When It Changed

Well, now that I have a brand new Iomega Prestige 1.5TB external hard drive (two of them, actually, so I can finally start keeping proper backups), we can soon get back to normal operations around here.

It's at times like this that I gain a new appreciation for how quickly technology advances nowadays.  My last drives before this one, I bought in 2007.  They were four Western Digital USB 2.0 drives with about 450 GB each.  In other words, three of them held about what the new one holds.  And each of those drives is more than twice the physical size, and cost at least half again as much when new.  (My new drives cost $99 each, with free shipping.  I don't think my last floppy drive even cost that little.)

Should I mention that my first hard drive was an Apple ProFile, held 5 megabytes, and had a volume somewhere north of a cubic foot?

So, does this mean it's time for Undersea Kingdom, Chapter Nine?  Well, not so fast, my fellow Crashites. I put together the file for Chapter Nine, then found I had a little problem uploading it to YouTube.

Turns out that during the couple of weeks I was reluctant to use the Thrilling Wonder drive for fear of finishing it off completely, YouTube made some changes.  Such as, now, in order to upload something, you need to use one of their approved browsers... all of which only run on Macs with System 10.5 or higher.  My eight-year-old G5 is currently running 10.4.11.

Fortunately, I do have a System 10.5 "Leopard" update disk, but I'm copying everything on my main drive before I do anything.  Apparently the folder with my iTunes files will take 7 hours all by itself.  Sometimes, technological change is a bitch.

So, what can I say?  Hold in there, folks.  Crash is coming.

UPDATE: I was worried about some aspects of the change to 10.5, so I re-installed one of my spare internal drives, and installed 10.5 on that, keeping 10.4.11 on my main drive.

So, from my new 10.5-running drive, I went to the websites of Firefox and Google Chrome (YouTube's approved browsers for files over 2GB)... and found I should have read them more closely the first time.  Because, you see, what they require is System 10.5... and an Intel Mac, which mine is not.

So it looks like I'm stuck.  The files I've uploaded since returning in July have ranged up to 5.5GB.  But no more.  In their wisdom, YouTube took a system that worked adequately (if not perfectly) for PowerPC Macs, and junked it for no particular reason.  So when you see my videos, and they're lower in resolution than they used to be, or chopped into two or three pieces, thank YouTube.

My file for Undersea Kingdom, Chapter Nine, was 2.16GB.  So looks like I'm going to have to knock down the quality a tad before trying again.