Friedbeef’s Tech

There was a time when the term ‘Gigabyte’ was a just a theoretical possibility, and running of space on a 40MB hard disk was unthinkable. I mean, how could anyone ever run out of out 40MB hard disk space… right?

Yet years later, here I am sitting here with my state-of-the-art Western Digital 80 GB Hard Disk…. and yes you guessed it… it’s full.

One of the inevitable facts of life is that, no matter how large your hard disk is, it WILL fill up.

Spring Cleaning

If you’ve ever attempted a disk cleanup to get rid of all the junk which has been accumulated on your hard disk over the months/years, you’d know that it’s often hard to pinpoint the where all your space is going to, and how and what to clean in the most efficient manner.

So today, we’re going to look at JDisk reporter, a piece of freeware that helps a user track how the space on a disk is being used.

For example, with a single glance, it tells you what type of files are hogging the space so you know what you should be looking for…

Which are the largest files/directories, so you know where to start…

plus many other features to help with disk cleanups which can be seen here.

I have found it extremely useful, and even if you’re not doing a disk cleanup, it still provides interesting insights to as to how your hard disk is being put to use.

via Lifehacker

Technorati Tags: storage, hard+disk, hard+drive, jdisk

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Fosfor Gadgets just released a list of the Top 10 weirdest keyboards which includes items ranging from…

a keyboard which is supposed to keep your arms in a more relaxed state (Relaxed? Are they kidding?)

…A laser projector keyboard that allows you to use almost any flat surface as a keyboard…

…and a decorative, washable tablecloth, which leaves your fingers cozy…

What will they think of next?!

Related Links:

Fosfor Gadgets

Technorati Tags: keyboards ,weird, fosfor, gadgets

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Kudos to The Star Newspaper - The first mainstream Malaysian news source with RSS feeds! FINALLY - I can get all my local news aggregated with the rest of my world news feeds (CNN, BBC) on the single page.

RSS in a nutshell if you’re new to it, is a way to aggregate all the news updates from your favourite sites in a central location, saving you lots of time. Learn more about it here.

It is worth mentioning that the Star Online’s use of RSS is not really new. However, until very recently, it has been a feature restricted to the technology section, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a tiny link on the main page - which led to a page with close to 40 RSS feeds covering practically all sections of the newspaper!

Custom Classifieds Searching

The one big thing which I was really impressed with was the implementation of customised RSS search feeds for the classifieds section.

What this allows you to do is create your own custom classifieds section dynamically updated with only the information YOU want to see.

Type in ANY keyword and select the relevant classifieds category and it will generate a custom RSS feed for your use.

In the example I searched “Honda Civic” under auto & mororcycles and subscribed to the the RSS feed which was generated. Now all the Used Car ads with “Honda Civic” will be displayed to me, and this list will be dynamically updated everytime I check the feed, with my RSS reader instantly bringing to my attention any new Honda Civics advertised. If I’m also considering buying a Toyota or Nissan, I just need to subscribe to their feeds, and I’ve just created my own custom classifieds section which only shows me updates and listings of the cars I’m interested in.

Issues with RSS discoverability

A few kinks are still present with the current setup. The autodiscover feature for RSS is not working properly (unable to discover the correct feed if searched on - and feeds have to be inputed manually) and it’s not Firefox Livebookmark friendly (No RSS icon to subscribe to) .

This makes it slightly user-unfriendly, and is something they have to overcome in order to gain proper user-traction with this feature - especially with the bulk of The Star Online readers probably unfamilliar with the benefits of RSS.

Roundup

All in all, a pretty solid effort, and I look forward to more tech innovation from TheStar which is also experimenting with podcasting, and citizen blogging.

Related Links:

The Star Online
The Star Online RSS Main Page
The Star Online RSS Classifieds
The Star Online Podcast
The Star Online Citizen’s Blog
What is RSS?
What is Podcasting?

Technorati Tags: star, thestar, rss, classifieds, podcast, podcasting, blog, blogging, newspaper, news

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