FocuSoft Tech Blog

Original Game Boy repurposed as external hard drive
How To: Back Up All Your Stuff, For Free [How To]
Kwikset finally adds remote locking functionality to door locks
Giganews crosses the 400-day binary retention mark (but won’t stop there)
Worst Case Scenario: Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take 21 Hours [Windows 7]
Exclaim Track: Track Twitter Search Terms Over IM In Near Real Time
District 9 director hasn’t totally ruled out returning to Halo movie
Nolan Bushnell’s First Commercially Sold Video Game Ever Is for Sale [Retromodo]
Philips puts a touchpad on a mouse, laughs maniacally
CrunchDeals: New 16GB iPod nano for $170

Original Game Boy repurposed as external hard drive

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 12:23 PM PDT

Okay, so maybe this here mod isn’t nearly as extreme as shoving an entire PC into the case of a classic Game Boy, but it’s still pretty fantastic in its own right. Completed at some point during the dog days of summer, the 80GB Game Boy had its innards stripped and replaced with parts that enable a 2.5-inch 80GB SATA HDD to operate beautifully as a standard USB hard drive. The display you see here is (unfortunately) an illusion, as it’s simply a professional-looking still insert that merely gives the impression of it paying Game Boy titles while offloading spreadsheets. Now, if someone could figure out how to make it pull double duty…

[Via technabob]

Filed under: Handhelds, Storage

Original Game Boy repurposed as external hard drive originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read

How To: Back Up All Your Stuff, For Free [How To]

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 11:15 AM PDT

People don’t neglect backing up their computers because it’s hard—it isn’t, at all. No, people file into the inevitable death march of data loss for one reason: Backing up usually costs money. But it doesn’t have to.

When your concerned friends and family insist that you have to back your data up, they’re effectively telling you two things: That backing up your data will save you a massive headache in the future, because more likely the not, your hard drive will fail; and, less bluntly, that you need to buy a hard drive. And who wants to do that? It’s hard to lay out the cash for a backup hard drive, since the payoff is uncertain, and (hopefully) far away. It’s a good investment—not an easy one.

The good news is, most of us cheapskates can still keep our most important files safe without spending a dime, or wasting more than a few minutes. Here how:

Note: These methods don’t give you traditional, full backups—they are ways to keep copies of the files that matter most to you, like your documents, photos, music and videos.

Do you live with someone else? Do you share a network with someone else? Then hey, you’ve got an ready-built backup system right there! There are a few ways to deal with this setup, from stupid-simple to moderately complex.

First, you need permission. Whoever your networked buddy is, sit them down and have a talk. Give them a glass of milk, and explain to them how important data backup is. Persuade them. Coax them. Scare them. Offer to store their backups in exchange for them storing yours. Great! Now you have a partner in data safety. Congratulations.

The easiest, most direct and least intimidating way to get free backups is to set up simple file sharing on your PC or Mac. On the PC, it’s just a matter of ticking a few boxes and setting a few parameters (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7) and on Mac, it’s not much harder (To another Mac, to a PC, courtesy of Lifehacker).

Now you need to decide what to back up, and how to do it. If privacy isn’t an issue, like in a scenario where you’re just syncing files between two open access family computers, you can simple copy your documents, photos, video and audio to opposing computers’ shared folders, and voila. If privacy is an issue, like if you’re trying to back up sensitive documents or embarrassing photos, you can simply create a password-protected archive of some or all of your data, then copy that over to the backup folder.

But this is all a little manual for my taste—for a longer term solution, I’d recommend something a little more automated. All we need with such a simple setup is a basic backup utility. For Windows, I’ve been happy with IdleBackup, a free little utility that’ll copy selected folders to any destination you want—including network folders—while your computer isn’t working. For Mac, Lacie’s SilverKeeper is as simple and powerful a tool as you’ll need, syncing folders locally or over a network on a set schedule—also free.

Go Online

Again, short of purchasing a whole lot of online space especially designed for the purpose of storing full backups, this’ll be a scenario in which you’re picking a choosing what you save and what you don’t; your intention here is to save and recover the files that matter most, not restore your entire operating system. Luckily, with increasingly generous offers from online storage companies, you can put quite a bit of your stuff on someone else’s servers for nothing. A few of the best:

Windows Live Skydrive: This one really deserves more publicity that it seems to get, because it hands you 25GB of no-strings-attached storage, for free. The 50MB filesize limit is a little low considering how large the online disk is, but for document, photo, and even music backup, it’s hard to beat this.

File Factory: 100GB of free storage with a 300MB file limit. The catch? It can be a little slow, so this much data isn’t necessarily that usable.

Dropbox: This is more than just a backup service—it has plenty of nifty file syncing and features, too—but it’s a super-simple way to store 2GB of data online, with well-designed clients on every major platform

Mozy: Gives you 2GB of storage for free, or an unlimited amount for $5 a month. Comes with an extremely handy Windows utility that makes it easy to specify what gets uploaded, and what doesn’t.

Orbit Files: Offers 6GB of space, but with fewer options available for non-paying customers, and no software client.

Scatter Yourself In the Cloud

The bad news is, this is the most time-consuming way to skirt proper backups, both in terms of setup and recovery. The good news is, you’re probably already doing this, to an extent.

If my laptop died right now, I’d lose my settings, a little bit of music, a few day’s worth of documents, and well, that’s about it. That’s because so, so much of my data lives in various online services, just by nature of how I work. Rather than undertaking a day-long effort to upload all your files to myriad websites, just consider changing your habits a little, and easing into a cloud over time. That these services provide useful backups is incidental—usually they’re intended as web apps—but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve the purpose beautifully. Use them for their intended purposes-be it document editing, photo sharing, or music streaming—and you’ll soon realize that, without even trying, you’ve create a wonderful, distributed backup of your most-used media across the internet.

Documents:

Google Docs: This one’s a no-brainer, since a lot of you probably already use Gmail, with which Docs is tightly integrated. It can sometimes break formatting in files, but at least you won’t lose important data.

Office Live: Microsoft’s take on the online office suite comes with a free 5GB, which, let’s be honest, is an awful lot of Word documents.

Zoho: As an online office suite, Zoho offers a few little features that Google and Microsoft don’t. As a storage service, though, they only offer 1GB. Still!

Photos:

Flickr: The obvious choice for photography geeks, Flickr give you unlimited storage for free, at a rate of 100MB a month.

Snapfish: With fewer options for enthusiasts, Snapfish’s draw is its unlimited storage and orderable photo prints.

Picasa: 1GB of Google’s storage space for free out of the box, with a nice client to boot.

Photobucket: Another 1GB of free storage, but this one takes video as well.

Facebook: This might seem like an unlikely recommendation, but they’ve got one of the best deals going, in a way. If you’re not concerned about the quality of your photo uploads—like, you just want them for onscreen viewing—you can upload unlimited photos here, 200 at a time. And in any case, a medium-quality JPEG is better than no photo at all.

Music:

MP3Tunes: Puts your music library everywhere, with a bevy of client apps for various platforms, including the iPhone. 2GB of free storage isn’t much, but it’s something.

File Factory: Mentioned above in the general storage section, FileFactory also has a web interface for music. 100GB is quite possibly enough to store your whole library.

Deezer: A French music streaming service that also lets you upload as much music as you’d like, for personal use.

Video:

This is the most hackish of the bunch, but YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and the like usually support private or invite-only videos, which means they can act as last resort backup solutions, though the loss of quality and long upload times might make these plans a little unwieldy.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Happy data-hoarding, and have a great weekend!

How To: Back Up All Your Stuff, For Free [How To]

Read the rest here:
How To: Back Up All Your Stuff, For Free [How To]

Kwikset finally adds remote locking functionality to door locks

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 11:07 AM PDT

Kwikset’s SmartKey has been lacking in intelligence for quite awhile, but at long last, the outfit has finally added a pivotal feature here at CEDIA: true remote locking and unlocking. The new remote access control solution is being dubbed SmartCode with Home Connect — an unnecessarily lengthy way of explaining how the company’s keyless locks can now communicate wirelessly with other devices. Users can also check-in on door lock status when they aren’t automatically arming / disarming, and you can initiate customized scenes upon entrance and exit in order to more accurately pretend that you’re Prince. There’s no mention of pricing, but given that you’ll need to hit up a Control4 retailer to get your hands on this puissant technology, we’d recommend bringing the bank.

Filed under: Household

Kwikset finally adds remote locking functionality to door locks originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read

Giganews crosses the 400-day binary retention mark (but won’t stop there)

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT

giganewsl

Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.

And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.

Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can "find things" on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!

So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current retention.

Read more from the original source:
Giganews crosses the 400-day binary retention mark (but won't stop there)

Worst Case Scenario: Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take 21 Hours [Windows 7]

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 10:45 AM PDT

Now, this is extremely unlikely, and doesn’t correspond to my own experiences, but Microsoft says that in certain situations (crappy hardware, outrageous amounts of data, 32-bit install), the Windows 7 installation could take up to 21 hours to complete.

Chris Hernandez, a Microsoft Software Engineer, posted data on his blog tracking the time for both a 32-bit and 64-bit install for three different kinds of hardware and three different kinds of users. Most of the install times are totally reasonable (a clean install won’t take more than 50 minutes, even on a really lousy machine), but one sticks out: The Super User.

The Super User has 650GB of data and 40 programs to be transferred, and apparently that in itself disqualifies it from testing with low-end hardware. But a 32-bit installation of this scenario on mid-end hardware has a listed time of 1220 minutes, or just over 20 hours. Even the best case scenario with the Super User (high-end hardware, 64-bit installation) is looking very slow, estimated at 8 hours.

My own installation took under an hour, even with 200GB of data to transfer, so these probably are conservative findings—that “high-end hardware” really isn’t so high-end, with only 4GB of memory—but now we’re curious. Has anybody’s Windows 7 installation taken an inordinate amount of time? Let us know in the comments. [Ars Technica]

Worst Case Scenario: Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take 21 Hours [Windows 7]

More here:
Worst Case Scenario: Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take 21 Hours [Windows 7]

Exclaim Track: Track Twitter Search Terms Over IM In Near Real Time

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 10:04 AM PDT

Screen shot 2009-09-12 at 9.31.18 AM Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the feature. But third parties have slowly been bringing it back. And a new one offers a pretty nice way of doing it.

Exclaim Track is a very simple service. It’s Twitter track over IM. Right now, it works with Google Talk (via Jabber), and all you have to do is follow exclaimtrack@appspot.com. Once that name is on your contact list, simply IM it with “track ” and it will IM you all Twitter mentions of the term you put in.

But here’s why Exclaim Track is really great: It’s so simple to both track and un-track items. For example, today is the Michigan/Notre Dame football game. I can’t watch it because I’m stuck at the office doing work for TechCrunch50 (hope to see you there Monday and Tuesday). I want to know what people are saying about the game, but don’t want to keep reloading Twitter Search, so instead I set up an Exclaim Track query, and now I’m getting pinged every time something comes up. After the game is over, I won’t care about the search anymore, so I simply type “remove ” and it’s gone.

You can also easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account. That’s great if you want to mute notifications, but don’t necessarily want to remove a term. Also, you can search multiple terms at the same time, so removing all of them to quite the service might be a pain, without the “off” command.

Exclaim Track is a part of Excla.im, a service which allows you to update your Twitter status via IM. The developer, Harper Reed, set up this new tracking feature using the Pubsubhubbub real-time pinging service and Superfeedr, which does real-time feed parsing. He simply used Google’s App Engine for the messaging and hosting aspects, so the service actually costs him nothing to run.

One small downside to Exclaim Track is that when you first start tracking a keyword, it will find most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search. This means you’ll get a punch of non-real-time information. But once this runs through (usually just seconds or minutes), you’ll start to see new results pop-up in near real time. “Near” is an important thing to note, it’s not quite real time, but it’s usually pretty close, usually under a minute of the mention on Twitter.

CrunchBase Information

Twitter

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

View original here:
Exclaim Track: Track Twitter Search Terms Over IM In Near Real Time

District 9 director hasn’t totally ruled out returning to Halo movie

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 10:00 AM PDT

e64f0a4cead9i.jpg District 9 director hasn't totally ruled out returning to Halo movie

Not too long ago, we gave our thoughts on the movie District 9. We did so because it was a big sci-fi movie, and that’s just close enough to the tech-science nexus on which we operate that it justified a quick post. Seeing as though it’s the weekend, and you really all ought to be watching La Liga or playing 360/PS3, we’ll take two minutes to highlight this interview with the movie’s director, Neill Blomkamp.

The take-away:

• Blomkamp is open to doing a sequel.

• Before then, however, he’s going to write another sci-fi film.

• He wants to work with Peter Jackson again, but it probably won’t be on his next film.

• He hasn’t totally, 100 percent ruled out making a Halo movie. Better him than some other hack director, I guess.

In the interest of fairness, I’m gonna watch the movie again this weekend. If so many of you liked, then perhaps it’s worth trying to appreciate, and not watch it through the lens of Michio Kaku (who says that aliens of such an advanced intelligence wouldn’t even bother landing on Earth, let alone put up with human beings’ stupidity).

Original post:
District 9 director hasn't totally ruled out returning to Halo movie

Nolan Bushnell’s First Commercially Sold Video Game Ever Is for Sale [Retromodo]

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 10:00 AM PDT

Computer Space, generally considered the first commercially-sold video game ever, is pretty rare these days, with only about 1800 of the retro-futuristic arcade cabinets made. Yet two of them just popped up on eBay.

Created by Atari founders and all-around gaming legends Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Computer Space came out in November of 1971, a full year before Pong hit the streets. The gameplay seems like sort of a mix of Asteroids and Space Invaders, with a rotational thruster (that phrase will never cease to sound filthy) controlling a rocketship (it’s just getting dirtier) trying to take down a UFO (well, if a UFO is a euphamism, I don’t want to know what it’s referring to).

There’s a green and a yellow version for sale, and the price is currently hovering around $1500 and $2500, respectively, but it’s kind of an awesome-looking piece of furniture even if you’re not into classic gaming. If you like those uncomfortable egg-chairs, this’ll fit right in with your aesthetic. [Technabob]

Nolan Bushnells First Commercially Sold Video Game Ever Is for Sale [Retromodo]

Continued here:
Nolan Bushnell’s First Commercially Sold Video Game Ever Is for Sale [Retromodo]

Philips puts a touchpad on a mouse, laughs maniacally

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 09:21 AM PDT

Philips couldn’t decide whether you asked for a Bluetooth mouse, a USB mouse, or a touchpad, so it Frankensteined all three together. What can we say about aptly named “Bluetooth notebook mouse SPM9800/10?” Well, if you need a Bluetooth mouse, you can use it like a Bluetooth mouse. If the juice runs out, plug it in via USB and you have a USB mouse. But the feature that most differentiates this from other, how we say, ‘mash-ups,’ is that the click wheel has been replaced with a 360

CrunchDeals: New 16GB iPod nano for $170

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 09:00 AM PDT

ipodnano Kids! The new iPod nanos are here! Amazon’s knocked ten bucks off of the 16GB model, too. It’s not much but, hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. Maybe you could use that extra ten bucks to buy yourself something nice, like digital content from iTunes to load onto your new iPod nano.

Don’t forget that these new nanos feature FM radio and a camera, along with a few other new bells and whistles. See our hands-on here for more info and real-life shots of the device.

Get one now for $170 with free shipping, if you’re interested.

Apple iPod nano 16 GB Orange (5th Generation) NEWEST MODEL [Amazon via dealnews]

See the original post here:
CrunchDeals: New 16GB iPod nano for $170

Visits

Online

Partners

Blog Archive