Photography Technology Blog

Back in late November/early December Eventective listed my wedding website on their advertising website. Free publicity is never a bad thing however this is the type of site where a client enters information and a lead is forwarded to you. That’s fine if you get the lead in a timely fashion however with this website leads are either delayed significantly or they simply don’t show up at all. In addition there’s a check box (which is checked by default) that sends the inquiry to other photographers as well. Seeing as I located Eventective by doing a Google Search on my own business name, I don’t appreciate the fact that they’re using my name and my hard work to send inquiries to my competition when it was me that they were looking for. Ultimately one could argue that if someone Googled me, they’re going to find me since it is the first link that shows up however, I still disagree with this practice in principle.

I called the company and asked them to remove my website from being listed on their service. They were a bit defensive (especially when I mentioned that they were in violation of US Copyright Law by using my photograph on their website without my permission) but ultimately complied. I thought that would be the end of it however I’ve found that they’ve relisted my website and once again they have violated my copyright. If they didn’t have the checkbox that sent leads out to other photographers, if leads would show up in a timely fashion, and if they weren’t violating my copyright (and then insisting on the phone that they were well within their rights to do so (to which I say if my lawyer becomes involved they’ll find out just how wrong they are)) then I might not have a problem however this company in my opinion has demonstrated has demonstrated a lack of ethics and a clear misunderstanding of copyright law. I’m just posting this to bring this to the attention of other photographers. Visit their website, see if you’re listed and enter a test to see if you’re getting leads (be sure to uncheck the box that sends the inquiry to other photographers). If they’re getting to you, fantastic. If however your website is listed and they’re using your material without permission I would encourage you to contact the PPA if you are a member and ask to speak to someone about copyright enforcement.

(update: the test inquiry eventually reached me several hours later)

Another “quick” entry here. There are so many different options for backing up and I plan to cover some of those one of these days but for now I just want to set the foundation for that article and get everyone thinking about their own systems. The whole purpose behind backing up is to be able to recover your data should you experience a drive failure or a data loss by some other means. There are of course different types of media and different ways to implement a backup strategy but for now let’s take a look at how we lose data to begin with. While you’re reading this, ask yourself if you think your current strategy will protect you.

• User Error - This is probably the most common cause of data loss. You have deadlines to meet, albums to deliver, prints to ship, galleries to get up online and you’re swamped. You’re working long hours and you’re tired. Oops, you just deleted the wrong directory by mistake. If you’re lucky you can fish it out of the trash can but if it was a large folder that you deleted you may be out of luck. I think we’ve all done this. I’ve done it myself.
• Mechanical failure - CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. It’s a terrible sound indicative of a “head crash” (where the read/write heads damage the surface of the platters on your drives). This is more likely to happen with a laptop or an external drive due to sudden movement while the drive is operating or due to the sudden LACK of movement when a running drive hits the ground. Other types of meachanical failures would be worn out bearings or a broken armature.
• Electrical failure - All components have an expected life and will at some point in time fail (the average which is known as the MTBF or “Mean Time Between Failure”. They can either fail because they are reaching the end of their life or because of some other external event. This could be a power surge, a brown out (a brown out is when the voltage output from the electric company dips to low levels, this can be damaging to electronic equipment), a short, ESD (electro static discharge… a note on ESD, the results of a piece of gear sustaining and ESD may not be immediately evident, sometimes it takes 6 months to a year before a piece of gear will start to exhibit intermittent problems), failure of a power supply, failure of a voltage regulator on your motherboard, improper bios settings (too “hot” of a voltage), and probably the most destructive, a lightning strike. Note that a surge protector will NOT protect your gear from a lightning strike. The power behind a lightning strike is such that it will arc right across a tripped breaker as if there was a straight wire. For lightning you need a very specialized device called a lightning arrester (and not even those can stand up to the strongest lightning strikes)
• Media degradation - A strong magnetic field can scramble a hard drive or the substrate on a DVD might decay over time rendering the disc unreadable.
• Directory corruption - The directory is like a big Rolodex that has a list of where each and every file on your hard drive is located. If this becomes corrupted those files are now “lost” and the OS may overwrite your data.
• Theft - Well, it’s a loss of data. The data is still fine but it doesn’t do you much good if you don’t have it.
• Natural disasters - Fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados… volcanoes???
• Software bugs - File corruption caused by a bug in the software you’re using
• Viruses and other malware

So, can your current backup system survive all of these types of failures? One particular method of failure that I like to point out is electrical failure. In order to make a backup you must physically have 2 things “online” at the same time that being your data source, and your data destination (the backup). What happens if you experience an electrical event during a backup? If such a thing happened (and it does happen) you can potentially lose both the source (the data your are backing up) AND the destination (the media you are backing up to). Then what? Or, what if you had a destructive virus that deleted or corrupted data? You think you’ve killed the bug but upon restoring your backup you find that you didn’t actually get it. These types of things are one of the reason that I stress that any good backup strategy must maintain TWO copies of your data, one of which is “offline” at all times (it is primarily for this reason that RAID fails as being a legitimate backup strategy, it can still be part of a total strategy but on its own it only counts as a single copy of your data). What do I mean by “offline”? I mean a device that has no physical connection to your system at all. In other words it is neither connected to your computer, nor is it plugged into an electrical outlet. If you are unlucky enough to experience a failure that takes out both your production drive and your backup, you still have a 2nd backup to fall back on.

So, that should get everyone thinking. Look at each bullet point and ask yourself if your current backup strategy would allow you to recover from each failure. Consider that your backup strategy is not just about how you accomplish the backup and what you backup to, but also when (or how often) you bacup and where you physically store that data.

That’ll do it for now.

Cheers, Joe

So this will be a “quick” entry. I ordered an Areca 1221x RAID controller card from NewEgg and it arrived today, or so I thought it did. The box said 1221x but when I looked at the System Information on Areca’s setup page I noticed that it said “IOP333″ for the chipset. Fortunately for me I happen to know that the 1221x as an IOP341 chipset. NewEgg is overnighting me a 1221x and taking this card back on their dime (I paid for another card but I’ll get a full refund when I return this card) so I believe it’s probably a case of a mislabeled box from the factory. NewEgg is looking into it.

Anyhow, here’s some quick information for you. The 1220ML is still a great card however there’s very little information out there on how well the Areca cards are supported by OSX. Well, it turns out they’re supported quite well although I’m sure the Mac purists will turn their noses at the html based setup page because it’s not pretty but hey… it’s functional and it works. So, whenever I get a DVD with a piece of gear that has drivers on it, I never bother. I go strait to the website to get the drivers. Areca’s website is here but don’t bother. Go directly to their FTP server. Their FTP server can be found at ftp://ftp.areca.com.tw. To save even more time go here to download the Mac Pro drivers. Turns out you don’t really need drivers at all under Leopard as Leopard supports the Intel IOP33x RAID controller chipsets natively. I suspected as much as I believe the SAS RAID controller that Apple now offers as an option for the MacPro is an Areca 1680 (not positive on that but pretty sure). So, download the software and just follow the instructions for installation.

After you’re done with the installation you’ll want to go to /Application/MRAID and double click on the file named “Launch MRAID Web Manager.command”. All this really does is open up a web page that talks to the controller (the controller has its own little teeny tiny web server on it ). This is the link… http://localhost:81 After you have that page open you enter the default user name and password which is admin and 0000. Once you’re in the RAID Console click on “RaidSet Functions” on the left and then click on “Create RAID set”. From there you will click on the drives that you want to be in your RAID set (this assumes that you’ve connected drives to the controller already ). After that click on “VolumeSet Function” and then “Create Volume Set”. You will select which RAID Set you want to create the volume on, and then set the attributes (RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, etc., NCQ, etc… FWIW I recommend leaving NCQ off, for desktop use it typically slows things down, it’s more of a server feature). After you click the verify button and hit OK it will start initializing the array. One nice thing (and this applies for both Windows and OSX… actually everything I’ve said in this paragraph applies to both platforms) is that you can shut down the machine in the middle of initalization, restart, and it will pickup where it left off. It’s a nice feature to have if you need to restart for some other reason because striping a 3 terabyte array takes a LONG time (and Areca is known for making quick work of this).

In theory when I get the 1221x I’ll just be able to swap the card and restore things without too much fuss.

That’s all for now. More later!

I’ve always maintained that both operating systems annoy me an equal amount (well, that’s not entire true, until Windows NT came along I found all prior versions of Windows to be infinitely more annoying) but I thought I’d put together a little something to help ease the transition for those who are making a permanent switch.

Your keyboard - So, you have a nice comfy ergonomic keyboard for your PC, problem is it doesn’t have the Command key (aka Apple key) or other keyboard modifiers that Apple keyboards have so you can’t use it right?!?! Wrong. First, check your keyboard manufacturer’s website. I have Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. It’s a really nice keyboard and I don’t want to part with it. Easy enough… go to Microsoft’s website and simply download the OSX driver for the keyboard and install it. When you restart your Mac your control key, Start key and Alt key will be mapped to control, option, and command respectively which is the same relative layout of these keys on a dedicated Mac keyboard.

Do you feel lost? - So you, you have your keyboard mapped out properly now but you just can’t get used to hitting what is the muscle memory equivalent of Alt-C for copy instead of what’s been hammered into your head which is control-c. No problem. You can remap your keyboard modifier keys. Follow the following instructions -

• Go to the Apple menu and select “System Preferences”
• Click on the “Keyboard and Mouse” control panel
• Click the first tab which says “keyboard” (if it doesn’t already open up to that tab)
• On the bottom left of that window you will see a button named “modifier keys”. Click on that button
• Now remap your keys as you see fit. If you want Copy to be control-C instead of command C simply map the control key to the command key and your keyboard shortcut for “copy” will be in the same place as it was on your Windows machine. A quick warning about this though… you may want to use a label maker and print a little “command” label and stick it on the contol key so you don’t get confused about what is what when someone says “press command Q to quit an application”

The Option Key - Just for fun, open up an application such as Safari, click on the “Window” menu so that the menu drops down, and now press the Option key. You’ll notice that you get some hidden options there. Not all apps support this but it’s sometimes nice to explore what additional little shortcuts and options become available to you in the menus by holding down the option key.

Browsing and the tab key - This is one of those things that leaves ya scratchin’ your head wondering what Apple was thinking. On the PC the default is to be able to tab through everything and this is EXTREMELY helpful when doing something like filling out an address form online or filling out a user ID and password. Under Windows when you get to the “state” field, it’s usually a pulldown menu populated with all 50 states. All you need to do is to tab into it and hit the letter of your state until your state pops up. Under OSX if you hit the tab key, the focus will skip right past all pulldown menus. This forces you to take your hands off the keyboard, grab the mouse, select the menu item… it’s cumbersome but we can fix this too:

• Again… select “system preferences” from the Apple menu
• Click the keyboard and mouse control panel
• Click the “keyboard shortcuts” tab all the way to the right
• In this window you’ll see a field that says “Full keyboard access” which has a radio button that says “All Controls”. Click on that radio button and you will now be able to navigate “focus” to a pulldown menu or a button!

Cough it up - I’m using a Windows keyboard but it doesn’t have an “eject” button. How do I open the DVD tray? - Easy, press and hold the F12 key. The DVD tray will open.

Shutting down - Mac keyboards have a nice little power button that you can press to bring up the shutdown dialog but PC keyboards don’t have that. No problem, hold down the control key and hit F12.

The Little Grey Pill - Ever wonder what the little grey pill in the upper right hand side of every window is for? Try clicking on it! You’ll notice that it might change the appearance of your window if that window has any buttons in it. Want even more options? Try command clicking the little grey pill. In an application like FireFox you’ll see no real difference between just clicking on it or command clicking on it (it hides the buttons and other menu items) but in Safari and an application like Mail it will give you more options for the appearance of the control bar. You’ll also find that you can often modify the look of a window by right clicking in it. Yes, contrary to popular belief OSX fully supports the right click and it’s a wonderful thing.

What’s the OSX equivalent of the Performance Monitor? - Under OSX what you want is the “Activity Monitor”. It’s located in the utilities folder which is in the Applications folder (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor). While the Activity Monitor is open try command-2 and command-3 to see graphical representations of CPU usage and CPU history. The rest of this tool should be pretty self explanatory.

Back to the tab key - Moving around between applications is similar to Windows but there are some notable differences. In Windows Alt-tab will move you from window to window, for example if you have two FireFox windows open, and one Thunderbird window open, hitting alt-tab three times will cycle you through all of them. On the Mac, the nearest equivalent is command-tab. The difference here is that command-tab will move you between applications. That is to say, if you have two FireFox windows open and one Mail window open, hitting command-tab once will toggle you to mail, hitting it a second time will toggle you to FireFox, hitting it a third time will toggle you back to mail. So then, how do you get to that second window? Command-` (the ` is on the same key as the tilde which looks like this ~ (it’s to the left of the number one key and above the tab key)) will cycle you between windows within an application.

What’s the three fingered salute in OSX? Command-Option-Escape is the OSX equivalent of Control-Alt-Delete (well, to a certain extent). This key combination will bring up the force quit menu in case you have a hung application.

Macaroni - No, not the food, it’s an application. The Mac requires its fair share of upkeep in order to keep running smoothly. Apple runs what are called “periodic” scripts to keep things in tip top shape. There’s a daily, weekly and a monthly script. Unfortuantely Apple has chosen to run them at odd times of the day so if your machine is not on the scripts won’t get run and this can lead to an unhappy and unstable Mac. Macaroni ensures that these scripts don’t get skipped. It’s only $10 and it’s WELL worth it.

Is your Mac behaving badly? - Again, I highly recommend Macaroni. I’ve fixed some mighty strange problems just by manually running the periodic scripts. It’s a somewhat messy procedure for those not well versed in the UNIX command line, you’ll definitely feel out of your element. Macaroni just takes care of this stuff. It also makes sure the permissions are regularly repaired but if you’re experiencing problems, repairing permissions is something you can try. Go to your applications folder, then go to your utilities folder, then double click on the “Disk Utility” application. From there you just need to click on a disk and then click the “repair permissions” button. Note that some permissions might not be able to be repaired in which case you may need to boot from your install disk and run the disk utility app from there. Another trick which often solves problems on the Mac is called “Zapping the P-RAM”. This is similar to resetting the BIOS on a PC. To zap the P-RAM restart your machine and simultaneously hold down:

command option P R

…until you hear the Macintosh bong sound go off 3 times, then you can release the keys. Finally, deleting the preferences file for an application can also often solve various anomolies.

Hidden Options - Sometimes the OSX interface really hides too much or tries so hard to be slick and elegant that you completely miss some pretty major features. Once you know what to look for it will become second nature but I’ll give you a few examples. How do you add a new name in the Address Book? Open address book. You see those little + signs? Whenever you see those it usually means that you can add something. Sometimes pressing the + sign may also display more options in a menu.

Well, that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll update this article from time to time.

Anyone who’s bought a Canon iPF6100 (and I suspect this carries over to the 5100, 8100, and 9100 as well) expecting it to work (based upon reading Canon’s own literature and driver download section) with XP x64 has no doubt run into an infuriating wall. Canon does not really support XP x64. Add to that the fact that their US website is absolutely atrocious and it makes for one unhappy camper (especially if you happen to own tens of thousands of dollars worth of their cameras and lenses that don’t really work as they should either).

Tell me if this sounds familiar… go to Canon’s website and find the drivers download section for the 6100, select “Windows XP x64″ from the pull down menu (as a side not… Canon, why are OSX drivers showing up when you select XP x64?), download the driver for the 16 bit plug-in, attempt to install it and see the following error message:

“Cannot correctly run this installer on this operating system. Use an installer compatible with your operating system”

Well, if you just spent $3000 on this printer guess what, you’re more than a little pissed off at this point (and if by chance you happen to own a ton of Canon DSLRs and lenses then your level of aggravation is through the roof whilst you contemplate putting the whole lot on eBay and switching to a couple of Nikon D3 bodies) . Operating on the knowledge that Vista 64, Windows Server 2003, and XP x64 are all derived off of the Windows Server 2003 kernel I made the assumption that the 64 bit driver ought to support at least ONE of those operating systems, and by extension it should support all of them. I figured I’d try a little trick to get around the compatibility message and it worked. Here’s how (it’s pretty easy… aside from having to spend time on Canon’s US website (the Euro site is MUCH better but the driver names are often different)):
Download the driver named “PluginVer3.01_Vista_x64_iPF6100.zip”
Extract the archive.
Once extracted find the “setup.exe” file, right click on it, and select “properties”
Click on the Compatibility Tab
Under compatibility mode click on the “run this program in compatibility mode for” check box.
In the pulldown menu select “Windows XP”
Click OK.
Double Click Setup.
Install the 16 bit CS3 Plug-in (or whichever plug-in you need for the version of CS-3 or DPP that you are running).

Knowing that Vista and X64 are all based upon server 2003 (and thus the drivers should work for all three) I had a hunch to try this just to get around the error that says “Cannot correctly run this installer on this operating system. Use an installer compatible with your operating system”. Thought it might be a long shot but it works.

I have no reason to suspect any problems color or otherwise by doing this. Again, the kernel for XP x64 and Vista 64 were based upon the Windows Server 2003 kernel. It’s been a few years since I’ve been a software engineer so I’m not current on driver design specifics but… I believe that if you design a driver for one, you design a driver for all of them (at least if Canon is using a current Visual Studio package).

I’ll post back here if I run into any problems. I haven’t done any thorough testing yet but from the prints I have made, I’ve not seen any surprises yet, the earth hasn’t stopped, and nothing has exploded (nor do I expect it to).

Just thought I’d pass this on. If anyone has any trouble with this please keep in touch or post a comment below.

Cheers, Joe

Maybe not, certainly not any time in the near future but this is still interesting (and slightly freaky).

Cyborg contacts

Here’s a few quick tips for getting the best fuel economy out of your PC. They’re all really easy to and don’t require a lot of expertice but they also aren’t obvious either so here they are.

1. Do a disk cleanup. There’s a bunch of files that just get used and then hang around and do nothing. The temp space that the OS uses, caches, etc. are all pretty much used once and then they just sit and stew. You don’t need them. Here’s how to get rid of them. On your keyboard hold down the start key and press E (the Start key is located between the alt key and the control key). This will bring up a Windows Explorer window. Right click on your C: drive and select properties all the way at the bottom. You’ll see a pretty pie chart of how much space is used and how much space is free. To the lower right of that pie chart is a button that says “disk cleanup”. Press that button. Once you do Disk Cleanup will start scanning your disk for files that can be deleted. It will then present you with a window that tells you how much space you can save and below that will be an itemezed list with check boxes next to them. Check each box for each item you wish to clean up. You may also want to explore the “more options” tab. The items there should be self explanatory.
2. Cleanup any preview caches that reside on your C drive. Version 3.7.7 of Capture One and all prior versions for example will maintain a preview cache that can get quite large over time. By the time I get around to cleaning mine up it’s usually over 30 gigs in size (you can configure C1 to delete the cache after a certain amount of time but I prefer to manage things manually). Just make sure you’re not deleting anything current. You can do this by clicking on “date modified” to sort by date modified in a Windows Explorer window.
3. Delete the Pre-Fetch cache. The pre fetch cache. The pre fetch cache actually helps to improve performance by pre-loading applications and code that you frequently use so that when you launch an application it’s mostly ready to go. Over time however things can get a little bit bloated so it’s not a bad idea to delete everything in this cache every now and then (as a sidebar, if you ever get an application that crashes on boot deleteing the pre fetch cache and restarting may cause the problem if the pre fetch file was loading corrupted data). The path to the pre fetch cache is C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. Open this folder, select all and delete everything.
4. Fonts - Got a lot of them? I mean A LOT of them? Are there a whole bunch which are silly that you don’t need? Get rid of them. They’re a tax on the system and they also slow down Photoshop boot times.
5. Defragment your drive. Over time files can become segmented in a way where you may have half of one file at the beginning of the disk and the other half at the end. This can slow things down as the arm on the hard drive has to swing from one end of the drive platter to the other in order to retrieve the entire file. To defragment your drive open a Windows Explorer window (remember, Start key + E… keyboard command equivalents are good!!!), right click on your C: drive and select properties, and then click on the “tools” tab. The middle item says “defragment now”. Click on that button, select the C: drive and click on the defragment button. This is going to take a WHILE if you haven’t done it before. Although this job will run fine in the background I suggest doing it at the end of the work day.
6. Buy a can of air, take your computer outside, open it up, and blow out all of the dust. Dust acts like an insulator and if you’re machine is a few years old and has never been given a bath, it may be affecting your machine’s performance. Be sure to pay special attention to the CPU cooler making sure that all of the dust is out of the cooler. DO NOT use a vacuum cleaner. You can cause serious damage to your machine due to ESD shock (electro static discharge).

That’s it. These things don’t take long to do and if you feel like your PC has been a little lethargic lately this might give it a little bit of pep.

Cheers, Joe

Many folks have probably heard me parroting this sermon before but I’ve had a few requests for clarification on a comment I made recently (which is the subject of this post) so, here’s the clarification.

RAID is specifically designed for fault tolerance. It was never intended to be used as a means of backing up data because for that application it is extremely unreliable. What is fault tolerance? Put simply it’s a redundant system where if one system fails, another automaically takes over without an interruption of service. I used to work in the professional audio industry and the company I worked for developed large format digital audio mixing consoles for music, broadcast, and post. Broadcast is a particularly critical application because you can’t have a piece of gear fail while you’re live on the air broadcasting the Super Bowl (commercial airtime costs are on the order of $33,000+ per second, if an advertiser’s audio got cutoff they’d be a little tweaked). With that in mind the system was designed to be able to handle failures. If a power supply failed the system would automatically switch to a secondardy backup supply. If a DSP processing card failed the system would automatically switch to backup card. If a control surface module failed, the controls on that module could easily be rerouted to another area of the console. The basic idea is that the system can survive a catstrophic failure of various components without shutting down and this is the idea behind RAID. A secondary feature of RAID is that for certain applications in certain configurations (RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 0+1 (for clarification RAID 0 is tehcnically NOT a RAID configuration because there is nothing redundant about it)) RAID arrays can provide increased performance.

RAID prevents a system from becoming unusable due to a mechanical or electronic failure of a drive. If one drive fails, the data in the array is still fully accessible. The simplest example of this is a RAID 1 array. In a RAID 1 array you have two drives that are mirrored (that is, each one has an identical copy of data on it). If any one of those drives fails, the array can still continue to serve data without interruption. Of course, once you’ve suffered one failure in this configuration you’re now vulnerable should the second drive fail. With a more advanced RAID 1 configuration you’d have the two drives in the array, plus a 3rd backup drive. If the array senses a failure in one of the drives it will automatically switch over to the 3rd drive and “rebuild” the array by copying data over to it which only leaves the system vulnerable to 2nd failure for a very short period of time.

Now, although you have identical copies of data on each drive there are numerous reasons why this 2nd copy should NOT be considered a backup. First and foremost is that this 2nd drive is electrically coupled to the system and ACTIVE at all times. That means that if there’s a power surge, lightning strike, or a catastrophic power supply failure that BOTH drives can be taken out and if that’s what your backup was, you’re now left with nothing. Another single point of failure for a RAID array is the controller card. If the controller card fails and data is corrupted in the process you may lose all of your data. The file system is also another single point of failure, if the file system gets corrupted then you’ve lost the data on both sides. If you get a virus, a RAID array will very obediently and expediently copy that virus to both drives and finally, there’s user error. If you accidentally delete a file on a RAID array, that’s it. You’ve deleted the file or files on both drives.

As you can see, RAID does a really lousy job at actually protecting data which is why it should not be used for backup. A backup strategy should protect you from all of the above mentioned modes of failure. My own configuration is as follows. I have what I call my “production drive” which consists of four 750 gig Western Digital drives in a RAID 5 configuration (this is NOT a requirement for photographers, nor do I recommend it… there are better places to spend your money, I’m just a geek which is why I have a RAID array). This gives me a transfer speed of about 150 megabytes per second and it also protects me from a mechanical or electrical drive failure. Inside one of my 5.25″ bays (that’s the size of a DVD drive) I have a mobile rack tray installed. These cost about $30 from New Egg. The tray allows me to plug in a hard drive. I use hard drives for backup media as they are faster and more cost effective than DVDs. I have two drives as a backup set (I label them A and B). I make daily backups using these drives and only ONE of them is connected to my system at any one given time (that way if there’s a lighting strike or a power surge, the offline drive will be uneffected).

So, that’s the basic explanation. Whatever you choose to do for backup I highly suggest that it allows for at least two copies of the data where one copy is offline while the other copy is online (and by “offline” I mean electrically removed from the system as in… no FireWire, USB, Ethernet or power cables connected when it is not being used).

Another issue to consider is protecting your data from theft, floods, and fires but that’s another discussion.

Cheers, Joe

A real 1 terabyte drive that is (not an external with two 500 gig drives). Have a look at this article from Anandtech. It reviews Seagate’s and Western Digital’s 1 TB drives but also contains performance data for other drives as well. Me personally? I’d go for the Hitachi 7k1000.

Imagine, a 90% charge after only 5 minutes of charging in a battery that lasts for 10 years or 5000 cycles? Sound too good to be true? Well, OK. It is for now but I’m sure this technology will eventually trickle down to the consumer electronics market. Toshiba is launching their SCiB (Super Charge Ion Battery) in March of 2008. No word on when we’ll see such technology make its way to our world but it sure will be nice if it does. On thing I’d like to know, after charging a battery to 90% capacity in 5 minutes I’m wondering if the oven mits are included or if they’re optional?