Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
After reading “Should you trust a hard drive after a major error?” (2019-02-18 AskWoody Plus), reader Daniel Loyd wrote with a real-life anecdote of a rather usual drive problem he encountered: “Fred, I had a hard drive that worked great, check disk and several 3rd party tools showed the drive was in great shape no…
Removing active malware will stop it from doing further or future local damage, but that’s all. You may still have trouble left over from the original, now-removed infection source. For example, removing ransomware from your PC or phone won’t automatically decrypt your files — they’ll still be inaccessible. You’ll have to restore your device from…
Keyboards are ultimately a trade-off between the number of letters and numbers in common use in the language being supported, and the size of human hands and fingertips. Ideally, you want the most-commonly used letters, numbers, and symbols to be immediately visible and accessible; but not have so many keys that the keyboard is huge,…
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com is an AI-powered website that displays a random, computer-generated face each time you refresh your browser. Here are some examples — all fake. (These are 1/4-resolution screen-grabs; the site produces higher-res images.) It’s interesting… and spooky. More on the site and its tech: ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=2092
Some estimates say YouTube adds something north of a petabyte of new data every day. That’s impressive in itself, but remember that YouTube is owned by Google, whose servers have to store data for: Google Search; Google Docs/Sheets/Slides; Gmail/Inbox; Google Calendar; Google Drive; Google Translate; Google Maps; Waze; Google Earth; Street View; Google Keep; Google…
Recordings released by NASA/JPL let you listen to “plasma waves moving from Saturn to its rings and its moon Enceladus… like an electrical circuit between the two bodies, with energy flowing back and forth.” NASA/JPL article: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7186 Recording, if above embed doesn’t work: https://youtu.be/hWHLCHv4PiI Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=2082
You’re right. There’s absolutely no sense in that. Storing backups on the same physical hardware as the original is a terrible idea because, as you say, any major PC problem that takes out the original is also likely to take out the backup. You’d be left with nothing. True backup copies should be stored on…
After some 15 years into a planned 90 day mission, it looks like NASA is about to finally declare the Opportunity rover lost; succumbing to a massive, planet-wide dust storm that engulfed Mars and covered the rover’s solar panels. More: NASA Says Goodnight to Opportunity, Its Most Enduring Mars Rover Multiple news stories Coverage of…
Reader Simone Paciaroni* asks: “Does it still make sense to buy external hard drives in the cloud era?“ I think so, yes. But not instead of cloud storage — with cloud storage. Local storage gives you immediate access to everything, regardless of the size or number of files you’re accessing. When you’re dealing with terabytes of…
Google’s new Password Checkup extension for desktop Chrome automatically checks your passwords, as you use them, against a Google-developed database of some four billion known hacked/stolen logon credentials. (Fig. 1) Note that this is not the same as sites like have i been pwned , which check to see if your email address (not passwords) appears…