Long-term Memory

My car has a CD player build-in that supports MP3 CDs. However, it’s fairly picky on the format of the disc. I tried to burn a CD using Burn Folder which comes with Leopard, which creates a multistandard disc containing a HFS+, an ISO-9660 with Rock Ridge, and a Joliet with Rock Ridge. While this looks very nice on paper, the car’s CD player was less satisfied: “Error CD”.

Another issue is that the player has no support for M3U-playlists. It does, however, support “albums” (directories), which can be used to emulate playlists. Just add a number prefix to each filename and it’ll work. Placing the same file in multiple playlists/albums/directories is possible, but wastes space. But this can be worked around.

Continue reading ‘Faking playlists on an MP3 CD’ »

Time Machine is the Mac way of doing backups. The concept is fairly similar to incremental rsync snapshots. Officially, Apple does not support Time Machine backups to a network volume: network drives don’t show up in the Time Machine user interface. The only way to get network-based Time Machine is by buying a Time Capsule.

When doing a Time Machine backup to a normal disk (I tried it with a LaCie 1TB USB disk), one can see the file structure created. Mine looked like this: Backups.backupdb/<hostname>/<date>/Macintosh HD/… Inside this directory is my full system (minus the parts I explicitly excluded in the Time Machine config).

Since we have more than 1 Mac, I’d like to have all of them back up to the same hard drive. I already have a Linux-based server serving files over AFP. This is where it gets more interesting…

Continue reading ‘Time Machine to a linux server’ »