Portable external hard drive filesystem?

How should one format a 500Gb Maxtor USB2 external drive for read/write use on both Windows and Mac?

I tried using NTFS, but you can’t write to it on the Mac, except using MacFUSE and NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver which *totally* corrupted all the data, after the computer crashed in the middle of writing to it.

I tried using FAT32, which had to be done using Swissknife, because 500Gb is too large for Windows to format in FAT32 natively, but it was immediately totally corrupted on the Mac.

It eventually worked though.

IMAP access to Gmail on your Blackberry

Orange told me that Gmail IMAP on the Blackberry Pearl they sold me is “not supported”, and couldn’t tell me how to set it up. In fact, it can be configured to work.

What you need to do is set up a new email account with an email such as anything_at_all @ site about nothing .com. The “site about nothing” part needs to be a domain that has a mail record set up, but don’t use gmail, hotmail or yahoo for this because the blackberry will set the mail server automatically without giving you the chance to choose IMAP.

It will tell you it cannot configure the email account for you, and offer the option of configuring it yourself.  You will have to follow through 3 or 4 pages saying the same thing, but you will reach a form that lets you enter all the fields you need to. Go on to enter the true details of your Gmail account, using mail server: imap.googlemail.com, port: 993.

It might be a little slow for your email actions to be synchronised between your blackberry device and your Gmail account, but it really does work! Now when I mark an email as read on my blackberry, it is also marked as read in my main Gmail account.