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.
Setting up a network printer on Windows
So here’s me, in my office, deciding to actually step up to the greatest challenge of my day: print stuff. My office connection is a simple network connection, no domain as far as I can tell and at some far end of the network there’s a printer.
Long story short, I tried everything for connecting to that printer. Tried adding a network printer by its address, hostname and a lot of silly attempts that probably made no sense. Tried installing it’s drivers from the CD. I tried everything I could think of for more than 30 minutes. Nothing worked. So then, I googled my problem and after a few minutes this is what I found:
http://uis.georgetown.edu/software/documentation/winxp/winxp.network.printer.html
You will probably be as amazed as I was to read how – in order to connect to a NETWORK PRINTER – you need to use the option “Local printer attached to this computer” not “A network printer..” as, well, you would think. I know, mind-blowing isn’t it? I thought it was a joke, but no… It actually worked.
