Nero Free For All
Back in the days when recordable CDs were still a bit of a novelty there were only a couple of applications on the market that could actually make recordings, and one of them was Nero Burning, and it is still regarded as one of the best CD/DVD utilities you can get. Now here’s the good news, you can get it for free, that’s right, Nero 9 Essentials Free version is all yours for the cost of a download. There are no catches unless you count the pre-checked facility to install an annoying toolbar – so read before you click – and the nags to upgrade to the paid for version. Otherwise it’s good to go with a decent set of basic but efficient CD and DVD burning and copying facilities.
LG GT810 and LG BL40 Spotted
One LG mobile phone that returned into the spotlight is the LG GT810. The handset, expected to come with a touchscreen display, has been spotted in the wild for the first time at the beginning of the ongoing year, and now we learn that it should be heading towards the Central and South America.
The device sports GSM, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA connectivity, and should come with Windows Mobile 6.1 as its operating system. In addition, there is the 3-inch touch screen that can offer a 240 x 400 pixel resolution, along with Wi-Fi connectivity, a 3-megapixel camera with video recording capabilities, and 256 MB of internal memory coupled with a memory card slot with support for up to 8 GB of additional storage space. Read more
Make YouTube YourTube
YouTube is great, well, some of it anyway, and even occasional visitors will see a video that they would like to download to watch again or send to someone else. There are lots of recording utilities on the web but this one, called Better YouTube has to be one of the easiest to use. It’s a Firefox add-on and it only takes a few seconds to install. Thereafter, if you see something you fancy simply click the ‘download this video’ link that appears just below the player screen and the download of the chosen video, as an .flv file, starts automatically. Incidentally, if you haven’t got a .flv player on your PC then I can thoroughly recommend the subject of a previous Top Tip, called VLC, which plays just about anything.
Hitachi Hard Drive with Half a Brain
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 more
How HVDs Work
HVDs, or Holographic Versatile Discs, are a type of optical digital data storing devices bearing a striking resemblance to the construction and operation of more common optical storing devices, such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, relying on read/write techniques based on the principles of holography. Similar to typical optical data storing devices, the first holographic memory systems were created several decades ago; however, they did not became as popular as CDs and DVDs mostly because of the manufacturing costs involved and the complexity of the read/write processes.
Lately, holographic memory systems have started gaining more ground in relation to more common optical storing devices, as HVDs become cheaper to manufacture. After all, HVDs have both significantly superior storage capacity and read/write speeds. Read more
