It's a rainy Saturday afternoon. Mommy I'm bored!

Let's have some fun. If you have a DropBox Account, you can play along

Download the OPML Editor for Mac or Windows here. Its free.

Install it. Ignore everything it does for now (feel free to explore later)

From the File menu select New

Right-click on little triangle you see in the new untitled document.

You will see a menu pop up

Select Add Feed

Paste this URL into the box: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5538262/adamCurrysWorldOutline.opml

Save the document with either controlKey-S or Save from the File menu

Name the file something like 'yourNameWorldOutline.opml in your Public dropbox folder

Now double click on the Untitled newspaper icon in your document.

It should expand, and you will see my document, with more icons to click on.

Some of the icons are more lists (opml files) some are feeds (rss) You can also select Add Link from thr right click menu to link to web pages, videos, sound files. Anything that has a URL

Now repeat the process of pasting in feeds in a few more lines in your OPML document

Email me the public Dropbox URL of your opml Document [adam (at) curry (dot) com], and I'll paste that into mine in some kind of Geographic organization.

When you click on my node again, you will see where I put it.

This is linking all our documents together, like a directory. But no one is the boss.

Lets see what we can do in the next hour or so...

(ps) This playful project was inspired by this post from Dave Winer

(pps) Opening and closing a node refreshes what it expands to based upon what the owner of the node has done with their outline.

 3/26/2011; 3:13:35 PM.   .

I have a ReadyNAS DUO that I use for network storage.

It is mainly used for Mac Time Machine backups, but also as a central storage for video production.

The bulk for the files stored there, when it comes to size, are never touched again. They are masters of 'appisodes' of the Big App Show. They are huge. 1-2 GB per file.

I love the ReadyNAS DUO, because of it's ease of use and compatibility with all flavours of systems, as well as it's multi drive redundancy. If one drive craps out, another takes over.

But of course there are limits to all storage solutions, and the hundreds of master video files are now taking up 80% of the avilable space. (The ReadyNAS emailed me this in a report)

Since the master video files are never used, I wanted to move them off onto their own USB drive for storage, in the unlikely event I will ever need them again. $89 for a Westerdn Digital 2TB drive is a very decent value for any time I might have to spend re-exporting or worse, re-creating an appisode should the need call for it. I value my time.

Unfortunately, upon connecting the drive, out of the box, to the ReadyNAS DUO's USB port it only showed 196MB of free space.

I reformatted the drive with the Mac Disk Utility to no avail, the NAS still only showed just shy of 200MB free space on an empty drive.

Off to google land, which is getting worse by the day it seems, which is the entire reason I'm writing this post. I hope that one day someone else running into this problem will google the title of this post, as I did, and come across this information. It's how this interweb stuff is supposed to work after all.

I did run across this good samaritan, 5 pages of search results deep and recognized my exact problem, albeit with a Windows solution.

Of course I have the Asus netbook, but since it's running Windows 'Starter Edition' I don't have enough permissions to re-format the drive as needed. Thanks Redmond!

My fix was to start a format on the mac with disk utility and interrupt the process by cancelling out and disconnecting the drive.

Upon reconnecting the drive isn't recognized and disk utilities opens automatically telling me I need to do a full reformat. I simply selected the FAT32 optioin and hit erase. AFter a few minutes the drive was ready to be re-connected to the NAS and presto! The admin program shows it as having 1.8TB of free space.

Next I ssh'd into the NAS, as you really don't want to be copying 100's of GB over the network. Not only will it take literally days, but it will probably caise a stack overflow of the cheap ass Time Warner Cable router/modem.

In order to do this, you will have to install the EnableRootSSH extension. It sounds scarier than it is. From a Termoinal window you type: ssh root@ip.address.of.the.nas

Type your password when prompted and you're in.

From here you will need a bit of basic knowledge of command line navigation and file manipulation.

On my system I did the following:

cd /media/Videos/Finals

mv *.mov /USB/USB_HD_1

It'll still take quite a while to move all the files, predicated by the speed of the USB, but it's all happening in the bacjground, isn't taking up any network or computer resources and I will feel great having all that space back and the archive safely stored for any future needs.

Hope this helps if you were googling for the answer!

 3/26/2011; 12:57:41 PM.   .