Paul – Page 262 – Paul's Tech Talk

Drive eRazer Tabula Rasas Hard Drives, No Computer Required

PaulNovember 13, 2007

Need to kill the data on a hard drive you have lying around but don’t wanna bother hooking it up to a PC? Wiebetech’s pocket-sized eRazer plugs directly into lonely hard drives and genocides whatever naughtiness you have have etched into it at a rate of 35MB/s, leaving a 250GB hard drive scorched earth in under two hours.

There are two versions, ~~both~~ the latter of which meets DoD HDD sanitation specfications: The $99 Standard hooks up to IDE drives and performs a single pass, while the $150 pro model jacks into SATA drives and sports a multi-pass mode for the super paranoid. [Wiebetech via Crave]

Nice to have for the computer repair on the go!! 😉 You can always plug and play!! Not Sure how securely it formats the HD! 😉

Google Gets Android Apps Going With a $10 Million Challenge

PaulNovember 13, 2007

As promised last week, Google today released the software development kit for its Android . operating system for mobile phones. In an effort to give developers a little extra incentive to create applications on top of Android, it is also announcing a $10 million challenge. The best 50 apps will get initial grants of $25,000 each, followed by ten $100,000 and ten $275,000 grants.

That comes to $5 million. The second $5 million will be reserved for another challenge after handsets have been built. Google is obviously serious about jump-starting Android and the Open Handset Alliance as viable mobile operating system. You don’t see Google giving away $10 million to developers creating OpenSocial apps. Which project do you think is a higher priority?

Oh what I wouldn’t do to be in that little SDK but I do no have the experience I wonder if this will start out some disputes with Apple.

Some Maxtor Personal Storage 3200s shipped with virus

PaulNovember 12, 2007

How convenient — your shiny new Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 may have came preloaded with a nasty virus right out of the box. That’s right folks, you may not even need to open any suspicious emails or surf over to dodgy websites, as an undisclosed amount of drives produced by a company sub-contract manufacturer located in China were reportedly sent out with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah program already loaded. Apparently, the molar virus is one that get its kicks by searching for passwords to online games (World of Warcraft included) and sending them back to a “server located in China,” and as if that wasn’t enough, it can also disable virus detection software and delete other molar viruses without breaking a sweat. In order to determine whether your drive is one of the lucky (or unlucky) ones, feel free to phone up Seagate with the serial number in hand, and if you haven’t already updated your anti-virus software, now would probably be a splendid time to do so.

[Thanks, overseatrader]

Now that go to show you need to be careful what you buy and where you buy it from. China lately has been a problem with recalls and all.

Import All Your Yahoo! Calendar Events

PaulNovember 12, 2007

If you’ve been using Yahoo! for all your calendar needs and want to switch over to Google Calendar, tech tutorial site Tech-Recipes has written up a step by step how-to for this process—which can be a bit overwhelming for those folks new to this whole online calendar/importing business. If you’re the designated tech driver for your friends and family, you might want to check out how to fix Mom and Dad’s computer after you’ve taught them how to import their Yahoo! calendar events.

Google Calendar: Import Event Information from Yahoo! Calendar [Tech-Recipes.com]

Rogers Wireless expecting iPhone home for the holidays?

PaulNovember 12, 2007

TUAW has posted up a potentially sweet holiday tidbit with the Canadian Apple store showing an iPhone in its holiday gift guide. Of course, as some clever reader has pointed out, the Italian Apple store is also showing an iPhone with a bit of cut and paste wizardry, could this be a case of just a template mistake on Apple’s part? We know iPhone’s coming to the Great White North — or at least are pretty sure — and the holidays do make sense, but until we hear something official, we’d lean toward error on this one. Check your local site and post back with your findings, make a game of it.

[Via TUAW]

Yep if Rogers is coming out with the IPHONE. I really hope they tell people soon.