How to partition and format an external hard drive on a mac

Here is a quick and easy way to format an external hard drive on a mac computer using the disk utilities partition tab. Make sure the external hard drive is connected either via USB or Firewire 800 directly to the mac computer.

If the hard drive is detected correctly it will mount on the desktop and you should be able to read and write to the external hard drive or read only if it has been formatted as FAT32 or NTFS.





Now navigate to the Applications > Utilities folder and launch the Disk Utility application.

Locate the external hard drive on the list to the left and highlight the capacity. Now under the Partition Layout, select 1 Partition.

Now next to Format, select Free Space.

Now click on the Options button located near the bottom of the screen and select GUID Partition Table then click OK.

Now click the Apply button and confirm the change by clicking the Partition button.

You have now successfully erased the hard drives old data and partition information. You can now repeat the same steps to create a new partition and format the external hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Now under the Partition Layout, select 1 Partition. Now next to Format, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Now click on the Options button located near the bottom of the screen and select GUID Partition Table then click OK. Now click the Apply button and confirm the change by clicking the Partition button.

You have now successfully created a new partition and formatted the external hard drive, it is now ready to be used on your mac computer.

Note: To use the external hard drive on a mac and pc (cross-platform), just select MS-DOS (FAT) from the Format menu.

HootSuite 1.7.5 for Android

So I've been using HootSuite for Android for a good while now and never really had any issues with it until now. The other day I was doing my regular activities and noticed the GPS signal actively running in the background while non of my GPS enabled applications were running at the time, as I started going through the list of apps I decided to kill their process and see if the GPS icon would disappear but nothing happened, so I powered off my Galaxy Nexus and waited two minutes before turning it back on, everything seemed to be working fine so I didn't think much of it.

A few minutes later I checked my phone and noticed my battery was about to die and the GPS icon was active even though I had not used any applications after the reboot. I sent out a tweet with the following image asking if anyone else had noticed this type of behavior on their Galaxy Nexus.

After some feedback, someone had mentioned that the GPS icon had disappeared after killing the HootSuite application from running in the background. After performing some test myself I was able to duplicate the same results and determined the culprit was HootSuite that was keeping the GPS signal active even though I wasn't using it.

Post your comments below and let us know if you also have encounter the same problem on your smartphone.

Update:
HootSuite has been great in resolving the GPS issue with their latest update to HootSuite for Android.
You can download it from the Google Play store here: HootSuite (Twitter & Facebook)

@BlizzardCS Twitter Contest

@BlizzardCS shall be that first step toward glory, the first step to reclaiming our land.

@BlizzardCS is proud to present our newest giveaway. Help us get the information out there about Diablo III support articles and you might have a chance to win a Collector’s Edition signed by the development team themselves or a Collector’s Edition key.

Contest Starts:
May 21, 2012 @ 7:00 pm (PDT)

Contest Ends:
June 2, 2012 @ 11:59 pm (PDT)

Full details here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5151269406

My Samsung Galaxy Nexus

 The Galaxy Nexus on Verizon’s 4G LTE network is an awesome smart phone with great features. I have owned the phone since its release date and I made the choice to keep it stock (locked) out of the box to determine if it had any flaws and down falls that would bug me.

I have found the phone might have a possible bug with the its LTE 4G radio antenna where it cause the phone to crash and power off completely similar to a Windows (screen of death) blue screen error and so far this only appears to occur when streaming music regardless of the application or service.

I must say at first I thought it was an issue with Google Music player or service as that is the only application for music I was using at the beginning but after an update the problem continued and I noticed that it only happen when listening to music so I assumed it had something to do with Google’s music player or service so I decided to backup my data and perform a factory reset and only install my daily applications to see if the problem continued.

After a few days I thought the issue had resolved itself but then one day after work out of no were my phone shutdown in the middle of listening to some music via Google Music player and writing a tweet. At this point I knew there had to be something wrong with my new Galaxy Nexus but what? I decided to test the phones behavior with other music applications since this had not occurred while streaming YouTube videos or Netflix movies but only when streaming music content.

I installed Pandora Radio for Android and started doing my normal activities on my phone like answering emails, posting tweets and reading articles online via the default browser or Google Currents and I noticed the phone would crash and power off after a few minutes or an hour or two of use. At this point I know there is a problem but still not sure if its software or hardware since there is no log I can check or error message. My final test was to only stream music without interacting with other applications and after 30 minutes of streaming the problem occurred again, I also transfer a few music albums to the internal memory and played them with Google Music player, after a while the phone crashed again completely powering off and rebooting after about a minute.

This is a random problem because there are days were the phone behaves just fine and other days were I’ve had the problem occur one to three times in a day.

Do you own a Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon’s Network that is behaving the same way? Or am I the only one with this problem?