BBC NEWS | Americas | Americans flee as hurricane nears

Tim Forster, of the UK charity Oxfam, on the island of Grenada, said: 'This is the worst devastation I have ever witnessed.

'Ninety percent of houses have been torn to pieces and there is waste strewn across the whole island.'

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I've read that this season represents a return to historic hurricaine patterns, and that the global warming component is relatively small (but growing). I wonder how confident climatologists are in those statements.

Capturing video on a Mac - EyeTV

Capturing video on a Mac - EyeTV

This author likes EyeTV. Interesting reference on how the capturing and publishing was done. Focus on TV capture -- using Mac as a PVR.

MacTheRipper: backing up the kid's DVDs

MacTheRipper

All you need on the mac is mac the ripper (decss for the mac) which is free and dragon burn--9.95 for a competitive upgrade.

The only other thing you might need is a compression program if the movie is more than the one-sided dvd capacity (single side capacity is 4.7GB, some movies come on DVDs that are double sided and can be up to 9.5GB -- but most consumer DVD drives won't burn double sided DVDs), but mac the ripper lets you extract only the movie and not the extras if you want.

Works good to back up the kids dvd's that they inevitably ruin.

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Mac the Ripper removes Macrovision protection, so you can copy from DVD to tape. It will be good to have a way to backup the kid's DVDs, or to play on the VCR (rather than buy another DVD). All legal so long as its our use.

Update 1/2/06: the original site has been shut down, but one can download 2.6.6 via VersionTracker.

Formating a hard drive as FAT under OS X

FWFL_User_Guide.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Your SmartDisk hard drive can be formatted and partitioned using Apple’s Disk Utility, located in your Utilities folder. Under Disk and Volumes Selected, select the appropriate drive, and click on the Partition tab. Under Volume Information, expand the Format field and choose Free Space. Click on the Erase tab, expand the Volume Format Field, and click MS-DOS File System. Click Erase and wait for the Erase to complete. Your drive is now ready to be connected to a Windows operating system.

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I didn't think this could be done any more under 10.3, but I didn't choose the "Free Space" tab. I need to test this.

SmartDisk Drives: Firewire FireFly and CrossFire

SmartDisk - Capture, Share and Preserve Digital Content

I've heard of some good results with these. I need to figure out who makes their bridge chips. I did see this on their web page, it means they don't use the dreaded Oxford chipset:

We are aware of reports that using the newest release of Mac OS X, "Panther," can result in data loss when used with certain types of external FireWire hard drives, notably those built with certain type of chips.

None of SmartDisk's FireWire hard drives use these types of chips. Therefore your SmartDisk FireWire hard drive should not be affected by the problems reported with Panther. No hard drive firmware update is needed (or is available) for SmartDisk's hard drives.

OS X: failure to mount a CD, cannot eject CD

OSXFAQ - Technical News and Support for Mac OS X

Every once in a while a CD would not mount on the desktop but would be visable by disk utility. It would happen with original CD's, Data CD's, Music CD's and burned CD's.

I would try restarting etc... nothing would get it to show up! I tried restoring the permissions, nothing. Disk utility was not finding any problems either.

Finally out of desperation I decided to log in as a fake user and see if that user could see the disc... and it could!

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I never had this problem -- until very recently. Some update has messed up drive mounting.

I wonder if this plays a role in the problems many have with mounting firewire drives.

This tip does work, but not if one uses fast user switching to switch to an already logged in user. It's only on initial login that the drive can be seen, and ejected or mounted!

macosxhints - Use Disk Utility to repair FAT32 formatted disks

macosxhints - Use Disk Utility to repair FAT32 formatted disks: "You can use Disk Utilty in Panther to repair MS-DOS (FAT32) formatted disks."

Apparently it can fix disks that data recovery systems have problems with. Weird.