Time Machine – Destination not resolvable

Ok, so I got to admit – I fell for Apples ‘set and forget’ mentality good and proper on this one…

It turns out that Time Machine is unable to backup your computer either after you’re logged out and the machine left on or before you’ve logged on from powering on your computer.

I was flicking through my logs one day, and stumbled apon a bunch of messages which at first glance, were less than conclusive:

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Google Maps gone tits up

I loaded up the Google Maps app on an iPad, and this is what I got:

And all I could think of was- # Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! #

Posted under Computing, Internet | Leave a comment

A milestone approaches

I knew this would come sooner than later. It’s been on my mind for a while now, and I’ve been between thoughts about what I’m going to do about it. In just over a year and a bit from now, this domain name tattybox.net will turn 10 years old.

In all honestly it isn’t the age of the domain that bothers me, the fact that the main usage of this domain is personal email and website coming second place. My thoughts lay on the fact that it’s 10 years on for me. Sometimes you got to stop for a while and review on where you are now, and where you have come from.

10 years is a long time for most things, especially in IT, so there maybe some questions to be answered.

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PEBKAS

For the people who didn’t know, I have been working with computers and networks for many years and professionally for at least 5 years. It started off with me skipping to work, 20 minutes early and so energetic to help and fix any users problem they threw at me.

Spin on to today’s IT culture and well, nothing has changed. Users are still asking the same old questions, like “My screen doesn’t work” – to which you can only suggest “Have you tried turning on the machine?” – which normally the outcome is the user hasn’t flicked the power switch on at the wall or perhaps hasn’t turned the monitor on. *Arrgh*

Don’t get me wrong, I have a particular skill in keeping a cool head when users are losing theirs, and within a few moments all is right again. For me, the tedious questions aren’t the issue because users will be users and all they want to do in life is do X, yet Y is getting in their way – no problem.

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2012: tattybox.net gets a new design

Right ok, so I had been running the current or old version of tattybox.net since 2007. After that many years I got bored, and have since gone through about 3 designs trying to get what I want out of the site.

If anyone reading this knows me, then they will know that me and site designs don’t get on, and as such, never get finalised into a live version. Not anymore…

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GTA IV: You’ve Won!

Today marks a mile stone. I have completed the missions on GTA IV. It has taken me (to this day) 3 whole years since purchasing it, but hey! who’s counting?

Yes I will admit it’s been coming for a long time, as I havn’t been able to commit such time required to complete it in a reasonable time (unlike some people). I can say that this has to be the best GTA in the series and a story line that I will not be forgetting anytime soon.

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Day 9,100

I’m feeling like *pfft*.

I’m hot, sweaty, worn out and feeling tired. The good news is that I’ve got the night off with the g/f tonight so will be taking a chill pill and chill-axing. (Did I get away with that?)

Anyway, I gotta press on..

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Windows at it’s best

Tried upgrading a Windows XP computer to Service Pack 3:

Always nice to be reassured once in a while, at least it’s being honest.

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iMac HDD Replacement

I had come to the point where my 250GB HDD was getting full, so decided on replacing it. Following a quick guide from iFixit, I had my iMac in pieces and had replaced the stock with a 1TB HDD I had lying around. Great. Job Done.

Oh no it wasn’t. After a few weeks/months of great usage of the newly installed HDD, I started to have random lockups where I was just left with a constant HDD access sound from inside the computer. A few months pass and the issue becomes more frequent, and of course more annoying.

After a shed load of ‘research’ (read: google searches) I gave up and just decided to update the HDD’s firmware from CC34 to the latest i could find- CC49. Of course you would think that Seagate would be forth coming and actually tell me an update was available by confirming that my serial number was in need of an update, but no Seagate would only tell me that my product number was one listed for this firmware update. Not knowing if this was the latest firmware, I could only assume so as it was greater than my current firmware.

So as I threw caution to the wind, I burnt myself a fresh copy of the firmware and booted the CD. Firmware Upgraded. After taking the plunge, following the reboot, the HDD was recognized and Mac OS X booted without issue.

Today after taking a relitivly small change, with a rather high risk, as of now (2 hours in) the update has fixed the issue.

- Update: A few hours later and still good. Lets hope for the morning!

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Steam Gaming on the Mac – Ouch

Ok, so I’ve been using Bootcamp with Steam since day 1. Then Valve release a version of Steam for the Mac platform, and I’m thinking ok, this could be good. Months (a year?) pass and I get round to installing it on my Mac in OSX for the first time and set L4D2 and TF2 downloading. (Yippie)

Fast Forward 36 hours of downloading and we’re done. Load L4D2 and:

Ouch. Yes. For those who don’t know the size of L4D2, the download size is 11GB. 11GB of bandwidth wasted.

After a quick Google search, it turns out that my iMac (2006) is ‘out of date’ and thus Steam won’t support such a crappy old graphics card. But wait – Steam work flawlessly on Windows Bootcamp! WTF?

Oh well on a plus, TF2 worked like a dream. Too bad it’s going to be deleted right after this post, and my dreams of Steam:Mac are for now, in the gutter.

Go Windows Bootcamp! :)

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