Synchronise your data

My hard disk crash chronicled here last week made me miss a Database deadline, but these blasted machines are capable of making your life much more difficult than that.


Microsoft’s new version 2.1 of SyncToy is an excellent tool, providing a choice of three ways to back up your data.
I'm not sure it's possible to emphasise how important backups are, although frankly, I think most backups are overkill. I can't see a lot of value to backing up entire disks, including Windows and all programs. A crashed hard drive means you can get a fresh installation of Windows, and that's never bad.

The only really important things on your computer are your files. That means the company reports and letters begging for a raise, notes to Mom, pictures of the rug rats as they grew up, video of spouse making a fool of himself.

In my opinion, the best backup is to another hard drive. They are cheap and they are fast, simple and easy as pie.

I'm not going to get into backing up via "the cloud" in this column. There are unique advantages and disadvantages to using the Internet instead of a second hard drive, which I'll go into in a column later on.

Syncback remains the ne plus ultra of free backup programs, and beats almost all of the ones that charge you. I have reviewed this terrific program for years, and won't go into huge detail again.

While it has evolved into a good business for the "two bright sparks" with their for-sale work-ups, the free version of Syncback is really all that most of us need.

It provides basic choices between synchronising original and backup folders, or just backing up the original. Synchronisation means they both will be exactly the same (you lose all files you've deleted on your main disk), while backing up means just add all the new stuff to the old stuff on the backup drive.

From there, Syncback is simple beyond words. And, a big plus, it will set up an automatic backup for you, so you don't have to remember.

Microsoft SyncToy installation is cute; there is no other word for it. You click "Install" and get the usual "Do you agree, blah, blah, blah...?" legal stuff. If you just click "Agree", SyncToy will not install. You have to physically scroll to the end of the Microsoft jargon and then click that you agree. And then you have yet another screen where you must tick a box that, yes, "I have read and understand the warning" about upgrading the program. And then you have to tick a box that you agree to the Microsoft licence.

Setup is as simple - as a backup program should be.

Start by picking an original folder where your data lies, and then a backup folder. Microsoft refers to them as the Left Folder and the Right Folder.

You have to choose one of three possible backup methods. You can Synchronise, which creates two identical folders. You can Echo, copying everything from the master, Left Folder, to the Right and deleting anything there that you have deleted on your main drive. Or you can Contribute, which copies and renames the original files but deletes nothing.

Before you backup - especially the first time - you can run a Preview to see what will happen if you go ahead. If you follow this closely, there is almost no chance of an error.

You can create as many "folder pairs" as you wish, and you can set different ways to do your backup from among the three choices.

Setup and previews completed, you can run one, some, or all of the backups at a click.

My Number One complaint about SyncToy is the lack of a built-in scheduling tool. To be effective, backing up should be automatic.

Windows has a Task Scheduler, which you can instruct to run your SyncToy backup for you. A Help button on SyncToy tells you how to set it up.

The key part about scheduling SyncToy to run automatically is the command "Synctoy -R". The "-R" part tells the program to go ahead and run all tasks on all folder pairs.

Third-party software is simpler than Task Scheduler.

Marxio Timer is a terrific program by young Canadian Marek Mantaj. It can automate a lot of computer tasks, one of which is to run a program when you want. For example, it can run Synctoy to back up your data while you're having your hair done every Wednesday before Ladies' Night - or while you're dancing, so far as that goes.

There's only a bit of a learning curve to installing and setting up Marxio Timer. You can learn and practice the many program uses as you go.

The opening screen gives you 16 tasks to choose from, and obviously "Run program" is the one you want here. A wizard then guides you through how to do it. Don't forget the "-R" you'll need for Synctoy. Or, alternatively, Marxio Timer will click your mouse for you to do it the manual way.

At the main page, click on Programs at Marek's website (http://www.marxio-tools.net/)

Microsoft SyncToy is explained and available for free - no genuine-Windows check - at tinyurl.com/2cu9fh.

For Syncback, at least find and try the free offer before considering whether to buy an enhanced version of the program, at http://www.2brightsparks.com/.

from :http://bit.ly/aCf35o

Maemo is like a PC in your pocket, but it cries out for a mouse

Nokia has pinned its future hopes on two platforms. First, the new Symbian, not to be confused with the current commercial Symbian that Nokia bought, and the other, Maemo, which has been through a few iterations already in a series of Internet tablets before finding its home in its first proper phone, the AIS-exclusive N900.


Nokia N810 delivers the full web experience, Flash and all.
In recent months, I have been toying with Maemo, though it is Maemo 4 (code-named Diablo) on an old N810 and not version 5 (Fremantle) as on the N900.

The experience makes me wonder if Android and even iPhone would have had a chance if Nokia had bothered to put a Sim card slot in it and priced the tablet at a decent price rather than make it a Wi-Fi (and later WiMAX)-only tablet when the N770 was launched in 2005.

Maemo runs a variant of Debian Linux, but not in the way that Android is Linux. If we equate Linux to a person, then Debian (and Ubuntu) desktop Linux and Maemo are more like cousins, like different races sharing the same DNA structure. Debian and Android, however, are more like the 99.5 percent similarity between man and chimpanzee. Which one has the extra 0.05 percent of DNA is up to debate. To complete the analogy, iPhone and Windows Mobile would be aliens who have the same general bipedal build but are not related to us at all.

Maemo is a thinly skinned, stylus-friendly Linux. In this day and age of touch, it feels primitive. Indeed, many programs are skinned in a way that is superficial. Half the time you feel the program cries out for a mouse and cursor.

Maemo's software can be considered at the same time both rich and sparse. It is sparse as there are very few Maemo-native programs out there, Nokia's core applications not withstanding. Indeed, of the dozens of programmes I have installed on my N810, only the MediaBox (a streaming Media Player) and Midori (a webkit-based browser, Webkit being the engine that Apple's Safari is based on) seem comfortable with finger input in the tablet form factor. Others, like Claws Mail, cry out for a mouse, with icons too small and menus too fussy for fingertip or stylus navigation.


It is also interesting to note that MediaBox comes with three Thai TV stations pre-loaded. Channel 9, a music station, and ASTV News 1. Obviously someone in the Maemo development community wears a yellow shirt to work.

The internal Nokia browser is based on an old version of Mozilla and does a decent job, only tripping up when rendering Thai fonts. Midori renders Thai correctly and is faster, too.

Now, the unexpected surprise is that the browser runs as if it were on a PC. This means a full PC experience for Facebook, albeit at a cramped 800x600. YouTube works as it does on a PC with a full version of Adobe Flash present. By and large, anything an older, slower PC can run and render, Maemo can run and render. Perhaps the only thing I missed after a few months of tinkering are the Google products. Google Docs does not work at all on either of the browsers and Gmail runs in limited, simple mode.

Whenever there is a phone review, everyone talks about how good or bad it handles Flash compared to a PC. This handles Flash as a PC does, full stop. Makes one wonder why the new iPad does not do Flash when a three-year-old Nokia tablet handles it perfectly.

Things soon get better. The internal Email client is nice and efficient but someone bothered to port Claws Mail and most of its plug-ins to Maemo. Granted, they did a bit of a cut and shut job with the UI, which is not as intuitive or stylus-friendly as it could be, but it is ever-so customisable and has plug-ins for GPG public-key encryption, all sorts of filtering and, well, anything you would expect of a Linux mail client.

Almost any program that runs on Linux can run on Maemo. It has a full Linux shell command line interface. All the standard Linux network tools are there too, making it perfect to debug a wireless network installation. If it had an RJ-45 wired Ethernet port, it would be perfect.

Going further, most Linux software can be run by recompiling it for the ARM architecture. Hackers (used in the original sense of the word; enthusiasts, not criminals) have already ported the entire Debian environment complete with GIMP (a Photoshop-like program) and Open Office 3 (yes, the entire suite). Do they run? Yes. Are they usable? No, as the CPU lacks the grunt and the lack of a mouse makes it more of a proof of concept. That said, adding a mouse (or external keyboard) is easy and one wonders how slick the Debian desktop will be given the extra power of the Cortex CPU in the N900.

Connectivity is a no-brainer, with seamless integration to connect to the Internet with last-generation Nokia phones, such as my N95, and even Windows Mobile phones. Oddly enough, getting it to work with the new N97 Mini was not a pleasant experience.

It also tries to mimic a phone with no less than three VoIP solutions included. One is Skype. It also has a SIP client built into the default presence "button" and Gizmo 5. The latter is especially interesting as it was purchased by Google three months ago and no longer accepts new users. What Google plans to do with a VoIP company now that it has both Google Voice and Google.com/phone is anyone's billion-dollar guess.

It has GPS and uses open-source maps. Compared to Nokia's Ovi maps, it is clumsy but it works quite well, even without being connected to the Internet.

As a phone OS or even a tablet OS, Maemo lacks the wow and slickness of Android or iPhone (and probably iPad). Like most things Nokia these days it lacks cohesion and a sense of direction. The keyboard is hard and the edges eat into your hands. But forget that for a while and look at it in the light of a full-fledged PC that can fit in your pocket. Perhaps it would be better to compare it to the pocketable PCs like the Fujitsu U-series or new slates like the Archos 9. In that light, it is a simple case of Linux vs Windows and this one comes with a good battery life to boot. Maemo does everything a Linux PC can do, buy it cries out for a keyboard and a mouse.

But judging from the way the N900 has been promoted, Nokia does not seem to be championing the Linux-ness of Maemo 5, instead trying to make it a high-end phone OS. It is like a beauty queen with a PhD in English literature reduced to a Q&A on her favourite colours. Yes, Maemo is a finger-friendly phone OS, but it is so much more. What other phone OS has a full-fledged competitor to Microsoft Office rather than a dumbed-down document viewer?

Nokia has announced a roadmap where it will release a few more Maemo 5 devices this year. It will be fun to see how well they fared in a year's time.

from ://http://http://bit.ly/cutV1v

iPad apps likely to be bigger, pricier

CNN) -- If recent gadget history is a guide, consumers considering Apple's new iPad won't focus so much on the product specs -- the big screen, fast processor, long battery life and the like.

They'll look instead at what the product can do.

And to find out, they'll turn to its lineup of apps -- those cheap, downloadable programs that run on mobile phones and other gadgets.

"The reason why people buy an iPhone is because there are 140,000 apps and you can change your iPhone into anything you want," said Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray.

At the iPad's unveiling last week in San Francisco, California, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs went to great lengths to say how robust the iPad's app "ecosystem" will be. He said app developers will encounter a "gold rush" of opportunities if they develop programs for the device.

He showed off a new suite of $9.99 iWork apps for constructing spreadsheets, creating presentations and designing document layouts.

The turtleneck-clad Jobs also trotted out game developers such as Travis Boatman, who said Electronic Arts, where he is a vice president, will redesign its games to be cooler, faster and, above all, bigger on the iPad's 10-inch screen.

"It's a little bit like holding a hi-def television just inches from your face," Boatman said at the presentation, referring to gaming on the new device.

But not everyone is sure the iPad will see the same flood of app-development that followed the releases of the iPhone and iPod Touch, two pocket-size devices known for accessing the world's largest database of mobile applications, Apple's App Store.

And, according to Munster and others, iPad apps are likely to be more expensive -- in the range of $4 for an average iPad app instead of $1.90 for apps on the iPhone, he said.

Apple declined to comment for this report.

iPhone games, widgets and programs already for sale in the App Store will automatically enlarge to fill the iPad's larger screen. Apple's App Store is the leading source of smartphone applications and about nine times larger than Google's rival Android Market, which sells a reported 16,000 apps for Android-based phones.

But app developers and mobile experts said the iPad isn't capable of anything fundamentally different from the iPhone and iPod.

All three of those touch-screen gadgets have accelerometers, which allow users to, among other things, tilt their phones to the left and right to control mobile games. All have GPS compasses, allowing for some neat mapping and navigation apps based on a person's position on the globe.

Essentially, apps on the Apple iPad simply may be bigger versions of what's come before.

That makes the iPad potentially less exciting for developers than the iPhone, said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, a group that tracks app sales, and who formerly worked in the video-game industry.

"The innovation is going to be limited to what's possible [on the iPad], you know," he said. "I don't think imagination can override the true limits of what's offered."

Farago added that no one was sure what programs developers would create for the iPhone when it debuted in 2007. Similar surprises could result once the iPad goes on sale in about two months, he said.

The larger iPad screen may also make new advertising schemes possible, since banner ads don't fit on the iPhone without blocking a substantial portion of its 3.5-inch screen, he said.

Even if apps on the iPad are simply bigger versions of what's available now, that still might make them more interesting.

Michael McWhertor, senior editor of the gaming blog Kotaku, said the iPad's 10-inch screen will give developers room to bump touch-screen controls off of the video game itself. So, where a person might have had to put their thumbs in the way of video-game action on the iPhone, a sliver of touch-screen space used only for game controls might make gaming more comfortable on the iPad, he said.

The iPad's size also brings limitations, he said. "While it's not heavy, it's a little more awkward to grasp" than the iPhone, he said.

Books apps are likely to fare better on the iPad's larger screen than on phones.

Jobs last week announced the opening of the Apple iBookstore, which will sell digital books in the ePub format.

An Apple-produced app called iBooks was a hit with the crowd at the unveiling, and some tech writers have said the iPad could mean the end of the Amazon Kindle, the most popular e-book reader on the market to date.

Also last week, Apple released an online kit to help mobile app developers create products specifically for the iPad.

Ryan Peterson, a spokesman for the app-development company Übermind, said developers at his company went to work on iPad apps as soon as they heard about the announcement.

"It's been a hotbed of activity," he said.

Apps for doctors, financial apps and shopping apps will work especially well on the larger screen, he said.

"This is going to open up worlds of apps and things and new processes -- and things we never even considered doing on a device like that," he said.

Cool factor aside, how many iPads Apple sells also is likely to be a major factor in whether app developers decide to work on programs for the new gadget, since that ultimately determines how much money will be made in that space.

Most analyst estimates said the slate personal computer market, of which the iPad is a part, will make up a relatively thin slice of overall personal computer sales this year. Bob O'Donnell, vice president of the firm IDG, said he expects about 3 million to 4 million of the devices to be sold this year, putting slate computers on par with the e-reader market of 2009.

Still, there's potential for iPad app developers to make money, said Farago of the app-tracker firm Flurry -- especially if all they have to do is retool existing creations for a larger screen.

from : //http://http://bit.ly/9FweRS

Size Matters

Earlier this month, Amazon.com announced the official release of an international version of its popular Kindle electronic reader - the Kindle DX, now available in over 100 countries, including Thailand.

Here and elsewhere, the burgeoning popularity of electronic readers sees benefits for manufacturers and users alike.

And Amazon and other vendors, with their environmental, social and moral concerns, are also hoping to capitalise on the huge profit potential of the new technology.

Although sales are increasing for electronic readers, they haven't quite taken off as many had hoped.

Let's take a closer look at the new Kindle DX to see if it will crack the market for Amazon and also what it can bring to the readers of Thailand.

Out of the box, the unit appears like the big brother of the Kindle 2, which is basically what it is.

The monochrome screen is now 9.7-inches, (2.5 times the display area of the 6-inch Kindle 2 screen), and is roughly the same size as a paperback book, giving a noticeably more natural reading experience. The thickness (or thinness) has been kept at a wafery 1cm, about the same as the Kindle 2.

The bigger screen comes at the cost of weight, and the unit is a little heavier at about 540g (up from 290g), but can be easily managed with two hands, similar to a book or magazine.

Inside, the storage capacity of the DX has been increased to 3.3GB, or about 3,500 books, a big jump from the 1,500 storage capacity of the Kindle 2.

In terms of functionality, the navigation buttons that appear on both sides of the Kindle 2 are now only the right side of the DX, which can be a little frustrating when it comes to turning pages, especially since the unit can now be rotated 360 degrees.

Also, the tilt sensitivity has been noted for being too sensitive as it rocks the text before the unit orientates even 45 degrees from the vertical - very annoying when using the device in irregular positions, such as in bed. Luckily, this feature can be disabled in the options settings.

A central flaw of the DX is the keyboard, which is much harder to use than the impressive input options available on other portable devices such as smartphones.

The DX has been flagged as having huge potential as a textbook reader, with students being able to annotate their notes via the keyboard, but the physicality of the DX keyboard hinders this potential somewhat.

On a more positive note, the DX features PDF file compatibility, allowing users to browse business or official documents and the many books now available in this format. However, problems arise because there is no zoom function, hence some files are displayed too small to read, even when in landscape mode.

Battery life of the DX is similar to that of the Kindle 2, at an impressive three or four days use with the wireless function turned on, and over a week with it turned off, ensuring high portability.

So far, there has been no mention of any electronic text books being made available yet from Amazon, so students will have to wait.

For the home user, the Kindle DX is the best e-reader available with its impressively large viewing screen and PDF compatibility.

But it's not yet worth the 21,900 baht asking price, and although it has many benefits for the user and the environment alike, people will probably still hold onto their paper-printed novels and magazines for now.

from : //http://http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/techscoop/32060/size-matters