I know this is a long post, but I truly encourage you to read through this and ask questions since this can be a severe problem. Just trying to bring some computer literacy to the masses.

It’s Halloween, but not much is scarier than going to your computer hitting the switch and getting one of a set of outcomes…you hear an unnatural clicking coming from your computer, nothing is coming on, or maybe sparks!!  I hear over and over about people who weren’t prepared for their computers to go down, and years of data is lost. Just to get you to understand the magnitude of backing up your data, here’s some stats that can help you to understand:

• 43% of computer users loose valuable data due to accidental deletion, and that is with the use of a Recycle Bin
• Only 3 out of every 100 stolen laptops are ever recovered
• Up to 13% of hard drives fail in their first year of use
• The average lifespan of a “non-server grade” hard drive is approximately 5 years
• CD-Rs have historically had problems with lifespan. The cheapest CD-Rs have been seen to only have a 2 year lifespan, DVD-R are lasting longer but have yet to be fully studied. This is due to dye fading, commercial DVD and CD don’t have this problem.
• Flash drive (or Thumb Drives) have a 10,000 to 100,000 flash limit before the old data can possibly corrupt. This means data that hasn’t been touch in a while could be corrupted (or un-remembered). This limits a flash drive to approximately 4-5 years with light to medium usage.

So there you have it. Think about all those precious pictures you’ve placed on a CD-R or DVD-R and haven’t touched.  Is it 2 years old? You might want to re-burn it.  Think about all the natural disasters? Dallas had an earthquake today, wildfires in that West Texas wind, Houston and flooding/hurricanes.  Are you going to be able to reclaim your data if something happens?  You hotel room gets broken into?  Call be paranoid but here’s my personal story:

In the past 3 years I’ve had three laptops fail on me. Four laptops in the past 5 years (well 1 laptop failed twice). I’ve also had a hard drive that was only 4 years old fail on me to the point where I had to pull out a Linux drive recovery tool and could get my data off right before it completely died.  That’s 4 possible serious data losses in 3 years.

So now that I’ve typed over 350 words on why, here’s the how. Read the rest of this entry »

It never fails, around this time of year I get a call from Mom asking me what I want for Christmas.  I never am able to respond that second, I don’t think about those things to the extent of having it directly on my mind.  Email it is hard because you have to take the time to think about what you want all in a compressed period of time, and I get distracted to easily.

I know many of you don’t use web tools, but I’m here to say you should.  There is a real easy way to create “Wish Lists” using very common web tools.  And this can be shared with everyone you want to see.  Here’s how… Read the rest of this entry »

An all new post in the series of how to do things on the website.  How about embedding videos?  I’ve see a couple of posts recently for people that intend to post videos on the site, but just have to link to them because they don’t know how to embed them.  Embedding is easy, so make the quick trip to find out how it’s done.

Also, in this Guide there are instructions for uploading your own video and posting it to the site.  It explains some privacy issues and how to completely control the video’s distribution so that the entire YouTube crowd can find you video and comment on it.

Here’s a link to the new Guide:

How to Embed a Video

So I’ve added another Guide to posting.  You can check it out in the Helpful Links section in the sidebar, or clicking the link at the end of this post.

What many of you probably have never seen or used is the Bookmarklet.  This is a tool to quickly post something you’ve seen on the internet in seconds, like a ninja.  There’s a quick How-to, then like my last one, a short video to illustrate how to use the Bookmarklet.   The video illustrates how to use the Bookmarklet in 60 seconds, which means once you get the hang of it you’ll be able to utilize this tool in less than that, like a ninja.

It’s really simple, and I hope you’ll check it out.  Here’s the link:

Using the Bookmarklet

A new guide post is up. It is about how to put images into posts.  This way you guys can dress up your posts any way you want.

You can access this guide by following the link at the end of this post, clicking the link in the The Guide page, or selecting the How to Upload/Post Images link located under the Random Image item in the sidebar.

If you have any question on this particular guide, go ahead and post a comment to this article and I’ll answer as soon as possible.

Enjoy!

How to Upload/Post Images