The server itself is mainly used for file sharing and as a media server but the Mini’s achilles heel is it’s lack of internal storage. Although I’ve installed two WD Blue 1TB drives, one acts as a mirror of the other so I only have 1TB of storage.

Enter the LaCie 2big Quadra with it’s two 3TB drives arranged as a RAID 1 array. Storage sorted for the foresable future. However, the LaCie proved to be a serious headache in terms of configuration. With the drive setup and LaCie Desktop Manager installed I set about copying my data on to the new disk in readiness for attaching it to the server. During the process though, the drive would frequently spin down while not is use. Then, when you click back onto the drive it needs to respin the disks. This continued even with the OS X Energy Saver system pref set to NOT Put hard disks to sleep when possible. Thinking it may be caused by Apple’s gradual slackening of support for Firewire (a technology they invented) I swapped to USB. As my iMac is getting a bit elderly now, it only has USB 2 but the 2big (like almost all USB devices) is backward compatible so no probs there. Not so. The drive still spun down at out times and then would spin up while the Mac was asleep!

I wondered if Apple was slackening support for USB 2 as well as Firewire so I tried the drive on the Mac Mini server that the LaCie drive had been bought for complete with its USB 3 ports. Same issue. Random spin downs while awake and spin ups when asleep.

After contacting LaCie support, I tried the drive on a 2012 iMac at work. On this Mac, the LaCie worked fine. Absolutely faultless. Weird. So, I tried it on a 2008 Mac Pro that we use at work as a fire server (and, like my 2009 iMac, only has USB 2). Again, it was perfect. I was starting to suspect that the drive just didn’t like my house! So, with one more Mac available, my 2013 MacBook Pro, I tried again. Faultless operation and this time in my house!

I started to wonder what the link between my 2009 iMac and my 2012 Mac Mini could be. The Mini was running Mountain Lion and the iMac Yosemite so it wasn’t an OS X issue (so I apologise Apple – maybe you’re support for Firewire and USB 2 isn’t as flaky as I thought). I wasn’t an interface issue as the thing had been proven to work on USB 3, Firewire 800 and USB 2 on the Macs at work so what was it?

Finally, I made the connection. I had installed LaCie Desktop Manager on both the 2009 iMac and the 2012 Mac Mini. Call  me stupid, but if software is bundled with a device, I kinda assume it’s going to work with the device! Apparently, with LaCie drives, installing the software essentially stops the hardware working correctly.

Once LDM was uninstalled the drive started working fine on both Macs. FWIW I went all out and trashed the app, a couple of plist files and a kernel extension (LaCieScsiType00.kext).

So far all seems well. I have just made another minor tweak. As per this article:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6607988

I’ve just stopped Spotlight indexing the drive as I was getting sporadic drive ejections. Hopefully this will fix the issue completely. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve recently been putting the finishing touches to my home work station. As my working week is split between an office in Norwich and my ‘Den’ at home, my work station needs to be flexible enough to allow me to move between these locations quickly, easily and effectively. A laptop is central to this as, by default, it allows me to take my files, my work and my life with me. I’ve used Apple laptops for over a decade now and currently use a late 2011 15″ MacBook Pro with a quad core 2.4ghz i7 processor. Initially, I was pretty disappointed with this machine. It came with OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ installed but this was quickly upgraded to 10.8 ‘Mountain Lion’ which, at the time had just been released. Mountain Lion seemed to chug along painfully slowly and made the experience of using the MacBook feel a bit like a £1400 downgrade! Things didn’t improve when the main board failed giving the laptop a very Windows-like blue screen of death. Repair was swift (and under warranty) by Stormfront – my local Mac reseller in Bury St. Edmunds but the lethargy in operation was still there. My research suggested that I/O seemed to be the biggest bottleneck with the pitiful 5400rpm hard drive the key offender. As Christmas approached I splashed out and bought a 512GB SSD drive for the Mac and also used the opportunity to upgrade it from the Apple-standard 4GB of RAM to the system max of 16GB. What an improvement. I have to say that this was the most impressive upgrade that I’ve ever performed on any computer. The MacBook was like a new (and very, very fast) machine with the phrase ‘new lease of life’ not really doing it justice.

So, what was next? With the MacBook now performing as required, it was time to start utilising it better when working from home where my wife and I have a 2010 27″ iMac. It’s probably overkill for listening to music on and sorting out our photos on Aperture so I needed to start making better use of it.

Unlike its’ smaller 21.5″ sibling the 27″ iMac has a Mini Display Port socket that can handle input and output (the 21.5″ can only handle Mini Display Port output). Input can only come from another Mini Display Port or (the newer) Thunderbolt sources. Although Apple do sell varying lengths of Thunderbolt cables, these could not be used to connect my MacBook Pro to my iMac as although the former does have a Thunderbolt connection, the latter can only handle Mini Display Port. Apple have never manufactured or sold their own Mini Display Port cables but both Belkin and StarTech do manufacture a Mini Display Port male – Mini Display Port male cable so I opted for Belkin and made the purchase on Amazon.

When the cable arrived I hastily got the machines connected up and straight away, the iMac slipped in to Target Display Mode and my MacBook Pro suddenly had another 3,686,400 crisp and very bright pixels to play with. They were very bright too. Far too bright in fact with no way of reducing the iMac screen brightness.

According to Apple’s documentation on Target Display Mode, the iMac’s keyboard would be locked out while connected to the MacBook Pro with only the brightness, volume and other media keys remaining usable. In my case though the brightness controls definitely were not working. More research identified a well known bug (discussed in depth here) with Mac OS X 10.6.8 (that my iMac was running) which had effectively stopped these control keys working while in Target Display Mode. I tried a couple of Apps (Shades and Brightness Slider respectively) but neither was suitable so it seemed the only other fix was to upgrade the iMac to Mountain Lion. This I duly did, enduring the immense 4.5GB download which zapped 45% of my monthly broadband bandwidth allocation (mental note, I must change my ISP) and (thank goodness) finally the brightness controls worked on the iMac and my arc eyes started to recede.

So, with the final addition being to plug in a USB keyboard to the MacBook Pro, the setup was complete. I used a full-size, wired Apple keyboard for this as these are really, really good keyboards. The key clicks seem more tactile on the wired version of the keyboard and make for a much nicer experience than the wireless equivalent in my opinion. After much tinkering and all of the various upgrades, I have to say, this is the best workstation setup I’ve ever used. The iMac’s stunning display becomes the main working screen with the laptop display available to dump screens on and refer back to. An added bonus is that the iMac itself is still running in the background while you’re using it in Target Display Mode so you can log on to it from your second machine and continue to use it for other tasks (video rendering, playing iTunes etc). Apple’s Screen Sharing facility makes this so simple and means you can jump back and forth between the iMac and MacBook Pro without even having to leave Target Display Mode.

Staggeringly, the Kansas-based design and film-making company MK Twelve have just turned 12 years old. I’ve been an avid admirer of their work for each of those years with each new show reel moving the mark even higher for motion graphic artists and videographers. Their work is as breath-taking as it is innovative and has been a constant source of inspiration over the years.

This post doesn’t require too many words. Instead, lets let the Vimeo embed below do the talking and raise our glasses to another 12 years of MK Twelve.

MK12 Summer Reel | 2012 from MK12 on Vimeo.

I was intrigued by a tweet from Simon Pegg this week that mentioned the Despecialized edition of Star Wars that a fan calling himself Harmy had created. This edit of the film aims to restore Star Wars as closely as possible to the movie that originally hit cinema screens in 1977 devoid of the CGI tweaks and re-edits from the 1997 Special Edition and 2004 DVD remaster. 

I could write a lot about Star Wars and Lucas’ apparently never ending desire to keep tweaking (and re-releasing) his movies but what Harmy’s re-edit stirred most in me was a desire to see my favourite childhood movie as it had been when I was a kid.

Having recently had a child myself, I can’t help but wonder how Henry’s childhood years might pan out. What will be his favourite film? What will he enjoy doing? What will he be interested in? What will he want to be when he grows up? All questions that I can instantly answer for myself both as they are now and as they were when I was a boy.

Back to Star Wars and my favourite scene both then and now was the scene often referred to as Binary Sunset possibly on account of the John Williams score that accompanies it.

Luke has been told by his Uncle that he has to remain as a farmhand for yet another year, dashing his hopes of joining the academy and becoming a star pilot. Aunt Beru has made a cryptic comment about Luke’s parentage and suggested that Luke is just not destined to be a simple farmer. As the two suns of Tatooine set, Luke reflects on his predicament. He desires so much to move away from the farm and head for the stars (quite literally) but his heart is heavy, knowing that his dreams are looking like remaining unfulfilled.

The scene struck a chord with the 5 year old me as it still does with the 32 year old me. What is my destiny? When the sun sets, what am I looking towards?

In 1985, the answer was simple – my destiny was to become a Jedi Knight too (that or a NASA astronaut anyway) but in 2012 it’s much less clearly defined. Am I the person I wanted to become? Was my destiny to become a husband, a parent, a middle manager?

I wonder if, after Return of the Jedi, Luke sat down and thought “I’m Vader’s son, I’m Leia’s brother and I’m a Jedi Knight. That’s it, that’s my destiny fulfilled”. I kinda hope not and that actually, every time he looked out as the sun(s) set, he thought “right, what’s next?”

Irritating at this is, it’s still preferable to Window’s nightmarish handling of file extensions with the display options squirreled away amongst a myriad of other ambiguous settings. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the comparison below!

Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s ‘is it’ / ‘isn’t it’ prequel to Alien has been on my radar for about 18 months now. So when a rare opportunity arrived to escape from parenting a 10 week old child, I hooked off to see it with a sci-fi pal.

I’m a huge fan of the original Alien film and although Alien 3 was fairly passable and destroyed James Cameron’s wonderful sequel to the original film within the first 5 minutes, I kept going back for more. That said, I do wish I hadn’t as Alien Resurrection and the Alien vs Predator films have been thoroughly abysmal and, like George Lucas’ dire Star Wars prequels have somewhat tinged their classic originals. However, with Ridley Scott returning to the director’s chair and the premise that this new film was more about the original Space Jockey alien and not the chest-busting Xenomorph, Prometheus promised a lot.

Unfortunately Prometheus left me with far more questions than it answered. The most obvious one being “Is this actually supposed to be an Alien prequel or not?”

Let’s be under no doubt that the human crew of the spaceship Prometheus (operated by a certain Weyland corporation) do visit a derelict space craft that is a bob-on replica of the one encountered by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien and said craft is obviously piloted by creatures that are identical to Alien’s Space Jockey creature. However, early on in the mission the Prometheus crew tell us that the planet they are visiting is LV223 whereas in both Alien and Aliens, the planet is called LV426. Perhaps someone made a script typo I thought and so the mission continued.

From that point on, Prometheus seemed to all intents and purposes to be an Alien prequel with an incorrectly numbered planetoid. It made some interesting revelations; the Space Jockeys are humanoids (in funky elephant-like space suits), they created the earth, they now want to destroy the earth (no reason given) and that, despite their immense technical knowledge they’d rather use a highly dangerous organism with a convoluted reproductive procedure to do the destroying for them. Hello, nukes would do the job for you and they don’t have a nasty habit of eating their owners but I digress.

The dangerous organism that I mention is similar to but not the same as the Xenomorph that we know and love. It starts life in a canister (not an egg). It seems to need to be ingested (rather than humping your face). It can work it’s way through a human system seemingly via any channels it wishes (olfactory, blood stream and seminal fluid to name but a few) and finally, when it’s fully grown it looks like a 2metre tall octopus. How did we get from H.R Giger’s stunning Xenomorph to something from Day of the Tentacle?

Along with this, there is an altogether new alien cobra-like thing that appears to swim in puddles and slips down people’s throats easier than a pint of Aspall on a sunny day. It then turns its host into a pathological killer with the general appearance of a zombie.

Finally, a Xenomorph type creature does make an appearance (in the usual chest-bursting way) towards the end of the film but we’re not shown or told how it got into its host (a Space Jockey). Design-wise it’s a pale comparison of the original beast but then if it’s supposed to be a pre-cursor then I guess we can let it off.

The film ends with more confusion. It seems like all is being set up nicely – Space Jockey is in situ in his penis / telescope / control seat, he takes off, then his craft crashes etc, etc. All nicely setup for Alien (just with a different alien in the cargo hold and on the wrong planet…) but then next thing we know the Jockey is out of his crashed craft and trying to kill the film’s main protagonist Dr. Shaw with again, no reason given. These Space Jockey’s really don’t like us human’s even though they created us in the first place.

Finally, in an almost verbatim speech to Ripley’s at the end of Alien, Shaw appears to leave a warning message at the alien crash site telling anyone who receives it to steer well clear. Presumably this is what the Nostromo then picks up at the start of Alien but then why would they mistake it for a distress call when it’s clearly in audible English?

So, how do we conclude this film? Well, in the words of Louis Walsh, I liked it. The visuals are spectacular with LV426, I mean LV223 looking marvellously desolate. The production design is stunning too with some wonderful ideas, equipment and alien artifacts. I particularly liked the scanning bee’s that the crew use to map the alien space craft and the Space Jockey’s star charts reminded me of childhood trips to the London Planetarium. Michael Fassbender is staggeringly good as the android David in this film. Definitely the best depiction of an android that the Alien franchise has ever seen.

However, as it is, the film asks more questions than it answers. I like thought-provoking films but if I have to visit more than 3 websites after the credits have finished to tie up the loose ends, then surely something in the storytelling has gone awry.

Some characters are pointless, others seem poorly chosen. Charlize Theron’s character Meredith Vickers does nothing throughout the film except reveal herself to be Weyland’s daughter – meh, sorry love, we don’t care. 114 year-old Weyland is a difficult character to understand. He’s funding the entire Prometheus mission himself on the wild speculation that the Space Jockey’s might be able to give him some way of living longer. At no point is he given any reason to believe this except that Dr. Shaw “chooses to believe” that it is so. Weyland doesn’t tell any of the crew (except for Fassbender’s android) that he is aboard the ship with them. Why not? What difference does it make? Weyland’s character is played (pretty poorly) by Guy Pearce in heavy, heavy makeup. Why not just use an elderly actor? Heck, why not use any actor but Guy Pearce? The only hint is the cryptic message at the end of the credits (hate it when film makers do that) stating that Weyland Corportation have been “building better worlds since 10.11.12″. A quick Google points you to this website: http://www.whatis101112.com/ which suggests that maybe there could be more to come – a prequel to the prequel that isn’t actually a prequel perhaps!

Final summary – an enjoyable film that will leave you confused, especially if you think of it as anyway related to the Alien story. Once you’ve seen the film, you’ll probably want to take a look at the Q&A section on IMDB, this interesting article from io9 and maybe the Gizmodo article on the cryptic 10.11.12 message.

I happened upon an interesting problem today whilst setting up WordPress 3.3.2 on MAMP. Essentially WordPress plays nicely with MAMP so long as you don’t want to switch on the Network feature that has been rolled in to the WordPress core since version 3.0 (it was previously available as WordPress MU (Multi User).

The problem is a result of WordPress Network’s inability to handle a host name with a specified port number. By default, MAMP uses port 8888 and 8889 for Apache and MySQL respectively, resulting in the host name http://localhost:8888 which WordPress Network won’t accept (the setup discussed here fails when using a host name that has a port number appended to it). However, with a few simple config changes to MAMP and and some very minor tinkering on the command line, you can overcome this problem.

Here’s how I got round the problem and got my WordPress Network working nicely on my local Mac. For the record, I’m using OS X 10.6.8 and MAMP version which includes PHP version and MySQL version. It’s also worth noting that, as far as my research could see, it is impossible to setup WordPress network in its sub-domain configuration on MAMP so the only option is to set it up in its sub-directory configuration. This wasn’t an issue for me as I need just this type of configuration.

Switch off OS X’s built in Apache web server.

Head in to System Prefs and make sure that Web Sharing is switched off. Otherwise OS X’s built in Apache server will get in the way of MAMP’s.

Download and install MAMP

No need for the Pro version, just the regular version of MAMP is all you’ll need. More info and download link here.

Configure MAMP

Firstly, set MAMP’s Apache document root to the proposed root of your local WP install. This is likely to be something like this:

/Users/mymacusername/Sites/mydomain/wordpress

Now set MAMP’s Apache and MySQL ports to web server defaults (80 and 3306 respectively). This will cause MAMP to request your OS X admin password whenever you start your MAMP server but if you’re savvy enough to be setting up a local web server, you can probably be trusted with an OS X administrator account!

Configure MAMP using its Preferences options

Edit your hosts file

Open a Terminal window and type:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

This opens the hosts config file in the vi text editor. At the bottom of the file, you’ll need to add the following line:

127.0.0.1 domainalias.co.uk (choose whatever you want for domainalias.co.uk, I used imagespa.co.uk)

Add an entry to your hosts file using OS X's Terminal

This basically means that from now on when you type domainalias.co.uk in to your browser it will actually point to the IP address of your local computer – the localhost.

If you’re unsure of how to use vi, take a look at this very helpful guide.

Restart MAMP

If the MAMP servers are still running, stop them and then quit the application. Ensure that the changes you made to /etc/hosts have been saved and exit your Terminal session. Probably best to restart your browser now as well. If you’re happy to do so, you might also do well to clear the browser cache as well. You can now restart MAMP and your browser. To check that everything is working as expected, create a really basic HTML file and save it in the folder that you specified as MAMP’s Apache root. Save the file as something like test.html and then visit http://mydomainalias.co.uk/test.html in your browser. If everything is ok, the file should render correctly and the host name in your browser address bar shouldn’t append a port number and certainly shouldn’t revert to localhost

Install WordPress

You can now download and install WordPress as normal using mynewdomainalias.co.uk as the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) fields within WP’s ‘Settings’ menu. You can create the WordPress database using MAMP’s built-in version of phpMyAdmin. You’ll find full instructions for setting up WordPress locally on MAMP here. Don’t forget that just like our test.html file, WordPress needs to be installed in the folder that you specified when you configured MAMP.

Setup WordPress Network

You should now have a WordPress 3 install working nicely available at http://mydomainalias.co.uk with the WordPress admin available at http://mydomainalias.co.uk/wp-admin

You can now continue with the WordPress Network setup using the Codex instructions found here.

I was drawn to this very clever mirror design via a recent post on Gizmodo. A great, if somewhat impractical idea for a novel bathroom mirror. Indeed the accuracy of the reproduction of Photoshop’s common tools and palettes means that any imagery of the mirror can’t help but look like screenshots of Photoshop!

The mirror measures just 43cm by 32cm which again reinforces that this is definitely more of a novelty than a useful piece of bathroom furniture. Nevertheless, a great piece of design and definitely a conversation starter. The manufacturers website doesn’t state whether the Clone and Heal tools actually work but at just €65, probably best to assume that they don’t!

Last night, Channel 4 aired ‘Derek’, Ricky Gervais’ latest comedy offering. Advertised as a comedy drama, Derek returns Gervais to the mockumentary genre that he (and frequent writing partner Stephen Merchant) redefined with The Office in 2001. Unlike that earlier work however, Derek seems to concentrate more on the drama and less on the comedy. Indeed it was actually Gervais long-time friend and comedy gimp Karl Pilkington that provided the majority of the laughs here leaving Ricky to concentrate on acting out his role as Derek Noakes the 49 year old retirement home worker with learning difficulties. A tricky role for even the most established acting talent to approach but even more so for a man who’s career, to date, has been defined by making us laugh.

And it was this, to me, that was Derek’s biggest problem. I struggled no end, to take Gervais’ character seriously. The full extent of Derek’s learning difficulty was not explored but the mental disability was thoroughly overshadowed by the characters pronounced jaw, crossed eyes and shuffling walk all of which were thoroughly superfluous and were probably the main reasons that Derek has come under fire from those seeing it as an opportunity to generate laughs from disability. For me, Derek Noakes as a character would have been much stronger without these physical impairments.

Setting the comedy in an elderly care home is an inspired idea and Gervais’ philosophy on why he chose this setting seems sincere if not slightly confused. The wealth of fantastic character opportunities that become available when dealing with people drawing near to the end of their days but who have a plethora of life experiences and baggage is enormous. This wasn’t tapped in to at all with the slight exception of Jean who passed away during the show. Sorry Rick but we really didn’t get the chance to know her so, despite your tears we couldn’t share your pain.

Opinions of Derek on Twitter were mixed with the majority of people seemingly concentrating more on the YouTube video featured in the show than the acting, the comedy or the social issues that were addressed.

It would be wrong to end this without some mention of Karl Pilkington who, in his acting debut was no different to when we last saw him in An Idiot Abroad 2 with the exception of an obviously fake, bald hair piece. That’s no bad thing though as Karl is just so genuinely funny. There have been musings for a while that Karl is a character devised by Ricky and Steve but you only have to listen to the original Xfm shows to know that this is not so.

Like Nick Frost, Karl seems to have been able to effortlessly turn his hand to acting by simply remaining himself. Whether he can ever successfully act as anyone other than himself remains to be seen but then, in my opinion this also still remains true of Ricky himself.