferences to create a black or neutral gray background to reduce the distracting edges.
EyeTV from Elgato makes a nice addition, but it requires USB 2.0 and claims in the documentation that it needs native USB 2. I have been told that all you need to do is install a $15 PCI card that has 2.0 ports, but it does not seem to work correctly; I have an unanswered request to tech support for more details. The video software that comes with EyeTV appears to have powerful recording and editing capabilities on the order of TiVO, and even has its own remote control.
Since we are hacking this stuff together with old equipment, however, don't count on the latest tricks working with it. Much simpler to get a wireless keyboard and mouse so you can control the video programs from your couch. Be aware that it can be difficult to see the cursor on the display from across the room. I got a Keyspan wireless remote designed for presentations, but found it was quite inconsistent working with VLC; it would stop working and just beep at me. Bluetooth dongles were equally unreliable. My best result came from an old-fashioned Kensington wireless mouse with USB transceiver ($29) even though it uses the 2.7 GHz frequency that AirPort uses. It runs on a different channel from the AirPort (which can be set in the AirPort Admin Utility) so I experience no interference.
In my case, I have the A/V rack, a 4-shelf wheeled table from Anthro in Tualatin, sitting next to the TV, also on a wheeled stand. My main workstation, separate from all this is also on a Anthro table. I can't recommend strongly enough that you always set up your equipment on wheeled tables because there is little more annoying than having to crawl under or squeeze behind your setup to change wires and cords which, believe me, you will be doing more often than you think you will. So nice to just move them about at will. Besides, furniture from Anthro is so well-made you will be using it the rest of your life and being modular, you can modify and redesign it to fit future needs. Everything is shipped to your specifications and can be ordered from a catalog or their web site. Yes, their stuff is expensive but worth it. (End free plug.)

Getting Content
Of course you will need content to watch on all of this equipment. You can spend huge amounts of money at the itunes video store, but I prefer to use the BitTorrent network. You can find all kinds of interesting stuff there because people willingly post TV shows they have recorded, including programs from Canada and Britain that we in the USA would never be allowed to see, either because the subjects embarrass certain special-interest groups, are too sexy, or are just deemed not commercially viable.
Sometimes the popularity of pirate TV spurs sales. The 27th series of BBC's Doctor Who was purchased for showing by the SciFi Channel (and later BBC America) only because of the work of ONE individual in England who called himself WhoFan. He not only recorded and posted each episode of the series within hours of broadcast, he then assembled a weekly DVD of the show and included the program Doctor Who Confidential, which followed the Doctor on BBC4, and contained material that never would be shown in the USA due to the interference of lawyers demanding cash for musical rights and other clips used in the show. He would round out the DVD with other stuff including a historical bit on the BBC Radiophonic Laboratory, which pioneered electronic music and audio effects from the early 1960s onward. Once he made that DVD he posted it as well.
So many people downloaded them and shared them with their friends at viewing parties that the buzz motivated SciFi to reverse their dumb decision not to show the new Doctor and, a year after it ran in England it finally showed here (riddled with commercials and cut to fit). At least BBCA didn't cut the show to cram in ITS commercials. The following year, SciFi ran Season 28 of Doctor Who less than 6 months after it had finished its BBC run. As yet, however, they have not purchased Torchwood, the spinoff series that ran last fall.
All of this was posted on Usenet, only later making its way to BitTorrent. If you want to explore Usenet, you will need a copy of Unison or similar newsreader, and you will also need an account with a usenet provider, since due to low demand most ISPs do not deliver very many of the 30,000+ Usenet groups.
To learn more about Usenet, look it up on Wikipedia, then visit Google for all you could ever want to know about it. Usenet has been around as long as the Internet itself, over 20 years. It takes a little education to learn to use it.
BitTorrent is a "bit" easier. It is a P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing service that works by having each user upload at the same time he is downloading. You visit a Torrent web site like XTVi and locate the program you want to acquire. Then you download a little file that loads into your Torrent client program. There are several, but I am happiest with Azureus. Find it on VersionTracker.com or just google it.
Torrent etiquette requires you leave your system on upload after you get your file. Otherwise you are considered a "leech" and your download speed will be throttled. Once you have uploaded three times the size of the file you can switch it off. Although it slows down your connection while it's running, you can still do Web pages, email etc. at the same time. Needless to say, all of this requires a broadband connection.
Once you have the little file, drop it on Azureus and it will begin the download. Half-hour TV shows are around 175 megs and hour shows (with the commercials removed) are around 350. You can also download HDTV versions of many programs as well; they take up about a gig. My setup won't play them, though; they bog down and crash the system a few minutes in. A better setup than mine might handle them just fine. All torrent downloads are usually in xvid format, with the .avi extension, and play in VLC. Be aware that older programs listed in xtvi may not have anyone seeding it and the download will take forever. In that case, just give up and search for something more recent.
If you just want to watch this on your Mac without all the hardware above, you already have what you need. Get VLC, Azureus and go to town..

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)