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Sometimes when you buy a computer with Windows pre-installed you just don’t receive all the disks you need for an emergency recovery if Windows just can’t find some of the files it needs to run. NeoSmart is offering a free download which can be burned to disk and used to rescue you in just this kind of bind if your Windows 7 goes kaputt.  I don’t know if it will work with Windows 7, but Western Digital is currently offering its Acronis True Image drive cloning tool as a free download. This looks like excellent software with many of the features you would want for backing up your files and OS before a migration or for a quick restore after a drive failure. From the Western Digital site: Key Features of Acronis True Image WD Edition Software:
 Mathway is a simple website that just would have saved me in high school. Just enter your math problem, tell mathway what kind of math you are doing and poof it solves the problem. If you sign up for a free account, they will even email you the step by step details on how the problem is solved. I’ve been thinking about brushing up on my outdated and under used math skills and this might be a good tool to keep in mind to help me along.  It is not unusual for friends to ask me for help when they are tossing out an older computer and don’t want to leave their data out there for some identity thief to pick up. These friends are smart enough to know better. Most people don’t. If you pick up a used computer or used hard drive off of Craigs list or ebay, more often than not the old user’s information is still there. Maybe they through the real incriminating stuff in the trash first, but this is often easily recoverable to anyone with a little know how. If you want to protect your information you need to remove it with something like DBAN, Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This free, simple software gives you several options, all of which will leave you comfortable that your data will not return to haunt you. Check it out before you toss it out.  When I want to do a new OS install on my laptop, one of the things I hate is reinstalling and re-updating my drivers. I was just reading about a free piece of software called Double Driver that makes it easy to back up all of your drivers to a USB flash drive and then restore them back to your computer right after your clean install. Well, as far as I’m concerned that is just the Bee’s knees of a piece of freeware. Good for them for coming up with such a handy little App. Haven’t tried it yet, but I definitely will on my next install.
Adam Savage has an article up on Gizmodo explaining that electricity doesn’t kill us by frying us like an egg but just sort of short circuits us. It’s a fun read. Do you know your fonts, do you want to point at things and shoot them? Then I recommend trying out the font game at deep.co.uk I like to build my own game boxes. Unfortunately I can’t do that effectively with a laptop. I ran across a good power laptop at Dell this morning for a price that made me drool just a bit. Oh, and I’m not a Dell Affiliate, there will be no code on my link. I just like the idea of a laptop with Dual SLI video cards for 1 GB of video power. It also has a 17 inch screen. For some reason they only put 2 Gigs of regular Ram though which I though was a little odd. You’re also not going to run this off battery for very long if you’re playing something that video power I would expect. They also scrimp on HD space a bit with 250 Gigs. Still, it would serve my gamer needs for some time with just a few extra dollars in upgrades. If my current laptop wasn’t just a bit over a year old I would probably get this - Sob When I previously wrote about Amazon’s agreement with the Author’s Guild that they would allow text to speech to be disabled in Kindle 2 books I didn’t know how they would be doing it. Would this just be for new purchases or would they disable it remotely on something already purchased? Guess what, books you previously purchased that worked perfectly have now been crippled. Turns out Amazon built DRM flags into the Kindle and just left them turned off. Now the flag blocking text to speech has been remotely turned on. Wondering what other DRM flags might be hidden on your Kindle and just turned off? Me too. Unfortunately Amazon is ignoring all requests for this info. You can learn a little more about this on BoingBoing. |
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I pretty much started ignoring information about the Kindle. I don’t like the policies, the equipment doesn’t seem to quite be there yet, and it is still on the expensive side. I just kind of put it out of mind. Until I happened to read David Pogue’s article in the NY Times this morning. Turns out all sales on the Kindle aren’t final. Even after you buy something, Amazon can change its mind and just delete it from your Kindle. This is what happened to buyers of 1984 and Animal Farm. The publisher changed its mind about selling electronic versions of Orwell’s books so Amazon, without warning, snuck onto people’s Kindles and deleted the books. Sure, I imagine they provided a refund. The money isn’t really the point here, it just re-emphasizes the danger of electronic posessions. You rarely actually own anything from “the cloud”. You are just borrowing it indefinitely. All your rights can be changed after the fact, turns out that even includes your right to possess it at all.