HitsGarden

Ho-hum, another 2Gb SD card, but hang on a minute, this one is different. The Eye-Fi Explore is a Wi-FI memory card. So what, you might be asking, SD Wi-Fi cards are nothing new, the one in my PDA must be at least 3 years old, but there is more. This is a fully self-contained wireless device, so it can be used in any SD compatible camera, and used to beam images across a network to a PC, printer or uploaded to the Internet. In other words the camera doesn’t need to be a special wireless-capable model. All you have to do is pop the card into your PC to activate and configure it then put it into the camera and while it is on it automatically sends image to any wi-fi device in range (around 3 – 5 metres). There’s an added bonus, it uses a system called Geotagging to label or identify where the picture was taken. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever lost a file or forgotten where you’ve put it on your hard drive? Of course you have, we’ve all done it, and if you’re lucky you may even have found it by searching through folders, or using the Windows Search facility. The one in Vista is actually quite good, but even that won’t be able help you if you can’t remember what the file was called.

Here’s something else to try, it’s called Seeker and in addition to searching for files by all or part of the name, it also looks inside files, for keywords or phrases. Again it’s something Windows can do, but this search tool is fast, very fast in fact, thanks to a powerful algorithm and an unusually flexible range of search criteria. Read the rest of this entry »

I am so old that I can remember when PC’s boasted having one kilobyte (1kb) of storage and I can still recall placing a special order, and waiting weeks for 1Mb hard disc drive, which I was convinced that I could never fill in my lifetime… So it is with a world-weary shrug that I learn than Hitachi is planning to market a 5 terabyte hard drive, probably within the next 18 months.

What makes this particularly interesting, not to say a bit spooky, is that Hitachi’s Dr Yoshihiro Shiroishi reckons that just two of them will be need to match the storage capacity of the human brain, which he estimates around 10Gb. Frankly I find that hard to believe; a lifetime of memories in a mere 10Tb, when a 2–hour movie swallows up 5 gigabytes? There must be some pretty impressive compression involved… Read the rest of this entry »

Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It’s clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.

The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has announced that Windows XP, which was expected to reach the end of its life later this month, has been given a reprieve and will continue until 2010. However, before XP fans start celebrating it’s worth reading the small print. It turns out that MS is basically extending the deadline for manufacturer’s to sell licences for XP, mainly for use on low cost and ultra-compact laptops like the eee PC and OLPC (one laptop per child project). There’s also provision for XP to continue on low-cost desktops or ‘nettops’, which are essentially simple web-surfing machines. On the plus side this means XP will be supported for a while longer, probably well beyond 2010, but the chances are the next over the counter or mail order PC you buy will have Vista pre-installed, but there’s nothing to stop you wiping the disc and installing XP, if that’s what you really want.