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Keeping your iPhoto Library on an external disk while still backing up to Time Machine

Posted by Scarr on August 3rd, 2010 No Comments

I’ve recently run into a bit of a pickle; My iPhoto library has become gigantic because of my photography hobby (I shoot everything in RAW because I like to play around with the resulting image, and I’m freaky about data loss).

So even though I’ve upgraded my Macbook’s hard drive to 500GB internally, I’m still starting to get tight on space.

So I’m fragmenting my iPhoto library to an external disk. The problem with this is now this externally hosted library doesn’t have Time Machine protection.

Here’s what I’m doing;

  1. Move my existing iPhoto Library to an external disk called “Photobox 1″
  2. Open Time Machine preferences, go to Options, under “Exclude these items from backups:”, I highlight “Photobox 1″ and hit the [ - ] box.  So this externally mounted drive will now be backed up via Time Machine.  
  3. Opening “Photobox 1″, I’ve got “iPhoto Library to August 3 2010″.  If I double click on that, iPhoto will open that library.  
  4. Holding down the Option key while launching iPhoto will bring up a library picking dialogue.  From there you can choose which library to work from.  

So now, I’ve got space on my Laptop for current photographs, and I’ve got a separated copy of my old iPhoto archive that is still being backed up to my Time Machine drive.

Of course I don’t just move my old iPhoto library to the Time Machine drive, because if I lose my Time Machine drive in that scenario I’ve lost the iPhoto archive and any possible backups.  Ugly!  So let’s not do that.  Remember folks, always segment your backups from your raw data.  Never use your backup as archive; that’s not what it’s for.

A future challenge may be merging a split library, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

"Photobox 1" is a removable SATA drive

"Photobox 1" is a removable SATA drive

Posted in Hardware, Photography, Software, Tech

Mounting a Linux ext2/ext3 filesystem on your MacOS X 10.6 Apple computer

Posted by Scarr on August 3rd, 2010 No Comments

I just wanted to mount a Linux ext3 partition on my MacBook! Doing google searches for this answer yields results, but they are totally buried in back-links and espousals of how cool MacFuse is for mounting every filesystem, including this LifeHacker post with the most misleading title evar (heh).  I just wanted the one answer.  Anyway here’s the formula, quick and easy.

  1. Download and install the MacFuse package
  2. Download and install the complimentary fuse-ext2
  3. Open up a Terminal, and from the command line (where $ is the beginning of the command line);
    $ disktool -l
    ***Disk Appeared ('disk1s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
    ***Disk Appeared ('disk1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
    ***Disk Appeared ('disk0',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
    ***Disk Appeared ('disk0s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
    ***Disk Appeared ('disk0s3',Mountpoint = '/', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Macintosh HD')

    So it looks like our disk partition is disk1s1, since disk0 is our Laptop’s hard drive.. Make a directory where you would like to set the mount point.  In my case, I put it into /Users/scarr/tmp/Linux

    $ sudo mount_fuse-ext2 -m /dev/disk1s1 /Users/scarr/tmp/Linux/

And kaboom, you should have a disk on your Desktop.

This will only give you read access to your disk, but the good news is you now have access to the files on your Linux ext2/ext3 formatted hard drive!  Score..

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Katy Winn – Fashion Week Photographer’s Camera Bag

Posted by Scarr on April 21st, 2010 No Comments

My latest crazy obsession is re-entering the world of photography after about a 14 year hiatus.  I’m going from shooting old-school traditional SLR on ISO 100/200 Black and White back in the mid 90′s  to shooting fully digital with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (thank you Seth!).   Like some odd traveller from the past, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

With that in mind here are a couple of awesome videos from daemonwebster / PhotoInduced.com; From 2008 – High-end photographer Katy Winn takes us on a pretty detailed tour of her photo bag, going to the trouble of explaining not only what she carries, but why.

Katy Winn, Getty Images photographer, works Fashion Week, Now what we dig is that we haven’t spoken with many women photographers, til now. Refreshing. You’ll get a pro’s eye view on the gear needed to cover this event. In Part 2, Katy shares more of the goods she carries on the job, and has some great words of advice. Check outhttp://photoinduced.com for more photo news, reviews and info.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I also found out bokeh was!

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Creating a second Bridged network interface on Parallels Bare Metal Server

Posted by Scarr on April 21st, 2010 No Comments

So if you’ve got a Parallels Bare Metal Server instance with a bunch of interfaces, and you want to be able to assign some of these interfaces as “internal” and “external” you’ll have to log into the command line and assign one of them as a second “Bridged” interface as follows;

prlsrvctl net add BridgedExt -i eth1 -t bridged

Then verify with

prlsrvctl net list

Example output;

[root@parallels ~]# prlsrvctl net list
Network ID Type Bound To
Shared shared vnic0
Host-Only host-only vnic1
Bridged bridged eth0
BridgedExt bridged eth1

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Anyone have any opinions on Canon Rebel DSLR cameras? I’m looking for something entry level

Posted by Scarr on April 19th, 2010 No Comments

I’m looking for an entry-level DSLR camera and I’ve been eyeballing the Canon Digital Rebel series for a long time.  Does anyone have an opinion on this camera?  Canon’s own site gives it 4.7 stars (LOL) and Amazon pretty much agrees.

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=139&modelid=17316

http://henrys.ca/23770-CANON-REBEL-XS-W-18-55-IS-LENS-BLACK.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/Canon-XS-Digital-18-55mm-Black/dp/B001CBKJGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1271685005&sr=8-1

Thanks to the truthful reviews (all the 4-star people; not the majority but not the 1-star “oh my printer didn’t work with it” blurts) I’ve also been directed towards the Nikon D3000

http://henrys.ca/54513-NIKON-D3000-W-18-55-DX-II-LENS.aspx

So, any thoughts??

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