Yeeehaaaa, I’ve got an ipod! It’s a sweet, sexy little beast, 60Gb, black, video compatible, will run for 20 hours on a single charge, it’s just delicious!
My delightlful little brother (new window) bought it in Singapore and has mailed it to his friend Suzy in a box with her birthday present (I hope she doesn’t think it’s for her!) so it should get here any day now.
It’s just so exciting, the first generation of video iPods, in black, ooooh, sexy as! You can check out pictures here (new window) and the specs, etc here (new window).
As well as the ipod, for a handsome £25 including delivery, I’ve bought an ipod camera connector (new window) which I discovered, courtesy of one of the reviews, will download pictures not just from a digital camera (which could be painful) but from a USB card reader!
I was going to hang for the new version of the ipod Belkin media reader (new window) which allows you to download photos directly from the media cards. However, because the new ipod doesn’t support firewire (a bold move for Apple), this device no longer works with the new ipods. The new solution of the camera connector and card reader is actually ideal, giving me the benefit of fewer devices to take with me and greater flexibility.
Ahh, I love technology when it works… 
I’ve just created a page on my tech setup with lots of lovely information about the various bits of kit / software that I use. So for anyone interested, check it out here.
A friend had a recent hard drive corruption and lost all the data on his drive, his computer wouldn’t even boot up so much data had been lost. In trying to fix the problem, I looked at various data recovery packages. The industry leader appears to be a product called EasyRecovery (new window) from Kroll OnTrack (new window), however, at an entry price of £70 to recover 25 files at a time, or £180 to recover up to 20 disks, it’s not cheap.
As it happens, I was on the phone to Alex (new window) today, my source of all technical wisdom, and mentioned the problem. He pointed me to a lovely little program called HandyRecovery (new window) which at £18 plus VAT appears to be performing the same function.
I’ve no doubt that OnTrack’s product is more sophisticated if the data has been partially overwritten, or the corruption is more extensive. For example, OnTrack’s product includes the ability to burn a recovery CD which will allow you to boot your computer into the software so as to run the data recovery, while HandyRecovery requires Windows to be running. In my case, I’m recovering data from a hard drive which I’ve taken out of my friend’s PC and have connected to my laptop via a USB enclosure, so it works fine.
HandyRecovery looks great for simple data deletions or simple corruptions. It even comes in a free flavour, I’m not sure of the differences, but for £18 I wasn’t going to quibble. It looks like data recovery software might finally be available at a reasonable cost to the end user. Delightful.
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