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What if Software Still Shipped on 3.5-Inch Disks?

Technabob — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:00:13 +0000

Remember the good old 3.5-inch floppy disk? Now remember how annoying it was when you had to install a program that spanned 4 or 5 disks? Well, imagine what life would be like if you had to install today’s bloatware on your computer using floppies. That’s exactly what the designers at Antrepo Design Industry envisioned in their new series series of art prints.

I had to do a double-take when I first saw it, but Adobe Photoshop CS4 would take up 358 floppies, and that’s not the full CS4 suite.

And your little lightweight browser, Firefox, all of a sudden wouldn’t seem particularly compact if it shipped on 36 disks.

And while iTunes 8 is no slouch on 46 floppies, the true heavyweight champion in this poster series has to be EA’s SIMS 3, which would take up an unbelievable 1,760 3.5-inch floppies. Or in other words, a stack of floppies that would be over 19-feet tall when piled one on top of another.

My arm hurts just thinking about having to swap disks that many times. If software companies really wanted to prevent piracy, I suppose they could always go back to distributing their programs on floppies. The number of disks you’d have to copy would be more than enough of a deterrent.

If you’re looking for some great art for your computer room, you can grab a set of 4 limited edition, hand-signed digital prints (each one measuring in at a substantial 18.9″ x 26.8″) over at the AntrepoShop for $120 (USD).

I wonder how many floppies it would take to install Metal Gear Solid 4 on my PS3.

[via Behance]

5.25-Inch Floppy Disk Coasters Save Tabletops, Not Data

Technabob — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:46:11 +0000

For some strange reason, I never thought I’d write a story about floppy disk coasters twice. But these really floppy, floppy disk coasters I found over on Etsy today were just too good to be ignored.

Modeled after the truly retro 5-1/4″ floppy disk, these soft coasters are handmade from colorful felt, and just like their real-life cousins, are guaranteed not to store any of your data reliably. But they should keep your coffee table free of stains.

San Jose crafter TheGeekery handsews these coaster floppies from EcoSpun felt, which ironically happens to be recycled from the plastic bottles that your drink probably just came out of.

Each set sells for $28 (USD) and comes with four brightly colored floppies, packed in one of those old school floppy disk cases that used to clutter my closets back in the day. And if you prefer to go with classic black floppies, you can even specify your own custom colors.

So who really needs flash drives, hard disks and optical storage? I proclaim ‘let’s bring floppies back!’ Show your pro-floppy support by picking up a set over at TheGeekery’s Etsy shop.

Floppy Disk Gift Labels Perfect for Wrapping Geeky Gifts

Technabob — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:30:06 +0000

Man, 3.5-inch disks. I still can’t believe that just a decade after the demise of the floppy, a pocket-sized iPod Nano can hold than 11,378 times more data than a single 3.5-inch disk. How far we’ve come. Still, there was something so tactile about working with floppies back in the day, so I sorta miss them.

Now you can bring back those fond floppy memories with these clever floppy disk gift tags. Edinburgh, Scotland crafter feelfuzzy makes these gift tags from leftover retro 3.5-inch floppy disk labels, adhered to heavy card stock, and hung from a string.

They’re available over on Etsy for $5.50 a pack of 5. Of course, if you happen to have box of floppies lying around, just grab a drill, punch a hole through the corner of the disk itself, and you’ll be just that much cooler when you hand out the presents.

Lacie 5big Network Drive Looks Like Hal 9000′S Brother

Technabob — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:00:37 +0000

Designer Neil Poulton got the inspiration for the domed glowing light on the outside of his latest hard drive design from the red light on the face of HAL 9000, the infamous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The new LaCie 5big Network storage array is designed for small and medium workgroups looking for a ton of storage at a reasonable price. Heck, I bet it has WAY more memory than HAL 9000 had. The 5big sports five hot-swappable Serial ATA drive bays which can accomodate as much as 7.5 terabytes of disk.

The drives can be configured in a number of array modes, including RAID 5, RAID 5+Spare, RAID 6, RAID 10 and RAID 0. The 5big can be attached to your network via a zippy Gigabit Ethernet port, and additional external drives can be connected via USB 2.0 or SATA ports.

The array also offers built-in Active Directory support, so you can easily add it as a Windows file server for your office. And if you’re not a Windows fan It’ll work with Mac and Linux systems too.

The 5big comes in three sizes: 2.5TB ($899), 5.0TB ($1399), and 7.5TB ($1899), and can be found over on the LaCie website.

LED Hard Drive Clock Lights Up the Night

Technabob — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:07:07 +0000

Hardware hacker Ian Matthew decided to see if he could turn a hard drive into a clock. But this isn’t one of those lazy designs where you just stick some clock hands through a hard drive platter. On the contrary, Ian went way over the top.

A narrow slot cut into the platter allows a set of flashing colored LEDs to show through as it spins. It’s powered by a PIC18F252 controller, along with custom software which adjusts the LED patterns accordingly.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

A small magnet on the platter triggers a magnetic switch to let the system know when a rotation is complete. The spinning drive platter not only can display the time, it creates a wondrous light show when it’s not in clock mode. (Ian got his inspiration from a similar clock design by Alan Parekhs).

According to Ian: “The clock works because the human eye does not see frequencies above 60 or so as blinking, but as a solid color. This is how we see a TV picture as a full image and not a series of lines being drawn across it. At 5400 RPM this drive spins just over 90 times a second, plenty fast enough to fool the eye into thinking it sees solid hands and not a spinning bar of light.”

I used to think this was the best hard disk clock hack, but I think we have a new champion.

[via Hacksosis via Make:]

Best Hard Disk Clock Ever

Technabob — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 04:02:31 +0000

In my travels, I’ve seen a few clocks made from old hard drives. They’re typically made by stripping out the guts of an old hard drive, slapping a cheap $2 clock mechanism through the platters, then call it a day. On the other hand, here’s a hard disk based clock hack that really is an engineering marvel.

A couple of builders from Germany painstakingly dissasembled an old 5-1/4″ hard drive, recalibrated the motor to run at a speed that lines up the drive precisely with marked hour indicators, then modified the head mechanism to move in 60 step-per-hour increments to indicate minutes.

For some reason, they weren’t able to get the motor to turn at exactly 24 rotations per day, instead turning 32 times, and quickly skipping the four “hours” between 12 and 1 on the dial.

Incredibly, the entire device is built from recycled parts (note the old power supply unit that serves as a base). Other than the electronics which control the speed and sequence of actions, the hard drive mechanism remains pretty much unchanged from its original state.

You can read more about the complexities of this very cool build here.

[via Hackaday via CrunchGear]

Compact Discs Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Technabob — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:57:02 +0000

While digital players have put a major dent in the CD business, there’s something about having your tunes stored on something a little more tangible.

To shake the old CD up a bit, the designers of Poland’s Baba Akcja have taken the boring round disc and turned it into something far more visually interesting.

The discs were designed to symbolize various computer viruses, but I’m just drawn to the bright colors and shapes. My personal favorite: the tribute to the old 5-1/4″ floppy disk.

Given their odd shapes, I’m not sure you’d ever get these discs to survive spinning around in your CD player at thousands of revolutions per minute, but I still think they look cool.

[via DesignSpotter via GeekAlerts]

Sony Confirms 80gb PS3

Technabob — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:46:12 +0000

Thanks to some images that were floating around on the FCC website, rumors have floating around for a while that Sony was working on an 80GB version of the PlayStation 3.

Well, it turns out the 80GB model is real. However, for now, it’s only coming out in South Korea. The real kicker is that the machine will retail for KRW 518,000 (roughly $555 USD) making it actually cost less than the North American and European 60GB models.

Other than the extra storage space, the new model features the same innards as the Europe and PAL versions, which means its stripped of the full PS2 backwards compatibility of the North American and Japanese versions. There’s no indication if or when the new version will be sold outside of South Korea any time soon.

[via The Register]

The End of the Hard Disk: Solid State Drives Hit 160gb

Technabob — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 14:57:52 +0000

This week, Adtron announced the availability of a new solid state drive (SSD) that’s capable of storing a record-breaking 160GB in its flash memory. The drive will be available in IDE and Serial ATA version.

As storage size is rapidly approaching that of decent-sized hard drives, it would seem that these drives are really the future of computer storage. They consume significantly less power than mechanical drives, and can retrieve data at a much faster pace. The only thing holding back SSDs at this point is price, and that is expected to come down at a pretty good pace as production ramps up.

[via Ministry of Tech]