Make with the clicky.
Paper-thin Shape Memory Cellophane. I can’t wait for the day when I can make origami birds and horses that can actually move of their own accord. (this is similar, but not quite what I’m thinking of)
It baffles me that products like this exist, but most in-built computer file manager programs do not have data “shredding” actions. Your stuff doesn’t go away forever when you hit the Delete key, folks. Be careful if you ever sell your old hard drive.
My Windows Explorer was acting up for a few days, crashing, locking up the system for no reason, and since in XP pretty-much every fatal crash problem has no proper solution (the symptoms are so endemic that actually finding your particular problem is nigh-on impossible). So, instead of reloading the whole system I just switched to a third party file manager, FreeCommander. It’s very geeky, which I like, and does feature a “wipe” command forgetting rid of those unwanted files forever (well, nothing is permanent– I’m sure there are high-level data recovery companies that canunscramble deleted data, although if you’re doing something you wantkept that secret, you really shouldn’t be doing it on a computer).
On a related note, my condolences to Aarti, who lost her Outlook Mailbox data yesterday (I’ve suffered a similar fate once, and it was completely out of my control. Nothing quite like losing mail). Samir’s been trying to help her recover it, but data once deleted on these newer systems is not the easiest thing to recover with basic software. My advice:
backup
Backup
BACKUP
(Seriously, I have at least 3-5 copies of all my data on different batches of CD-Rs, DVD Rs and hard-drives somewhere, but that still means there’s a couple of gigs of unwritten, vulnerable data on disk that’s my current stuff. Shudder.)
These are pretty. “for the life with nudie sound.” mmmm…
My only question about this is, where is the mouse?
And finally:
Holywowwowowow