User Friendly
Hard Drives
Despite all of the motherboard failures and hard disk crashes I’ve experienced over the years, I remain completely irresponsible about backing up my data.
I do my best to ignore the telltale signs of impending doom: the screen on my iMac that goes all-white, and stays that way, until I reboot. The ominous warnings that read, “Time Machine has not backed up your computer in God knows-how-many days.’’
I have always blamed my backup woes on the vicissitudes of Time Machine. That, and my aging iMac, and its dodgy Firewire connection to the clunky disk drive I bought at Costco last year.
But until recently, I had little to fret about, beyond losing a few applications and e-mail archives.
Now there are the photos, music, and Flip Video Camcorder movies I keep on my computer — the memories I will need to rebuild my identity in a virtual world, after my body gives out (at some point beyond the Singularity, hopefully).
For now, I will gladly settle for an external hard drive that plays well with my iMac.
Seagate Technology LLC says that its new FreeAgent GoFlex portable and desktop external drives make data backups go more smoothly, because they are fully compatible with both Windows and Mac devices.
The company’s GoFlex Ultra-portable Drive(about $200 for 1TB of storage) can perform automated backups from both Macs and PCs.
The drive ships with a software “dashboard,’’ which you use to schedule backups, and to designate the files you want encrypted on the drive.
Another GoFlex device, the TV HD Media Player, should make enjoying your digitally stored movies less of a pain than if you were to schlep your computer into your man cave for each viewing.
The TV HD Media Player, which supports scads of video formats, connects to your TV through an HDMI cable.
You can send movies to the player from your Mac or PC via an optional Wi-Fi adapter, or plug a GoFlex drive, or another external drive or camera, directly into the HD Media Player.
Another option, for YouTube fans: You can use the TV HD Media Player, which will be available in June, for about $130, to stream video directly from the Internet to your TV.
iPhone Apps
Utah makes nuke visualizations available
Are you completely mystified by what goes on inside a nuclear reactor, such as the one at MIT?You are not alone, apparently.
The United States is facing a dramatic shortage of engineers who will be able to take the helm at any of the nation’s aging nuclear plants in the coming years, while designing safer, new models.
But the University of Utah’s nuclear engineering program hopes to enrich its students’ learning with an iPhone app that renders in three dimensions the collision of neutrons and uranium inside a nuclear reactor core.
Utah last fall released a free 3D iPhone app, ImageVis3D Mobile as part of a biomedical visualization project.
Utah does not plan to make the software behind its nuke visualizations, which were also generated for the ImageVis3D Mobile app, publicly available anytime soon.
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