(Credit:
Wolverine Data)

• Option 1 is a portable hard drive with a flash card reader and display.

• Option 4 is whatever options readers are about to tell me about. I welcome your thoughts in the TalkBack section below or by e-mail to stephen.shankland@cnet.com.

And how reliable are hard drives anyway? My photos are precious, but I can say right now I’m not going to carry a second drive for backup.

For the gearheads out there, here are my constraints.

I’m going to Latin America for the month of March, and I don’t know what to do with my photos. Does anyone out there have any advice they’d like to share?

• Option 2 is a hard drive without the fancy display. Wolverine’s 120GB FlashPac costs $140. I’d have to rely on the camera for weeding out the dud shots, which probably is OK, but this is definitely the minimum-thrill approach.

I’ve been trying Wolverine Data’s ESP 5000, a 40GB model with a screen. I like its ability to review raw images as well as JPEGs, and its battery power seems sufficient for my needs. And I like these for giving impromptu slideshows.

Flash cards have a lot to recommend them, though: are pretty durable, reliable, lightweight, and don’t require batteries.

Anybody have any experience with the Epson P-5000 or similar products? They’re even more expensive–an 80GB version costs nearly $700!

Wolverine Data's $370 ESP 5000 has a 120GB drive and can show raw image files.

One advantage of these devices is that I could also use them to play video and music files and collect photos from others’ digital cameras while I’m traveling.

First of all, I’m trying to travel reasonably light–I’ll only be backpacking a little, but I will be schlepping luggage a lot, and I don’t want to lug a laptop. Second, I probably won’t have to go more than two or three days without a wall socket for charging.

I’m guessing I’ll need about 100GB of capacity. I’ll be shooting raw images with an SLR (single-lens reflex), and there should be some mighty scenic spots. On two weeks in Ireland last year, I shot about 30GB of files, winnowing lightly as I went. So here are my options as I see it.

• Option 3 is a bunch of CompactFlash cards. I have 16GB so far, but getting up to 100GB would cost something like $400 more even if I didn’t pay for premium brands like SanDisk or Lexar. Watching the ever-dropping prices on flash memory cards would be depressing, though.

But with radically cheaper storage, remote power plants running on polluting fossil fuels are cut out of the picture altogether.

(Credit:
MIT)

But wide-scale distributed power generation in people’s homes, combined with hydrogen fuel cells, is mostly just a vision at this point.

Commercially available electrolyzers already split hydrogen atoms from water. A hydrogen filling station, for example, could use an electric-powered electrolyzer to break off hydrogen from water.

The key to MIT’s discovery is a catalyst made from abundant materials that can make oxygen gas by passing an electrical current through water more effectively than previous methods.

The newest generation of solar thermal power plants will store hot water or molten salt to provide several hours or even days of electricity. Batteries or pressurized air in underground formations are also considered viable, if niche, technologies for power grid storage.

The hope is that within 10 years, a cost-effective system that combines clean energy generation with storage can be engineered and available cheaply to people around the world.

Nocera said that an MIT-Abu Dhabi venture, called Masdar City, to create a self-powering “sustainable city” in the middle east could be a proving ground for the storage method.

Nocera and his MIT colleague, Matthew Kanan, on Thursday will publish a technical paper that describes what they claim is a breakthrough in solar energy storage.

The idea is to use the energy from solar photovoltaic panels (or another electricity source) to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Those gases would be stored and used later in a fuel cell to make electricity when the sun is not shining.

“The initial results look promising but it doesn’t answer all the things you need in a catalyst,” he said. Turner’s research focuses on improving ways of harvesting light energy to crack water molecules.

On-demand, or “dispatchable,” energy storage holds back broader adoption of renewable energy sources like solar and wind. But it is an active area of research and development for centralized power plants.

Active field of work

The concept is a closed-loop system: running the hydrogen and water through the fuel cell creates water, which can be captured and used again.

Today, when solar panels generate more electricity than a home is using, the excess is simply fed back into the grid, essentially subtracting from the homeowner’s utility bill. In an off-grid application, the excess is put into batteries.

Turner said that many researchers are pursuing the same goal of cracking water to make hydrogen without losing too much energy in the process. Although existing electrolyzers are expensive, the challenge is devising a system that efficient enough to make energy inexpensively.

(Credit:
MIT)

Leslie Katz talks to Martin LaMonica about the MIT research on the CNET News daily podcast on Thursday. Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

But he said that a number of improvements still need to be made before realizing the “hydrogen economy.” Right now, systems to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water would require huge amounts of land and materials to make catalysts.

Artificial photosynthesis

The core scientific discovery was finding a way to break oxygen out of the water with a relatively inexpensive and benign material, Nocera said. The catalyst–made of a cobalt phosphate–can operate in plain water at atmospheric pressure, giving it more potential than existing methods, he said.

Using the process of photosynthesis as inspiration, Nocera has spent 25 years researching a way to tap the energy in water molecules’ bonds.

A finished system that MIT researchers envision would separate both hydrogen and oxygen. Once stored, both gases would be fed into a fuel cell using a second catalyst like platinum to make electricity.

The key to plentiful solar power is water, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Daniel Nocera.

He said colleagues at MIT’s electrical and mechanical engineering departments have already committed to working with the research, which MIT has patented. The work came out of a university-wide energy initiative launched in 2006.

He envisions a complete break with existing power distribution infrastructure where each home can produce and store enough electricity to be self-sufficient.

John Turner, a research fellow in photoelectric chemistry at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), called the work a “significant result.”

MIT researchers have made a discovery they claim will allow solar panels to make hydrogen and oxygen gas that can be stored and used to power a fuel cell when the sun is not out.

“I’m open-sourcing this to let everybody run with it,” he said. “My plan is that when people see it, they’ll see it’s easy to do and they’ll start working it.”

“If we’re successful, then we’ll compete with electrolyzers,” he said. “If not, we’ll have to find another way to get hydrogen.”

Click here for more news on Windows 7.

In a blog posting, general manager Mike Nash said that the next version of Windows will retain its
Windows 7 code-name when it is released to the market–a date currently pegged as late 2009 or early 2010.

“Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows,” Nash wrote. “We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or ‘aspirational’ monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense. Likewise, coming up with an all-new ‘aspirational’ name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.”

“Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense,” Nash wrote.

Microsoft plans to give developers at the Professional Developer Conference later this month a pre-beta version of the software.

Microsoft has said precious little about what’s actually in Windows 7. In a May interview, engineering chief Steven Sinofsky said it would use the same driver structure and underpinnings as Vista. The software maker has also talked about its multitouch capability.

For the first time in recent memory, Microsoft has chosen to stick with its code name for a final Windows release.

Nash said the decision to stick with the Windows 7 name is “about simplicity.”

* Video uploading for Flickr pro members

* The ability for free and pro members to view public video clips
* Video limits up to 90 seconds long and 150MB maximum in size
* Controls to make videos private, visible to friends and/or family, or public
* Seamless integration of videos into the photostream, along with photos
* The ability to share video clips individually, as part of a set, or embed on third-party Web sites
* Tagging and geotagging capabilities for videos
* The ability to search videos by tags and descriptions
* The ability to upload videos directly from camera phones
* The option to view videos on a full screen
* Licensing options to mark a video as ‘All Rights Reserved’ or designate a license through Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/)
* Application programming interface (API) for third party developers to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr
* Eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese
* Upload from the Web, from Uploadr, via email, via API
* 700 kbps
* 12 30 FPS, keyframe every 12 30 (fixed)
* Scaled within a 500×500 box (aspect maintained)
* Audio: 44.1 kHz, stereo, 64 kbps
* 2-pass VBR, 700 kbps

So how do videos fit in with the photos? Quite well, actually. Glancing at someone’s photo stream (now classified as a media stream), photos and videos sit side by side with no differentiation besides a small play button in the bottom corner of video thumbnails. Like photos, you can simply click on them to go to the page that contains all the usual things like user comments, tags, and metadata, or you can simply view the video in its thumbnail size right in the stream–complete with player controls. It’s absolutely wonderful, albeit tiny.

The folks at Flickr say the time limits were not a move forced from having to share company resources with Yahoo Video. Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr says Yahoo Video is all about giving people a place to create their own content channels and drop those large videos. Her vision for Flickr video is simply to popularize the longer version of photos–something they hope becomes an artistic medium, and that people simply get used to taking alongside their still photography.

Update: One thing you might find kind of neat (I do) is the video embedding function. It’s not just a standard bit of embed code; it’s actually quite massive. The upside to that is that the built-in embedding tool is incredibly simple to use. You can change either the height or width and the embed code will change the other size value accordingly. There’s no need to go in and change the hard code or pull out a calculator to figure out how to keep the aspect ratio.

The player is a modified version of the one found on Yahoo video with controls that fade away after a few seconds to reveal the full shot. Users can embed clips on third-party sites as they would anywhere else, and developers can pull in them in through the same data API that’s helped integrate Flickr into all manner of third-party tools and services. Expect to see Flickr videos making their way to photo mashup and editing services in a few weeks–JumpCut excluded (for now at least).

Today Flickr is introducing the single biggest change to its service since launching in 2004–video. The photo service is rolling out the capability to upload video clips of up to 150MB to its paying Pro members. Free members will still be able to view these clips, but will be unable to add their own, at least for the time being.

Various specs can be found after the break. See also News.com photo guru Stephen Shankland’s post on it.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Getting your videos on there in the first place is almost as easy as viewing them. Videos can be uploaded at the same time and the same way you’re used to uploading your still photos. The Web uploader takes them just fine, and so does an updated version of the desktop software for PCs and Macs. Once your videos are on the service, you can’t get them back to your hard drive, something I’m told will be coming later on.

What Flickr is trying to do with these small clips is provide a place for people to post and share the little videos they’re capturing on their digital cameras. The throwaway items that are still very watchable, but hardly worth spending the time to upload to a separate service. The company knows this move will turn many off to the new service, but as part of the Yahoo ecosystem there are important boundaries that dare not be crossed. In light of Yahoo Photos shutting down last year to make way for Flickr, the company seems to have recognized the importance of brand separation and seems intent on creating these artificial boundaries if only to keep people from being confused.

Video on Flickr is off to a good start, but with the artificial time limitations, I find it to be unsuitable for most of the clips I take. For those I’d be better off uploading to a standalone video service with more generous time and file size limits. I can only imagine some of my less tech-savvy friends trying to upload a video that’s slightly over the size or time limit and simply giving up. That said, power users and people who are intentionally shooting short-form video will find the service a joy.

Update: Information about the frame rate has been updated, see more below.

That’s not to say videos will look poor and grainy, though. The system has been designed to scale any clip you can throw at it, including high-definition from high-end point-and-shoot cameras or your HD-capable camcorder. The frame rate also maintains 30 FPS, which is half the speed of video captured on most modern point and shoot digital cameras, but a step up from the 12 FPS that was available while I was testing the service over the weekend.

Flickr videos can be played right in the stream of thumbnails. You can also jump to the full-quality version of it with one click.

The company has taken a very different direction than I originally imagined by limiting user video clips to just 90 seconds. It’s a far cry from the arms race of higher quality and unlimited length offered by services like Vimeo, Viddler, and even YouTube to a certain degree.

The Microsoft Office Live Small Business FAQ also refers to “redirecting” a domain and “domain redelegation.” The two terms are used interchangeably. But for what? I’ve dealt with domains and Web sites a lot. If you asked me yesterday what these terms meant, I would have given a different definition for the first term and couldn’t have guessed at the meaning of the second.

In todays’ New York Times, David Pogue reviewed an updated version of Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business, a suite of online services for making Web sites (I’m simplifying a bit).

If you are interested in using Office Live (which I have no experience with) to create a new Web site, first go to a registrar and register your own domain. The two registrars I recommend are GoDaddy and DirectNIC. GoDaddy is cheaper ($9 per year) but DirectNIC ($15 per year) is easier to use.

The Defensive Computing Approach

“Will I be charged a fee when my domain name comes up for renewal?
Domain names are renewed on an annual basis. Microsoft will automatically renew your domain name for you, and you will not be charged a renewal fee. If you already own a domain name and transfer it to
Microsoft Office Live, Microsoft will pay for any future renewals.”

There have been times when a Web site hosting company registered a domain in their name rather than in the name of their customer. For example, instead of my JavaTester.org Web site being registered to me in the big master file, it would be registered to A2hosting.** In this case, it is not my domain, even though I paid for it. For a small business, this can be a really big deal.

The first Web site I ever created was hosted on a computer run by a school. The name was something like computerdeptserver.someuniversity.edu/~michael. Everyone in the class was assigned a userid on the server, and that formed the rightmost part of the Web site address.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

The bad news about changing DNS servers is that the actual procedure differs for each registrar.

Registration of a domain is too important to trust to a company, such as Microsoft, that does it as a sideline rather than it being its core business.

Also, it appears that Office Live Small Business domains are renewed on an annual basis. This is an accident waiting to happen. A real registrar can lock it up for many years.

The good news is that Microsoft provides instructions for making the change at a number of popular registrars. See How to set up your new Web site with an existing domain name.

What about e-mail? Companies hosting Web sites can also provide e-mail, as can most registrars. Then again, you don’t need either one, you can have a third party handle e-mail for your domain.

He failed to point out an important defensive computing aspect of any Web site, divorcing it from the domain name registration. In addition, trusting Microsoft to handle domain registration is not your best option. To fully understand this, some background is required.

* That the Internet grew to the extent it has over the years is due, in part, to the distributing of the responsibility for maintaining these pointers. No one company can screw everything up.
** I don’t know that A2Hosting does this, I haven’t tested it. This is only an example.

For one thing, using two companies makes it easier to switch Web site hosting companies in the future, should the need arise. More importantly though, it insures the domain is yours.

Microsoft’s documentation

The bad news is that the instructions for GoDaddy don’t exist. Clicking on the link results in a Page Not Found error. The instructions for register.com are also missing. In fact, all
the “redelegation” instructions are missing. Maybe they were filed under changing DNS servers.
Update. February 16, 2008: The instructions now exist, there are no more “page not found” errors.

The Office Live Small Business folks use these terms to mean changing the DNS server computers associated with a domain. For an existing domain with an existing Web site, that is how you point the world to the new Web site (at Office Live Small Business).

Consider what its FAQ page had to say after Pogue’s review came out:

A small business setting up a new Web site is likely to be tempted by the one-stop shopping offered by Office Live Small Business. Many registrars host Web sites and any company hosting a Web site will also register a domain name. But, you are better off getting these services from different companies.

From what Pogue says, Office Live Small Business does a similar thing, giving out names like bobsfleabag.accommodations.officelive.com (his example) to customers only interested in free services. Using your own domain, instead of one that ends with officelive.com, is what Pogue means when he refers to “customized domains.” I point this out because the term “customized domain” has no real meaning–all domain names are unique.

If you already have a Web site, but it was registered by the hosting company, I suggest first moving the registration to GoDaddy or DirectNIC before getting started with Office Live, or start over with a new domain name. For more on this, see my posting from last month on How to fire a Webmaster.

Associated with each domain is a pointer to the computer running the Web site and a pointer to the computer that receives e-mail sent to the domain. The pointer system is called DNS, for Domain Name System. The pointers are indirect. That is, rather than pointing directly to the computer(s) with the Web site or e-mail, they point instead to server computers running DNS software.* A company that hosts Web sites is obliged to run a DNS server computer to handle the finger-pointing for all the Web sites under its control.

Good news, bad news

My JavaTester.org Web site, for example, is hosted at a company called A2 Hosting and the domain is registered with GoDaddy. A2 runs a pair of DNS server computers, ns1.a2webhosting.com and ns2.a2webhosting.com, which GoDaddy associates with the domain in the big master file in the sky. (If you want to impress your friends, the ns1 and ns2 computers are technically referred to as authoritative name servers.)

Pogue on Office Live Small Business

This directly conflicts with Pogue’s account and I believe Pogue.

A domain name, such as CNET.com or JavaTester.org is a unique name on the Internet, one that is used for both e-mail and a Web site. Conceptually speaking, all domains are registered in a big master file in the sky. Hundreds of companies, called registrars, are authorized to register domains into this huge master file. Registrars offer many services, but simply registering a domain name ranges from roughly $9 to $35 a year.

My MacBook Air has been down to about 2 hours of battery life and I finally looked into what the problem might be. At the same my friend who had the same issue took her MBA to the Apple Store and the guy there “fixed” hers. He didn’t explain what he did but after some digging we figured out that he reset the System Management Controller.

The System Management Controller is an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is on the logic board of the computer. As the name implies, it is responsible for power management of the computer. It controls backlighting, hard disk spin down, sleep and wake, some charging aspects, trackpad control, and some input/output as it relates to the computer sleeping.

Over time, the settings in the System Management Controller may become unusable, which can result in operational anomalies with the computer. Examples include not turning on, not waking from sleep, not charging the battery, or not recognizing the AC Adapter, among others.

On another note I have seen this machine do some weird things with the memory usage. There have been several times when I quit all my apps and the MBA is still using 90% of the memory.

From the Apple Support Doc:

[Thanks to Webware reader Kyle for the tip]

The service is currently in private beta, although we’ve got 500 invites that have been made available to Webware readers. You can get yours by going here.

Like the service’s namesake would suggest, all this action takes place on one page, but you can also cycle through the six major categories (finance, shopping, e-mail, etc.) as you would using self-created tabs on other customizable start pages. The added benefit of going to each of these specialized pages is that the widgets are larger and contain their entire set of data instead of just a brief overview. This was especially useful for my cellular phone bill, which offered up a forecast of how many minutes I was on track to using by the end of the billing cycle, something my carrier doesn’t even offer on its billing pages. On the other hand, you can’t reorder what’s on any of the pages, which is incredibly useful, and will hopefully be added in later versions.

One of PageOnce’s best features is that it’s very fast, and makes it easy to get going. There’s a directory of pre-existing services to choose from, and if you come across one that’s not listed you can send in a request for it to be added. I very easily found my bank, phone provider, and various credit card accounts. It also let me add things such as my Facebook news feed, Netflix queue, and mileage number from my airline–something I don’t really need to check on a daily basis, but why not add it, right?

PageOnce is a very new take on an old idea. Take your standard widget-based feed reader such as Pageflakes or Netvibes and replace its blog and RSS feed widgets with financial tracking tools to let you keep an eye on bank accounts, credit card transactions, and various bills. It promises to offer you all the things you love about accessing your private personal information, while presenting it like you’re scoping out your favorite feeds about gadgets and odd news.

My one reservation with using services like this, and others that deal with financial data (see Mint and Wesabe) are that they just freak me out. There’s just something about giving a third party service so much of my personal financial information, that it doesn’t matter how secure it is, or how much the data is anonymized on the way there. That said, PageOnce uses a variety of bank-level security measures to keep your data safe including high-level encryption, SSL, firewalls, and vulnerability tests from third party security consulting agencies.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Besides the usual social stuff and e-mail accounts, you can also keep an eye on financial data from various bank accounts, credit cards, and billing services (not pictured).

He got caught when a Mexican man named Fidencio Estrada was nabbed by state police in a traffic stop near Houston. Estrada had Pacheco’s business card with him, and the state trooper asked him about it. After receiving a suspicious answer, the trooper phoned Pacheco, who called back and said that Estrada was a “huge” confidential informant and demanded that the trooper “let him go now.”

Pacheco was, to put it bluntly, a corrupt cop. He sold access to TECS for money.

A recent court case demonstrates, once again, the dangers of assembling massive police databases and trusting that law enforcement officers with access are paragons of virtue.

He appealed, claiming that there was insufficient evidence, that the convictions were based on inadmissable hearsay, and other technical grounds. But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his convictions last Monday.

TECS, by the way, is described in a Justice Department report as including a watch list mechanism and, more generally, is: “Designed to identify individuals, businesses, and vehicles suspected of or involved in violation of federal law. TECS is also a communications system permitting message transmittal between law enforcement offices and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The database provides access to the FBI’s NCIC and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. The TECS database serves as the principal information system supporting border management and the law enforcement mission of the DHS’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal law enforcement agencies.”

You can imagine what the truth was. The U.S. Customs Service, which was subsequently renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would later say that Estrada was never a confidential informant. Instead, Estrada and his family had sent about $18,000 in Western Union money transfers to the Customs agent, who deposited the cash in his personal bank account and used it to pay off a vehicle loan with the Florida Customs Federal Credit Union. Estrada is, according to ICE, a drug trafficker.

So what eventually happened? Thanks to the happenstance of the traffic stop, the access-for-cash scheme unraveled, and Pacheco was convicted of receiving a bribe, hindering law enforcement, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and unlawfully accessing restricted federal computer databases. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison (and a separate 60-month sentence to be served at the same time).

As for Estrada, a U.S. permanent resident, he was found guilty by a jury of conspiring to bribe a public official, conspiring to launder money, 5 counts of bribery, and 10 counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison, followed by 36 months supervised release.

In this case, the unvirtuous Fed is named Rafael Pacheco, an agent with the U.S. Customs Service in Florida. And the database in question is the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which contains more than a billion records used by Customs and other federal police.

CNN first launched the iReport project in August 2006, and since then has received over 100,000 photo and video submissions, according to MediaWeek. In October, the Time Warner-owned news brand established a presence for the initiative in virtual world Second Life.

The new site, to be hosted at iReport.com, will be a repository for user-submitted news content–video, audio, and photos. Visitors can navigate through categories of news (like sports, weather, and politics), rate content, and embed it elsewhere on the Web. Contributors will be able to create profiles, and regulars can build up individual followings. As for filtering, the new site will be moderated once content has already been posted to the site; this is a change from CNN’s current strategy with iReport, in which only select contributions are posted to CNN’s Web site. This obviously means that the news runs the risk of inaccuracies and pranksters, but one could assume that moderation as well as community interaction could keep the fake-news factor to a minimum.

Right now, hubs for “citizen journalism” on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Google’s cash cow is its ability to display small text ads next to search results, but the new examples include pictures as well. That could be more distracting or more useful, depending on how you see it, but Google insists that it’ll place the ads only in a way that adds to the user experience, one measurement of which is that people search more often.

As it promised to do, Google has begun testing ads shown next to image search results.

Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch carried screen shots from readers showing the new tests, and Search Engine Land added a shot of a banner ad as well. Now I’m seeing the image ads too.