32GB Flash Drive
Just a short post….
I took delivery of a new flash drive last night, a lovely shiny 32GB Drive. The best bit is that it it only cost me £12.00!!
So I was wondering what sort of read / write speeds it could provide, I admit I wasn’t expecting much considering its size and that it came from eBay (via Hong Kong). I came across a piece of software called “Check Flash“, which was listed along with 4 others over at makeuseof.com.
The upshot of it all, it writes at a consitant 10MBs and reads at around 20MBs, so not to shabby considering its size.
For those that are interseted the eBay seller was cititrading.
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Whilst I was watching This Week in Google last night, I came across someone in a twitter #hashtag, who was also watching it.
@daleochase
We had a few tweets about the show, and then about Timmy the ThinkGeek monkey! I took a quick look at his website, more from professional curiosity than anything more as his Twitter Bio said he was a coder. The first thing that caught my attention was the music player on his site http://dalechase.com/. The first item in the play list was titled “Think Geek”, and there was a picture of Timmy the Think Geek monkey next to it!
Timmy sings the Think Geek Song
I listened to the song, and laughed out loud! Its a great take on all the crazy geekey things that Think Geek have on their site. With riffs about Wookey Cookie Cutters, fuzzy mould and Yoda Backpacks.
I would recomend anyone who has ever shopped at ThinkGeek to go and listen to it, over at Dale’s website http://dalechase.com/. Or if you haven’t ever shopped at Think Geek, go listen to it anyway (and then go buy stuff at Think Geek)!
Dale’s other album can be found on iTunes.
EDIT:
Dale has released a music video for his thinkgeek song. You HAVE to check it out! http://youtu.be/vkfbCgulyUQ?a
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The UK Digital Economy Bill has passed through the Lords, and is now waiting to be passed into law. Most notably, it is currently not slated for a debate in the House, and appears that it will simply be rushed through before the election (which must happen in the next few months).
Last night I was listening to the This Week in Google (TWiG) Pod cast with Leo Laporte, he had a guest speaker by the name of Kevin Marks who managed to turn the conversation over to the Digital Economy Bill (deBill). They made some comparisons between what Lord Mandelson wishes to enact and what the Chinese Government are currently doing in China. Britain previously made it clear that it believes China are breaking the Human Rights of its citizens, so why is the British Government thinking about similar things?
Before anyone does the “Literal Web” on me, and claims that I am making brash statements comparing a democratic country with a corrupt maoist regime, that is not what I am doing!
The point I am making is that there are proposed laws being put into effect via the deBill that would allow a future member of Government (Sec of State) to do the sort of things that China are doing. An example being that in Xinjiang China, after a local ethics riot internet access and international phone calls were disconnected for six months. Even now Xinjiang can only access a watered down internet, and send only a few text messages a day! The comparison with deBill is:
- (1) The Secretary of State may direct OFCOM to—
- (a) assess whether one or more technical obligations should be imposed on internet service providers;
- (b) take steps to prepare for the obligations;
- (c) provide a report on the assessment or steps to the Secretary of State.
- (2) A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against some or all relevant subscribers to its service for the purpose of preventing or reducing infringement of copyright by means of the internet.
- (3) A “technical measure” is a measure that—
- (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber;
- (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use;
- (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or
- (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.
Anyway before I rant to much, I suggest that any interested partys read Kevin Marks blog post on the subject.
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/03/bpis-china-like-clauses-in-digital.html
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2009/10/baron-mandelson-and-magna-carta.html
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I, like many of us in the IT field am often painfully aware that my precious files are not being backed up. I have over 10GB of pictures alone, which I would be devastated to loose. Add to that my personal documents, save games and code files, I have a lot which I would not like to be without.
The company that I work for recently started looking at some on-line backup companies with the aim of switching from our current in house backup system. So I took a leaf from our book, and started to look at a personal backup solution. The first provider I came across was Backup Direct, who are a subsidery of Iron Mountain. I took a trail account with them for two weeks, and then took on a full account. The account allowed me to dynamically backup 5GB for £10.00 a month.
The backup solutions provided by most on-line solutions generally backup files only when they have changed, and then they only upload the actually changed files. For instance, your 1GB email folder from outlook may take a while to upload the first time, but from then on only the new emails (or bits of emails that have changed) will get uploaded, this makes things much faster. Add to that compression and encryption and your on a win.
Unfortuantly for Backup Direct, they were unable to beat an offer from another company. Carbonite On-line backups are based in the United States, as such their data storage charges are much lower. So through no fault of Backup Direct’s I chose to migrate my backups to Carbonite. Carbonite’s service gives me unlimited storage for $54.965 year (around £37 at the time of writing), and a very intuitive interface.
Needless to say I am now doing the initial backup to Carbonite, with 12GB done and 2GB left to upload!!
Anyone that is interested in trying out Carbonite, drop me a line and I can provide a referral email which will give you a free month trial, and another free month when you pay! The best bit is that they don’t even want any credit card details for you to do the trial!!
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Picasa's Logo. It makes me wonder if Picasa are infact a hippy department of Aperture Science!
It’s taken me a while to find a WordPress plugin that does what I want it to do, but I think that I have finally found one.
I have started to play with a few of Google’s applications, after listening to the T.W.i.G (This week in Google) Podcast by Leo Laporte. One of the first PC apps (rather than web app) that I chose to test was Picasa. For those that do not know about Picasa, it is a photo editing and organising program for both the PC and Mac. The software provides some great features to allow you to organise your pictures, and also provides you with the ability to upload them to your own Picasa web album for all your friends and family to see.
The feature which really impressed me with Picasa is its facial recognition system. Shortly after it loaded all my pictures (only a few minutes for over 30GB of photos), I was informed that it had found some faces and would I like to identify them! After tagging a few people into photos (akin to Facebook), I was surprised to see an little notification asking me to validate its guesses! It had taken the pictures I had manually tagged, and found other pictures with those people in them.
Along with the upload and facial recognition features, Picasa also provides some touch up and alteration features, from the tipical Red Eye tools to a “straighten” feature which allows you to sort out those slightly wonkey pictures!
The Photos page of my site is now pulled from my Picasa web albums, by a WordPress plugin known as kPicasa. There are others out there, but I found kPicasa to be an easy to use yet fully featured plugin.
Feel free to take a look at my photos, and leave any comments if you wish!
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