A Time of Magic

Although more and more of our lives is spent online few people bother to backup any of it and thus, sooner or later, something is sure to go wrong and you’ll end up losing all kinds of stuff that you didn’t realise that you needed.

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.

Long ago computers just came in black or beige or whatever the latest “in” colour was at the time but things have moved on a lot since then.

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.

Compact flash was one of the first easily removeable forms of solid-state memory around but it seems to be starting to get a little harder to pick up compact flash in the shops these days.

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…