So, I am sat in Philly airport (gate A2 for the interested) waiting for my connecting flight to Frankfurt. Why Frankfurt? Because it’s the only flight going that way which has spare seats. Then we get a flight to Birmingham, and I pay more money for the extra day of parking.

Yes, about that extra day… Originally my flight from Philly to Birmingham direct was going to get in at 6:25am UK time. According to the new itinerary that someone invented for me, my Frankfurt to Birmingham flight would get me in at 9:20 on the same day. Despite me setting off a whole day later.

Last night I was sat in bed trying to work this out, and it made no sense. It made even less sense to the checkin desk people who found it quite amusing. The automated checkin machine printed to parts of my journey off and then shut down, evidently thinking I was insane. It seems that whoever invented my new flight schedule forgot the small fact that days are 24 hours long, and at some point you need to go onto the next one. So yeah, I would be flying to Philly at 6:45am US time, and five hours earlier at the same time I would be flying from Frankfurt to Birmingham. Then, later today I would catch another flight from Philly to Frankfurt.

I don’t think they managed to mess the space-time continuum up that badly in Star Trek.

Only pain in the arse is that I don’t have an European travel adaptor for my laptop, so when I arrive in Frankfurt I’ll have nothing to do. Maybe then would be a good time to go insane? I will get home at some point…

My Macbook comes with a wonderful invention called Time Machine which is a clever incremental backup system. If an external HDD is connected to the Mac, Time Machine will ask if you want to use this as a backup drive. Saying yes then starts the backup running. It’s all automatic and keeps hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a month and then monthly backups until your external HDD fills up. And since this is a Mac, the backup is bootable without having to do anything special.

The only problem I have is that this is a Macbook, not a desktop machine. I don’t want to plug an external disk into it just to run automated backups, I have a perfectly good Linux server that I store backups on.

Unfortunately Time Machine doesn’t support network shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you go to Finder – Go – Connect To Server, connect to a network share and it’ll appear in the Time Machine list of volumes. The clever part is that a disk image is created on your network share, the disk image is then mounted on your Mac, and Time Machine does its thing. Apple like disk images

I’m currently on 13GB of 21. This is on a freshly bought MacBook that I’ve only installed OpenOffice and Firefox onto. There must be a way of stripping this down and removing some junk.

I gave my new work laptop to the technicians at work. They were in the process of scrubbing Vista off and replacing it with XP last I saw. Vista Home won’t connect to Windows Domains so it had to go.