This past week I was the unfortunate victim of hard drive failure on my 1stgen Macbook Pro. After looking through my local NAS and finding that my most recent backup was done in April, I kicked myself a little bit. I have everything available to me to do regular backups, but like most people I am just too lazy. I decided that I wanted to try and get Time Machine to perform backups to a network share instead of a local drive. A simple terminal command was all that was needed to make my network volumes show up in Time Machine.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Just changing this preference has worked for many other people, but I get the a message from Time Machine stating “The backup disk image could not be created.” Nothing on google or the apple support forums seems to give any good info on the situation.

Any ideas?

Popularity: 8% [?]

Yes! It IS possible to watch NetFlix Watch Instantly content in Canada on your XBox 360! However, I will not post the details here, for fear of them closing the loophole somehow. So, if you want to know how I did it, ensure that you have the following requirements, and then e-mail me, in person, and I’ll reply with the details…

E-mail address:

Requirements:

• An XBox Live Gold Membership (with a U.S. Gamertag)
• An XBox 360 equipped with NXE and a hard drive
• A US Credit or Debit card (PayPal can help you with this)
• A valid US Mailing Address
• A NetFlix membership of any kind (including a trial membership)
• A computer running Windows XP or Vista 32-bit only (a VM will do)

If you can’t meet these requirements (and I’ll admit, they’re steep) don’t bother contacting me. I can’t help you.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Here’s a cool little release for those interested in making a Mac more like an AppleTV.
Scott Q writes:

I’ve just finished writing my own version of the AppleTV screen saver called QTV. After lots of searching I couldn’t find anybody that had a working version that actually did the same stuff the real AppleTV version did. QTV will work on both Tiger and Leopard (10.4 & 10.5) and has a random array of photos that you specify floating vertically across your screen at varying 3D depths and moving at varying speeds while periodically rotating as a group. My version also allows you to optionally have a glimmering sun cast it’s glow across the entire scene. You control everything thru various settings including: speed of front, middle and rear photo scrolling, the folder to search for images in, spin to the left or right, cast shadows from front and middle photos, the rotation interval speed, and whether to show the glowing sun or not.

Read more about QTV and download from his website!

Popularity: 9% [?]