Tommy Peters' Bicycles

I had issue with a 640G Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive. ‘Erasing’ (the Mac term for formatting) the WD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) was impossible or so I thought, because the default format was MS-FAT32. Although Mac reads FAT, I was aware of FAT’s instability in Windows and given the size of the drive, I wanted an exclusive Mac platform to avoid the risk of losing a sizable amount of data. Trawling the blogs, I found a tip by one CarlaMac that worked perfectly. I launched Mac’s Disk Utility and did the following :- On the ‘PARTITION’ menu I selected ‘1 Partition’ and in the same window I clicked ‘Options’ 3 button options shows up for erasing. I clicked the first button (GUiD) for the Mac platform. Then I clicked ‘Apply’ and it the ‘erasing’ was done in minutes. I now have a stable MacDrum, minus the FAT, to throw stuff in.

Wei, my adopted niece, is a happy little thing with her PS3. She had a 40G before I purchased my 80G two weeks ago. What persuaded me to get this versatile machine was not so much Wei, but witnessing a close buddy enjoying Grand Theft Auto on his. Wei maxed out her 40 sometime back and asked me to upgrade it for further downloads and game saves. I was lazy to learn the procedure but when I got mine, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to do so, having already embraced Home where Home-Spaces are saved as you move around. Two weeks of Home and other downloads left me with 20G (out of 76 at start-up). Firstly, some blogging and research was in order. Most web tutorials walked the procedure like a breeze but I noticed a major step missing. Installing the system update file named PS3UPDAT.PUP into the fresh drive, without which the fresh drive does not start-up the unit. Only the PlayStation Knowledge Centre has the information and the PS3UPDAT.PUP download and I thank some pos...

“Don’t laugh at my moustache” – an old Arabic proverb that means – I know more than you think I know. He sat in the corner of an empty church and said it was a battle of mind over emotions and sought another angle, maybe intervention. I hazarded a guess and he opened up, but not before skirting the issue. The 411 - A foreign-born lass, her lover and her Malaysian husband. By her own admission, her sexuality was awakened in her adolescence by her father who continued lessons throughout her teenage years. On his front, only a sibling and a friend are aware of her early stages. I asked him when did realization set in. He replied that he has a passion for analyzing body language and movie mistakes and that understanding her dialect (unknown to her) was certainly helpful, hence, he knew of her infidelity for a while, during which time he hoped for honesty while analyzing the deceit. Besides he added, the local community was small enough for information to filter through at an earl...

Why does Lim Guan Eng, the current Chief Minister of Penang, appear like a breath of fresh air? It is because he does not allow emotion to trump logic, save for his emotional outburst in waiving fines when he first took office. The emotion of the previous government was to allow the bumiputera to overcome economic relegation and reading into his speeches, it happens to be the sentiment of the Chief Minister too. The difference is the previous government did not ask itself whether affirmation action actually helps the bumiputera but instead if it feels good to overcome his relegation. The Chief Minister asked a logical question. Does affirmative action help the bumiputera? Does it help him when he wears an invisible sign that reads 'affirmative action got me where I am'? I am reminded of a father of two, who agreed that families do practice 'affirmative action' when raising children, in that parents do give a quiet leg-up to the weaker sibling, but he qu...

The way I demand form and function in the office I work and the home I stay, I ache the same aesthetics in the virtual digital platform I stand upon all day. A poorly lit office with obtrusive partitions is unacceptable in this day and age simply because of the lack of productivity it engenders. Show me a well designed home that blends with the ambience and 'chi' and I will show you an 'emancipated' architect who embraced the whole project. Show me a wedding reception to remember and I will show you a 'colorful' wedding planner who controlled the many facets of the program right down to the bouquets. Computers and smart-phones are no less environments and I demand a single entity who controls the many facets that comprise the environment. At this point my digital life is a mess. My machine is Dell, the OS is Microsoft and applications are piggy-backed from 6 other entities. My back-up is Lacie. My Spyware is McAfee to ward of hackers of who offer a myri...

Nades, I am glad you are back and I hope Terence is well too. I was asked what trumps ‘life’. I said ‘goodness’. Say you witness a girl being violated and before you help her, an accomplice of the rapist warns you not to interfere or he will take your life. You tell the accomplice. ‘Take my life because I am going to help her’. Point is, threat to personal freedom presents itself every time you and Terence write and we do appreciate that at least for some journalists, values trump everything else, not to mention personal freedom. I was also asked why I engage the New Straits Times when I pick up the The Sun free of charge. I said they compliment each other as long as you are able to discern and not totally embrace their opposing sentiments. I said the latter (The Sun) is the technological equivalent of a hospital while the sentiment in the former (New Straits Times) is that you do not use the emergency ward to gauge the overall healthcare of the community but as a reminder of what coul...

Naked aggression describes the Internal Security Act when used against a civilian for any reason other than him being a genuine security threat, but ironically, abolishing it encourages the very aggression it is designed to prevent. In this context it should be re-defined rather than abolished. A plausible scenario. The opposition forms the government and the ISA is abolished. Al-Qaeda takes issue that the new administration has withdrawn logistical support for its separatist brethren in Thailand and Philippines and takes out Suria KLCC with a nail-bomb. Hundreds die. The sophisticated bomb is the handiwork of say, a Malaysian born chemist with known links to the group. The academic is apprehended but he was not at the scene of the crime and therefore charges cannot proffer on existing legislation. Wan Azizah is Prime Minister and Teresa Kok heads the Home Ministry. Not unlike Israel’s Golda Meir in the 70s, the liberalist Malaysian leader is in a dilemma when her Home Minis...