SimpleTech by Fabrik sucks

I just bought a 1TB external hard drive from SimpleTech / Fabrik, and it is the worst piece of garbage imaginable.

Firstly, the drive comes pre-formatted for PC, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s formatted read-only, so to use it for ANYTHING I have to completely erase the drive.

Secondly, when attempting to erase the drive with Disk Utility, something about the drive makes the erase operation fail. I tried MS-DOS FAT, which seemed to work, before giving me an error upon trying to use it. Formatting to Mac Extended gives an error immediately.

I’m just considering myself fortunate that I don’t need this in the next few hours.

UPDATE: oddly, someone from SimpleTech saw my posting and sent me a personal email. She apologized for my experience and I sent her some notes. Apparently there is a separate product line that the same company makes which is meant for Mac called G-Technology.

I ended up getting something on special from Fry’s mail order, a 1TB “FreeAgent Pro” from Seagate. The funny thing about this one is it has a glowing bar on it that serves absolutely no purpose other than looking like a prop from a 1980’s sci-fi movie. It does not have a Firewire 800 interface (the SimpleTech one did), which is a bummer, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.

My files are copying now; it’s around 400GB which will take something like 6 hours to duplicate.

Z Channel notes

I saw “Z Channel – A Magnificent Obsession,” which was pretty cool. I wonder if there are copies of the magazine Z Channel used to put out, floating around on ebay?

Here’s a list of movies mentioned in “Z Channel” that sounded interesting.

  • A Safe Place (Jack Nicholson)
  • Images (Altman)
  • Welcome to LA (1976)
  • Madchen in Uniform (1931)
  • 400 Blows
  • Dance of the Vampires
  • Overlord (1975) – Stuart Cooper
  • Fingers (Harvey Keitel)
  • (Andrei Rublev)
  • Heaven’s Gate (1980)
  • Decline of Western Civilization
  • Bad Timing (1980)
  • The Important Thing Is to Love (Main thing?)
  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller
  • Le Magnefique
  • Berlin Alexanderplatz (it’s 12 hours!)
  • 1900 (5 1/2 hours!)
  • (director Sam Peckinpah)
  • (director Claude Chabrol)
  • Once Upon A Time In America
  • Wife Mistress
  • Lady on the Bus
  • Turkish Delight (Verhoven)
  • The 4th Man (Verhoven)
  • Soldier of Orange (Verhoven)
  • Flesh & Blood (Verhoven)
  • Spetters (Verhoven)
  • Katie Tippel (Verhoven – Kaetje?)
  • Salvadore (James Woods)
  • Something of Value (1957)

UPDATE: Looks like Wikipedia has a page with a more complete list

Enka 8-track Transcription

This 8-track tape belonged to my grandparents.
It’s Enka; I can’t really read it.
I ripped it to mp3, and transcribed the titles and artists for future analysis.

It’s titled
“トップスターによる心にこる大演歌”

It was released by Nippon-Columbia – 8WY-1021

TRACK 1

TRACK 2

TRACK 3

TRACK 4