How to format my USB drive for Mac and Windows
I was getting a bit frustrated this morning because of various problems moving files back and forth between my Mac and the other Windows machines in the house. All my portable drives, whether they were flash drives or external hard drives, have been formatted to NTFS for the past few years which always worked okay for me before. Windows obviously handles NTFS perfectly and Linux has no problem reading or writing to that either. Unfortunately, Mac OS doesn’t seem to play as well with NTFS (at least not out of the box). It can read NTFS, but it can’t write to it.
So now starts the file system war again. If I leave my USB drives in NTFS, my Mac can’t write to it. If I format it for the Mac, it won’t work on Windows. If I format it FAT32, it will work on both, but it won’t handle files larger than 4gb.
Now before people start commenting about this or that app that handles different file systems, I want to stress that I am aware such applications and plugins exist, I just wanted this to work easily/natively/out of the box on all computers, without requiring this extra layer.
After quite a bit of digging around, I found out about something called exFAT. You can read the wiki page for more info, but in a sentence, it’s somewhat like FAT, but can handle large files. It’s compatible with pretty much any Windows you’d be running in 2011 (hopefully) and Mac OS starting with Snow Leopard. So this should work fine for thumb drives going between the two OSs.
Of course though, nothing is perfect… exFAT is not compatible with Linux. So sooner or later, the file system war will start again. Until that dark afternoon, let’s pray for peace.
Fat
This is driving me crazy. No really, it is.
In the holy year of 2009 there are still nutritionists advocating low-fat diets as the silver bullet to a better life and everyone takes that for granted. Because of that the market has moved in this huge anti-fat direction. Hell, I can barely find ONE yogurt that is NOT low fat or fat free. And I could almost live with that if that extra fat weren’t replaced by sugar and artificial crap in most of these products. You’re taking away the natural fat that the human body needs (oh yes I said it, YOU NEED IT) and you are replacing it with chemicals and THAT’S suppose to be BETTER! Wait, WHAT?!
This is not about what’s good and what’s bad anymore, this is about choice. I can CHOOSE to smoke and knowingly hurt myself, I can CHOOSE to drink and knowingly hurt myself and while we’re at it, I can CHOOSE to OD on tons of OTC drugs and KNOWINGLY hurt/kill myself. But I am not given the choice of a regular yogurt. YO-GURT. Actually never mind the yogurt, it’s beginning to be difficult to even find cheese that is not low fat. WHAT IS GOING ON?! Is saturated fat really worse than tobacco?
I like my fat. YES, I do. Moreover, my FAT diet is HEALTHIER than your low-fat diet a hundred times and more. And I am willing to bet you that my cholesterol level is lower than yours. But this is not about me and it’s not about you. Do whatever you want. Eat your sugar-filled fat-free yogurt, drink that unhealthy soy milk (yes, I said unhealthy), eat that disgusting chemical mixture you nicknamed butter and pretend you are healthier because of that; but PLEASE let me have my fat yogurt, sour cream, cheese, milk etc. I am not taking away your diet coke, am I? Just give me my regular yogurt back, give me my fat back so that I can actually complete my healthy diet.
And when you’re done with that. please wake up. Fat is not the “enemy”. The enemy is inside, not outside.
PS: I also love it when people grab light yogurt, skim milk, cheese out of skim milk and then, finally, a box of donuts. Let me put it frankly: you’re doing it wrong.
