Bought a 3TB Seagate usb portable harddrive, and wanted to partition it for both Macs (to have Time Machines on their own dedicated partition) and Windows (for general storage of files).

Can’t be done using Windows, at least not the free software I tried. Had to be done on Mac, but not without some strange phenomenon that required a few tries. Basically, Mac’s Disk Utility won’t partition the Seagate as-is, from what I can find its most likely due to a EFI that is smaller than 200MB (in fact, the Seagate doesn’t have a EFI partition), and also the Seagate has a Microsoft reserved partition that seems to serve no purpose.

Whatever the reason, I didn’t bother to figure it out. I decided to forgo Seagate’s default setup and start from a blank disk. So, in the Mac’s Terminal:

diskutil list
diskutil unmountDisk force disk2 //or whatever disk# the usb drive is]
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1024 count=1024 //this will erase the entire usb disk
diskutil partitionDisk disk2 GPT JHFS+ "KnockDrive" 0g // this will partition the drive with a EFI and the remaining space as a partition of Apple's HFS format

Now open up Mac’s Disk Utility. Use the Partition function to segment the desired number of partitions; for the partition that will be used by a Mac, set it as Journal HFS, and for the partition that will be used by Windows, set it as exFAT.

Voila!

Credit:

• https://mycyberuniverse.com/how-fix-mediakit-reports-not-enough-space-on-device.html
• https://appuals.com/fix-mediakit-reports-not-enough-space-on-device-for-requested-operation/

X-Mouse Button Control is the follow up to discovering Dual Monitor Tools. The usage scenario is as follows:

1. The middle button on the scroll wheel for scrolling is never used.
2. DMT is setup to move cursor between the two screens using ‘Win-Z’ hotkeys.

With XMBC, I can map the middle button to fire ‘Win-Z’, which in turn tells DMT to ‘teleport’ the cursor to the other screen. I now can switch between screens one handed!

XMBC even has a portable version. Gold!

Windows 10 is by in large quite nice to use. Its polished and responsive enough for basic tasks even on a low power processor like the Atom X5.

Except when Windows have to do an update. Oh the amount of time it takes to calculate and download!

I guess that’s always been the case with any of the Window versions. I think that’s also an often not-considered reason to go for a Mac: the update process is much more straightforward. I take it its because MacOS supports a gazillion less hardware combinations than Windows.

Firefox has a powerhouse suite of Developer tools that comes standard. Among them is the ability to take a screenshot of the whole page!

First, enable the feature. Press ‘Ctr+Shift I‘ to display the Developer Tools. Click on the Gears icon, scroll down to tick ‘Take a screenshot of the entire page’

Then, whilst on any page, press ‘Shift+F2‘ to call up the command line interface, and type ‘screenshot –fullpage‘ then Enter.

A fullpage screenshot of the page will now appear in your Download directory!

Shout out to this free, open source project Dual Monitor Tools.

I often have my ThinkPad connected to an external monitor, and recently I’ve needed to move the mouse cursor across the two screens back and forth regularly – that is a lot of traversing!

So a search on whether I can ‘teleport’ the cursor from one screen to another using a keyboard shortcut resulted in Dual Monitor Tools. And it works brilliantly!

Don’t get scared by the amount of features; just use the DMT Cursor tool to add shortcut keys for how cursors operate. I use ‘Win + z’ as the shortcut key to ‘Move cursor to next screen’ – which is the ‘teleport’ feature I was looking for – and I also have ‘Cursor movement between screen is sticky’ as default so there’s a bit of resistance when manually traversing between screens (and hence precision at the monitor edges).