I had just recently purchased a Buffalo external hard drive with 250GB capacity, to hold the photos I’ve been taking with my new Nikon D60 camera. But since the space was there I figured I’d use it for storing my other non-office files as well. That is, until I tried copying a file that was 5GB in size.

I was stumped when Windows told me the disk I was copying into did not have enough space for the 5GB file, which was strange because there was over 200GB left in the drive. A quick search through the Buffalo forums revealed that the drive—connected via the USB port—was formatted in FAT and therefore had the 4GB file size limit. The thing to do was to format the drive into NTSC. Doing this would limit file access to the drive by only Windows XP/Vista systems, but that was what I had anyway. But how could I do that when Windows only lets you format USB drives in FAT?

GetUSB.info taught me how. The illustrated step-by-step on how to format any USB drive as NTFS can be found on THIS PAGE. So if you ever have the same problem as I did, head on down there now.

BUT—and this is a very big but—what if you already have files in the USB drive and you don’t want to erase all that is there by re-formatting? You can convert FAT to NTFS directly by following this guide on Microsoft TechNET. However it requires entering commands into a DOS/command prompt window, so if you’re not comfortable with that, you’re better off finding a computer with enough space to hold what you have on your external USB drive, copy everything off, and do the format as suggested by GetUSB.info.

Happy formatting!

Now ain’t that cool? Pictobrowser lets you embed that slideshow/album on your blog in just 4 quick and easy steps. All you need is a Flickr account with the photos in it either Tagged, in a Set or Group. There’s lots of other things you can do to customize your slideshow as you will see in the Pictobrowser builder.

The photos you see above are from our trip to Corregidor Island early this year.

If you look at the upper right hand corner of this blog you’ll see that it now sports an Ubuntu ribbon, courtesy of blogsticker.net.

Blogsticker.net can provide several types of ribbons for your blog. You only need to sign up, claim your blog and put up a javascript code within the header tags of your blog template.

However, as I was surfing for alternatives, I came upon Quickribbon.com, a completely free and no sign-up required site that can help you generate a ribbon for your blog that says anything and can link to anywhere. I’m using a ribbon generated from quickribbon.com on my main blog, Balay ni Bambit, to promote my post “The Sun Sets on the Nayong Pilipino.”

The main difference between the two is that blogsticker.net is a community, while Quickribbon gives you just that–a quick ribbon–and a choice of where you want to link to, and the option to stay in the same browser window or open a new one for the link. Blogsticker links you up with other blogs with the same sticker as you have, and can also show you other blogs with other ribbons that you might want to try on.

If you have more than one blog you can register them all under one blogsticker.com account, with different ribbons displaying on each blog.

Click here to get a Blogsticker, and here to get a Quickribbon.