Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
Affordable Backup for Your Laptop February 6, 2009
It is good practice to backup the files on your computer. If you are a notebook user it is even more crucial to keep a backup of your drive’s contents because they are more prone to crashing at a young age from being moved around so much.
Western Digital’s solution is the WD Passport. The Passport is a USB-powered, portable hard drive that includes backup and synchronization software and even a tool that lets you take your desktop wallpaper, email, and internet favorites, to any computer you want.
The drive has a single blue light to show the drive is plugged in and powered on, aside from that, there is just a single USB port that lies behind a small, rubber flap. The flap prevents dust from getting into the USB port when the drive is not in use.
A USB cable is included, but it’s short (about seven inches or so). There have been a few occurrences, when plugging into a desktop computer where a longer cable would have come in handy. We feel that the short cable is ideal for laptop usage and prefer it over the unnecessarily long cables found with other USB drives.
Software Bundle
Every backup drive needs backup software, and WD’s solution is named WD Sync. The software lets you sync folders between your computer and the drive, so you always have a backup on the drive in case something happens to your PC’s hard drive. It also lets you bring your web browser’s bookmarks, and Outlook email, to any PC, and you can even have your desktop wallpaper on whatever computer you connect to as well.
In addition to the features just mentioned, the WD Passport also lets you initiate a “secure” browsing environment on whatever computer you plug it into, so you could theoretically plug it into a coffee shop PC, surf the net, and then disconnect, and nobody would know what you did (except your conscience).
Conclusion
The WD Passport is an excellent product. We love being able to have our bookmarks and files synced all the time, and to be able to essentially take “our PC” with us to any computer. The Passport provides a large amount of storage capacity in a very small, slim, sexy glossy case and works well with both Macs and PCs. We have referred many clients to this product and have received no complaints in return.
Purchase a Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive
Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 Become the Newest eBook Readers February 5, 2009
The date was June 29, 2007, I was at work and my girlfriend was waiting in a line to purchase the maximum number of the first iPhones released (yeah…she’s a keeper). Fast forward to July 11, 2008 and I was in line to buy the maximum amount of 3G iPhones allowed. I have been an advocate of the iPhone since it wsa first announced on January 9, 2007. It has lived up to all the hype.
Fast forward.
The Amazon Kindle was in high demand for Christmas 2008 and sold out fast. Within just a few months the Kindle already has some pretty stiff competition with the anouncement The Google Book Search Project which puts more than 1.5 million book titles at the fingertips of Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 users. With the launch today, Google has released mobile editions of its entire book collection.
Google used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to transform the scanned book pages into screen-friendly text for iPhones and G1s. To access Google Mobile Book Search, just point your mobile phone browser to http://books.google.com/m.
Google admits, there are some drawbacks to the OCR technology that occur when reducing the book’s pages to a small screen-friendly size, “Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text,” reads the blog post announcing Mobile Book Search.
The difference between page image and extracted text is below:
"Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. ...
"lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve ...
Google is constantly updating its library of public domain books, currently 1.5 million strong. You can plan on this number increasing rapidly. With Google you learn to expect the unexpected.