JOY

I have a new item on my x-mas list and it is an 8 monitor video card because honestly dual screening is all nice and good, but why not a wall of screens?

30 Bajillion Gigawhatizs

The increasing amount of dependence on technology means that in order to function well in our society one must own several electronic gadgets. Cell Phones and GPS units have specifications that are confusing at times but usually irrelevant to the casual user. However computers both laptop and desktop can vary greatly in use and functionality based on their specifications. Not only that but as computers have a wide range of functions the top specifications are not always guaranteed to be useful and in some cases can be immense amounts of overkill. In that interest I am going to make an attempt at clarifying some of these definitions.

Hard Drive Space; One of the most commonly made misconceptions about the space remaining on a hard drive is that the number given by the vendor or manufacturer is the real number.  Mega and Gigabyes because of the way that are measured are actually 1024 not 1000. This rounding off to the nearest 1000 is magnified the larger drives get. Additionally the operating system which is Windows, Apple OS, Linux or what have you takes up space even on a brand new computer unless this is an additional drive. This means that most drives even back up drives will show up with slightly less room then advertised because 120GB is not as nice and impressive as 111.75(approx) hence the mix up.

Now unless you take mass quantities of Photos have a amateur video editing habit or own massive amounts of music you will not really need more then 250B of space. Most casual users who browse the web, keep holiday pictures and have their music collection on their computer will not even fill a 10th of that space. While computer games and such are becoming increasingly space filling the Hard Drive space advances are still quite ahead of them.

Jump or Flash or Thumb drives are an excellent tool for information migration. Most individual files or groups are going to be rather small word documents and even pictures will fit in mass quantities on a Jump or flash drive. If you are working with video or have an interest in saving large amounts of work to a separate location from your computers main hard drive. External hard drives are the way to go. Western Digital has a rather svelte example of a usb external hard drive. A word of caution however due to technical ways that the hard drive is set up unless modified it will not allow a single file that is over 4gb to be copies onto it. It will tell you it is full, this is a quirk of the way the information is saved and should not be tampered with unless you know what you are doing.

Should you be curious what is curretly taking up space on your disk drives and you are running Windows, HD Graph will show you how all your information is arranged in terms of what is filling up how much in a lovley pie chart.

Yes Anywhere But Why

The idea of being connected to the internet anywhere is a seductive idea but practically applied makes less sense. The idea that at anytime in most of the 1st world you are able to browse the internet on a web browsing enabled phone is very pleasing to a technophile. However the actual fact is that most of this is a “because you can” situation. This blog is currently being written on a laptop connected via wireless.  This seems to be as small as rational.

Having a single device encompassing all of someones technology needs seems to be introducing as many problems as it solves. You are now dealing with dependence on a single battery life powering all of your needs, making its failure that much more crippling. There are concessions made to storage space for the music, font and image size for web browsing, interruption of other tasks. For being a multi tasking device the fact that you can only use it as a GPS or a Phone or  a music player and if you do want to listen to music you are better off buying a more battery efficient device like a separate iPod. So the question becomes, sure it does it all but not as well as devices designed for a particular purpose.

The iPhone is just the worst criminal of this mentality others are equally guilty, for instance, my GPS can play a small amount of music and save pictures as well as play audio books. This single device multi-functionality trend is absurd. While it may in the short term be more green to have less devices, using one device for all your needs will run through its battery like water through a hole, therefore needing a more freqent recharge. This means the battery will completly run out, then get sent back to the factory to have the battery replaced.  So is it greener, or just a bid to dominate the market. You decide.

Trial and Possible Error

As a know and out Nerd with my custom PC and reflexive tech support, even I expected to start blogging sooner, however like the self-promoting essay it seemed a little to self promoting. So Instead of using this to talk about my everyday, this blog will be all about the nerdy things I have an interest in or have realized. Sort of a Boing Boing or Slashdot but personal.

As redundant as it is to observe on a blog, there is a marked increase from this culture on the Internet. Now along with powerful computing technology, a greener impact on the environment and a  more seamless Graphical User Interface or “GUI”  there is now the expectation that every single piece of technology developed today with any sort of everyday use must have an Internet connection.