in.sight

lifestream of designer Dr P Fenderson

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Recommendations for reliable, external, USB-only hard drive?

Digital music takes up so much space, and my collection is rather large. I've filled the 160GB external drive I've been using for years, and need an upgrade. The current drive is failing and ran out of space a year ago.


Since 2004, I have been using the same 80GB and 160GB external FireLite drives offered by SmartDisk. 6 years for a constant-use drive is amazing, and I know that I got what I paid for and more out of them. They were excellent because they came with solid aluminum cases and built-in cooling - sturdy and reliable. I pretty much only use them for photo storage and music storage, so mostly just reading data rather than writing it. The 80GB died around 5 months ago with no warning after being left all-night plugged into my Wii. This happened a number of times, so I'm not really surprised it died, just sad. The second is still working - but just barely. It's giving me read/write errors more and more frequently. Fortunately, I format with ext4 so I'm not as boned as I would be if I was on Windows.

My needs are this:
  • 400+GB of space. Again, I've only increased my space by 20-40GB at a time, and this time I need a nice boost. I think a TB is a bit much, but who knows?
  • External. Internal is out of the question.
  • USB-only power. I need to be able to transfer files from multiple computers, so carrying around an AC adapter is not really viable.
  • Reliable. I don't want it to fail in 4-5 months with my entire music collection from the past 6 years on it.
Do any of you have a recommendation? Perhaps a drive that has worked especially well for you.

The 2 that I was considering were the Western Digital Elements 500GB and the SeaGate FreeAgent GO 500GB. But after a bit more searching, it seems that with both, the number of "My drive died in 4 months" stories is around 1/5 of the total reviews. Those are NOT good numbers. I found this to be true on the 4-5 different electronics shopping sites I scoured. Not good. I need this to last.

Any help from the tech-savvy?
Posted 1 hour ago
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Rebased Internet

via boingboing.net

Posted 16 days ago
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The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

via wired.com

Posted 16 days ago
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Images that lay around for a while and become hesitant

These are just some various photos I've been wanting to upload for a while.

           
Click here to download:
Images_that_lay_around_for_a_w.zip (670 KB)

Posted 2 months ago
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Poll: What recovery image and manager do you use for Android?

Just curious. Use the comments to discuss pros and cons.

Posted 3 months ago
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and 3 Comments

First Artificial Life; Now Quantum Teleportation

This week in science is absolutely blowing my mind.

Earlier this week scientists announced that they had created the first living synthetic cell.

The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.

 mutation

Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr

We don't really know what all this means right now. There are some interesting hypotheticals on what can be achieved. But the ones forefront, it seems, are engineering awesome cancer-killing lifeforms, unique drugs, and cleaning up the crap we love dumping into the oceans and air.

People are questioning the negative impact, but I agree with commenter dagfooyo over in the BoingBoing discussion:

We humans are always so worried that we can doom the planet by creating some genetically anomalous creature. But we fail to consider that nature has been randomly creating new mutant creatures for billions of years - and the only ones alive today are the baddest of badasses. No way are we gonna accidentally create something in a lab that can beat out billions of years of evolution and take over the planet. I mean unless we somehow combined influenza, velociraptors and cockroaches to create a constantly reproducing and mutating vicious intelligent killing machine that is impossible to kill. THEN we'd be in trouble.

Then, in news from the quantum computing front, there is some fantastic news. Scientists were able to transfer information simultaneously across 10 miles of space.
 
Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.

Pairing this with the recent advancement in using lasers to prolong the life of quantum data, and we have a recipe for awesome. The life of the data, and the distance of travel for quantum information have long been the 2 main points of failure for quantum computing. Looks like we may be putting those stumbling blocks behind us.

(Thanks Technoccult)
Posted 3 months ago
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Test-driving Fennec Pre-Alpha

Firefox has been a big contender in the desktop browser game for a while now, but Mozilla has taken its time coming to the mobile arena. With a stripped-down Chrome running standard in most Android devices, it has been hard work outdoing the speed and simplicity the default browser has to offer. Steel was an early contender, but was soon purchased by Skyfire and has yet to be released again. Dolphin browser came along and offered tabbed browsing, multi-touch and some interesting social-network integration. xScope is a newer contender with added file-management, task-killing capabilities, and a couple of neat tricks under the hood.


Mozilla hopes to change the game with Fennec, their mobile browser. A public "pre-alpha" release came out today, which you can download here. It's still a little slow and buggy, and there are some
special considerations as developer Vladimir Vukićević points out:

This build should be considered “pre-alpha”, so there are some warnings and caveats:

  • We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One. 
  • It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot. 
  • Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet.  This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid. 
  • You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it. 
  • You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
  • This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device

Check out Vladimir's blog for more information, or continue below for my review. 

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Posted 4 months ago
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Using Dropbox with Xfce

 

Note: I originally posted this on PinkOnBrown.org, but it seems that NearlyFreeSpeech's servers killed it. :(

Started working with my older laptop again, so I decided to install Xubuntu. Xubuntu is the Xfce edition of Ubuntu Linux. A big part of my computing experience is the portibility of applications like Dropbox or Box.net – easily being able to synch files on my various computers is of upmost importance. However, Dropbox is designed to work along with Nautilus which is the default file manager in GNOME…and the default window manager in Ubuntu. But not Xubuntu which uses Thunar as it’s file manager.

Dropbox logo

But, it’s no problem – by simply following the instructions below you can get Dropbox to work side-by-side with Xfce and Thunar. We will basically just be starting a no-frills instance of Nauilus which causes Dropbox to start. The explanation will mostly be relevant to Ubuntu/Xubuntu users, but can simply be modified to other distros.

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Posted 4 months ago
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Antikythera computer from 2000 years ago more complex than first imagined

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.
via io9.com

Been following the Antikythera phenomenon for most of my life...since I gained interest around age 11. It is so amazing that people overlook simple - yet mind-blowing - discoveries such as this.
Don't you understand? We had advanced computers and calculating mechanisms 1500 years before ANYTHING ELSE of its kind was seen. And this device was seemingly mass-produced. The encroaching hordes of religious warriors and dogmatic belief systems have set us back thousands of years.

Posted 6 months ago
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iPad vs Stone

via 9gag

Posted 7 months ago
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