Scott Hanselman's blog, at ComputerZen.com, is one of my favorites. He seems to always have the best answers to the worst problems.

Recently I had purchased a Western Digital MyBook 500GB External Hard Drive. (I managed to find them at a local Sam's Club for only $120, which was a steal at the time.)

I installed and setup the external hard drive and collected at least 200GB worth of data on it before I noticed something. "This hard drive came formatted as FAT32, which doesn't support files larger than 4 gigs."

This was a problem for me for two reasons. I wanted to use the external hard drive for both Virtual PC images and PC backup images, both of which can be larger than 4 gigs.

I knew I could copy off all my data and then format the drive as NTFS, but this meant finding over 200GB of free space on my network, which I could do but would be a hassle to do and the undo again.

Fortunately for me I remembered an article I had read on Scott's blog: "The Duh Files - The file is too large for the destination file system".

C:\Users\CJCraft>convert /?
Converts a FAT volume to NTFS.

CONVERT volume /FS:NTFS [/V] [/CvtArea:filename] [/NoSecurity] [/X]

  volume      Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon),
              mount point, or volume name.
  /FS:NTFS    Specifies that the volume will be converted to NTFS.
  /V          Specifies that Convert will be run in verbose mode.
  /CvtArea:filename
              Specifies a contiguous file in the root directory
              that will be the place holder for NTFS system files.
  /NoSecurity Specifies that the security settings on the converted
              files and directories allow access by all users.
  /X          Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
              All open handles to the volume will not be valid.

Brilliant, simply brilliant. Thanks again, Scott.

What is the PopSci Predictions Exchange?

It's The Hollywood Stock Exchange for science and technology.

You get $250,000 in virtual PopSci dollars. Then you can expand your portfolio with bets on energy, space, consumer technology and extreme science, and compete against other players for prizes and bragging rights (So far I'm up $20,994).

So far here's my portfolio:

Overall Rank: 369 of 2465 (percentile: 85%)

• iPhone Hack in First Two Months (IPHACK) 5.36%
  • Will the iPhone be hacked to run third-party applications within two months of its U.S. release?
  • If nothing else it'll run DOOM. It's already on almost the entire Apple iPod line. I've made 5.36% on this one so far.
    
• PlayStation 3 Wins Console Wars (PS3WINS) 12.36%
  • Will the PlayStation 3 outsell both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii by the end of 2009?
  • I can't see the Playstation 3 making this kind of come back. So I'm shorting selling this one. I'll make money if the price goes down, which it will , -12.36% already.
    
• Skydiving Altitude Record Broken (SKYDV) 9.55%
  • Will a human successfully break the world record for skydiving of 102,800 feet by the end of 2009?
  • So let's see. There is a world record of 102,800 feet. Alright well then someone can do 102,801. Easy money.
    
• Major U.S. Hurricane in 2007 (HURICAN) 13.87%
  • Will a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane make landfall within the U.S. this year?
  • Weather seems a little volatile lately, and fairly good odds to me on this one. 13.87% and counting.
    
• Google Overtakes Yahoo (GOOGL) 17.07%
  • Will Google.com overtake Yahoo.com as the world's most trafficked Web site by the end of 2007?
  • To me Yahoo seems more like a portal site to me than Google, but I couldn't resist the easy profit due to market popularity. This one might max out the way it is going.

This is a long video, a little over eight minutes, but it is so worth seeing. It has several plot twists in it, worthy of M. Night Shyamalan himself. Just wait, Disney will make a movie out of this yet.

Corporate Comedy by Corporate Comedian Don McMillan.

This is a great PowerPoint presentation on how NOT to do PowerPoint presentations . It's about 4 minutes of pure PowerPoint wisdom, plus its hilarious.

How NOT to user PowerPoint by comedian Don McMillian

I've post an article about Microsoft Popfly on CodeProject.com.

CodeProject.com: Meet Microsoft Popfly: Part I - Mashup App Creator Built On Silverlight

It covers the following areas:

Popfly Space	Popfly Web Page Creator
Popfly Mashup Creator	Popfly Block Creator

If there is enough interest, then I'll do a part two on building mashups, and a part three on creating Popfly blocks.

Make Magazine, one of the coolest magazines ever, has an article on their blog on all the progress being made in the world of 3-D printers, or as I like to call them replicator prototypes.

The article I'm referring to is The Desktop Factory - Fab@Home.

Here's a real good overview section from the article:

Lipson’s fabrication machine, called a “fabber,” can print thousands of three-dimensional objects, everything from toy parts to artificial muscles, using dozens of materials, including PlayDoh, peanut butter and silicone, by following simple directions sent to it by a PC. About the size of a microwave, the fabber costs $2,300 to assemble—roughly one tenth the cost of commercial 3-D printers.

While I was watching Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed on History Channel I happened on one of the coolest commercials I have send in a long time. It was a commercial for the Craftsman CompuCarve. You can pretty much see the same thing here.

The Craftsman CompuCarve is $1,899.99, which I think is still a little high. But if you consider the business opportunities, from everything like mall kiosks, flea markets, business logo items, and eBay and other online possibilities I think it would be easy to make you money back on the investment. (Yeah, I'm tempted.)

I'd want to make a Möbius strip or a maybe a Sierpinski triangle. It's a shame it is limited on 3-D capabilities. I think I'll hold out a little longer and see how the The Desktop Factory - Fab@Home project does. Besides I probably couldn't resist trying other things besides wood in it.

Famous Last Words: "Hey, look its winter. Let's make ice sculptures."

I just saw on Robert Scoble's Blog that Microsoft has released a new version of Windows Live Writer. And I thought the previous version was good.

Since I both use and really like Windows Liver Writer, and its Free, I figured I give my endorsement and big thanks to the team for great job.

"Writer is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog."

Highlights of New or Improved Features

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• New look and feel

Key Features

• Compatible with your blog service
• WYSIWYG editing
• Rich media publishing
• Powerful editing features
• Offline editing

Developer Community

• Blog
• Community Plugins - here are three I'm trying out.
• Insert Spaces Emoticon
• Allows you to insert a Live Spaces Emoticon into your blog entry
• Paste from Visual Studio
• Easily transfer syntax highlighted source code from Visual Studio to elegant HTML in Windows Live Writer.
• XFN Link Editor
• This plugin enables Windows Live Writer to insert XFN (XHTML Friends Network) aware links.
• Forum
• Developers
• Provider Customization API

[Download]

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There are new versions of Windows Live Messenger 8.5 Beta and Windows Live Mail as well.

I've put together a beginner's introduction into Silverlight on CodeProject.com. The article covers how to use Silverlight to create the famous Sierpinki Triangle fractal. It's really meant to help someone who wants to create their first Silverlight experience, but then again maybe that's you?

Sierpinski Triangle - An Introduction into Silverlight by Example

There's a whole set of "Hi, I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC." parodies on YouTube. They are terrific, made my day. There are nine of them in total, and they crack me up. I think I'll watch them again.