These days, it’s a lot simpler and there are lots of online printers who’ll handle things like postcard printing for you. Generally speaking it is things like postcards that stymie home printers as they just can’t handle card thick enough for postcards. Photos are generally fine these days (though expensive on home printers) but if you’d like a really large enlargement or something on canvas then you’ll generally need to do this via an online outfit as few home printers can handle odd papers or really large ones.

And none of this is anything like as expensive as it used to be. A high quality poster sized print is under £20 these days.

Thus if you want to get something slightly out of the ordinary it’s often the electronics retailers that stock it. You’d need to get a very large computer shop to find a barcode scanner these days I suspect. That’s more obviously (in an odd kind of way) an electronics produce but sometimes it can be very difficult to track down what would formerlly have been very much a computer component like a graphics pad. Well, you can get the little toy models but I found it quite an ordeal to track down a sensibly sized one a year ago.

So if you’re looking something that little bit out of the ordinary for your computer don’t neglect the electronics shops.

How many of us even think about backing up our information though? After all, the disc is sure to fail at some time and thus take with it a fairly large chunk of our lives in many cases. Would you really not mind losing all those photos stored on your computer?

The snag is though that backup is a hassle to do and difficult to keep as a habit over the longer term. However, online backup is now quite a viable option for those hooked up to high speed Internet. You still have to set it up and it will take an age to run the first time, but once that initial bulk work is done it’s very much an automatic thing that you can basically forget about until the day that you need it. You can even get it free for smaller amounts of data and these days “small” is actually quite a lot of information.

Those with long careers in the computer industry may recall the likes of the PDP8 of the late 1970s which sported a 2MB (yes two megabyte) hard disk some fourteen inches across and costing something like £10,000. These days even if you buy the cheapest flash drive you’ll be taking in terms of gigabytes and a price of under a tenner.

However, despite all that improvement in portability and capacity people are, if anything, less careful about safeguarding their information. One wonders just how many people have lost all their digital photos already simply because they didn’t bother to update the storage media?

Although you can obviously reuse the digital storage from, say, your camera it’s now so cheap that you may as well keep the original on the card after you copy it onto your computer and thus create a backup with no effort at all.

One of the ways to avoid the hassle element of backup is to do it online. That’s only recently become a truly practical activity with the increase in line speeds just about everywhere and when you add to that the rapidly decreasing cost of storage there are even free online backup services these days so there’s no excuse.

Obviously you’ll get less storage space and facilities on the free services but that “less” might well be enough for the essential files that you have.

For one thing, with the falling price of computers they’ve started to acquire some of the aspects of fashion accessories. Thus we have the deliberately cute range of Sony Vaio computers which do all that a normal computer does but in a much cuter form factor that lets Sony get away with charging more for a comparable amount of computer power than other manufacturers can get away with.

But is it worth getting one of these cute computers? Well, if you want more of a fashion accessory than something with a whole lot of computer power then it’s the way to go for you. After all, I’m quite happy with my cute little Aspire One despite it being quite underpowered as computers go and the Sonys are a good deal more powerful than it is.

That’s a bit of a shame really as there are an awful lot of gadgets out there which still use it and which’ll be in use for many years to come. It is still available though although its use is generally aimed at professional markets these days (it’s preferred over SD memory by professional photographers).

Unfortunately, that decrease in availability means that it’s generally more expensive than the equivalent amount of SD memory these days although it is possible to get around that by buying one of the adaptors that let you put an SD card into a compact flash slot (if you can find one of them: they’re quite rare).

And, of course, it’s sad to see the closest analog of Mr Spock’s little memory cards fading into history…

Why would you? After all, for a general article the main difference that you’d notice would be that a British/Irish/Australian/New Zealand blog would say “colour”, an American/Canadian one “color” and other related differences. Aside from that there would be differences in the sports talked about and the news agencies referred to. However, by and large in a general post you would barely notice where it had been written so long as the author was a native English speaker.

However, there is one major difference that we experienced (”we” being me and Wendy) late last week when we received a call from the police telling us that we were in contempt of court. That particular concept doesn’t exist in the American legal lexicon thanks to the First Amendment but basically means that you’re not allowed to “publish” details of an ongoing court case where there are “reporting restrictions” in effect.

But what does “publish” actually mean? Up to now there’s been something of an ongoing debate about whether or not bloggers could be counted as journalists. Aside from anything else, if they weren’t journalists then legally they couldn’t be publishing anything, could they? Well, apparently we ARE journalists now or at least are being treated by the courts as though we were part of “the media”.

Curious as to the case that triggered this? Well, since this particular blog is published in London I can’t tell you about it…

Just a few years ago typically those in government information security roles were, by and large, generalists who had the security function bolted on by way of a fairly small number of specialist training courses. However, with the rise in the profile through media attention on various incidents that’s rapidly becoming a non-runner and thus there’s been a fairly rapid rise in the number of university masters courses on the topic.

Why not ordinary degrees? Essentially that’s because those getting into information security are generally very experienced and many of them already have degrees in the computer field. One suspects also the fact that the universities can charge more for a masters course has a certain amount to do with the level of degree too.

Is it just a flavour of the month though? In the sense it is in that a lot of the raising of the profile has arisen from the bad press that the various incidents created. However, those incidents are, to some extent, a reflection of the sheer volume of information that’s knocking around these days and that can only get worse as the power of computers increases.

However, these days everyone seems to have a wide selection of digital media devices knocking around. I suspect that I’ve more than the average with everything from PDAs through to camcorders and everything in between. The snag is that such a range of devices means that I end up needing quite a variety of memory types with the original compact flash memory of the PDA having SD cards for that PDA, the laptop, baby computer, compact camera and SLR. Actually, SD was the workable single choice for the lot (though then that comes in normal (up to 1GB), newer normal (up to 2GB) and HC (up to 32GB)) but now I find that I need to add microSD to the range for the new camcorder and miniSD for the mobile broadband modem.

Still, at least the SD family generally come with adaptors which means that I “just” need to remember where I’ve put them…