For the last few months I’ve been finding myself constantly moving pictures and music between the laptop and the desktop. The laptop was starting to run out of space, so when quibix mentioned an external hard drive I had one of those very rare “eureka” moments when I realised a solution had just been presented. Yesterday I bought a nice Lacie 250Gb external USB 2 hard drive. The idea is that I’ll use it as a repository for my music and pictures so that I can move them around, share them between computers and operating systems. Of course FreeBSD refused to mount the drive as the single 238Gb partition exceed it’s maximum size for FAT32, so while I did try recompiling the kernel using the MSDOSFS_LARGE option and mounting it (which worked), the extra memory usage was exactly as predicted by the warnings and it took so long I don’t think it’s worth it.

The drive is now partitioned and all the music and some of the pictures have been moved over. Organising the music is easy, but how should I organise the pictures? I’ve tried a variety of methods but have yet to find one that I like enough to habitually use it. I think maybe just using the date (year and month) is the obvious solution, but as some of the months have a few hundred pictures this may not be as smart as it sounds. Something to ponder while flogging down to Houston and back I think.