Some people store their entire life on a hard drive. They have photos of their young children, copies of their important documents, and everything else you could possibly think of. It’s safe to say they would be in trouble if anything bad was ever to happen. If you are one of those people who keep everything on the computer I really hope you have it backed up. Not only should it be backed up on an external hard drive, but also in the cloud where it’s even safer.

Even if you do try to back everything up in multiple places there is still a chance you don’t quite catch everything. Some things will only be on your regular hard drive and they might be really important. What will you do if you switch on your computer one morning and your hard drive crashes? You need the information back or you’ll be in trouble, so what do you do? There are some things that might work and we can take a look at them right now.

An external case

Maybe you could find a way to retrieve the files if you connected the hard drive to another computer. In order to do that you would need to take it out and put it into an external case which would connect to the other machine. It might have been something inside your old machine that corrupted the hard drive, but now that you’ve bypassed this your problem might be solved.

Data retrieval software

You can download software that promises to get your data back for you. Some people don’t like data retrieval software and they will tell you it’s unreliable, whereas others will tell you it’s great. Because it’s risky you should attempt to download a free version of the software instead of buying it. If the free version doesn’t work it will be up to you whether or not to try a paid version.

In the freezer

Take a freezer bag and put your hard drive inside it. Now put it in the freezer for 5-6 hours. I know you’re thinking I must be going crazy, but it can work. It’s meant to constrict the components long enough for you to retrieve your data, so make sure you do what you need to do before the hard drive thaws out. It will also work better if you put it in an external case.

A different operating system

Do you know how to use the Linux Live operating system? If you don’t know, use another computer and download it onto a disk. Go to the logistics page as soon as you put the CD in your broken computer and boot it up. Choose CD as the start-up system then save and exit. When the computer boots up it will now use the Linux system and you might be able to access your files.

Speak to a professional

If everything else fails you might need to go and see a professional. Just make sure the person you go and see knows what they are doing, because if they can’t retrieve your data it might be because they’re crap at their job and not because it’s lost forever. If you do find someone who can do the job properly it might cost you a lot of money, so make sure the data you want to retrieve is worth it.

Hope is not lost

How many people do you think just throw out their old computer when something goes wrong? They probably think there is no way to retrieve their data, so they don’t even try. Let us know what technique you used to finally recover yours.

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Carl Benson is a tech geek and a computer engineer by profession. He likes to keep a track of the latest technological developments and often reads tech magazines and journals. Data recovery is an issue, which he has harped upon in this post and suggests people to buy external drives inorder to meet the increasing demands of storage.

The law often has a difficult time keeping up with the pace of technology. One of the biggest challenges that lawmakers around the world have faced is trying to regulate and monitor social media. They have come up with a number of new regulations to promote censorship but most of those measures have failed. More lawmakers appear to be feeling that censoring social media is probably not a feasible approach.

Attempts to Censor Social Media

Lawmakers have proposed a number of different approaches to censor social media sites. Here are some of the laws that were created to censor social media over the last few years.

SOPA

The Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) was introduced by the United States House of Representatives in 2011 to prevent copyright infringement. The new law would have prevented marketers from doing business with any website that violated copyright laws and would have ordered Internet Service Providers to block all access to sites that violated copyright laws.

The law was proposed to help protect the financial stability of the entertainment industry. Many people understood the concerns that the law created, but said that the bill created a number of other concerns that they needed to voice. Many libraries and other institutions were worried that the law would expose them to prosecution. A number of social media communities and online information portals blocked themselves out a couple of months later to protest the new legislation.

Lawmakers came to realize that the new measure probably wouldn’t work as they originally wrote it. They haven’t abandoned the legislation, but seem to feel that complete censorship wasn’t the best approach.

Saudi Arabia Efforts to Censor Social Media

The Saudi Arabia Telecommunications Authority has proposed a new bill that would allow them to censor social media. However, Prince bin Talal has recently protested the new legislation. He said that blocking social media is a “losing war” and the government will need to find a new approach.

The prince and many other supporters have protested these proposals. They said that social media is a powerful tool for citizens to make their voices heard and the government would be unwise to implement such measures. A number of rights groups have backed bin Talal and the potential law is losing support among other lawmakers as well.

Censorship in China

Government officials in China have been working diligently to censor social media. Many experts have accused government officials of trying to use censorship as a propaganda tool. However, recent articles have found that it has been largely ineffective. Kelly McParland of the National Postrecently published this article stating that many citizens are openly using social media to mock government officials. McParland has said that many people have felt that the government’s efforts are backfiring on them.

Governments Reevaluating How they Manage Social Media

Governments are trying to understand how to regulate social media. They are still trying to find out the best way to do so. They will continue to look for new ways to do so in the future, but are starting to realize that censorship may not be an approach that can work.

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About the author:Kalen is an Internet marketer who writes tips about social media aggregation and other topics for My Life. He feels that connecting social networks together can help people use their social media more effectively.

I do realize there a tremendous amount of games both free and games you have to pay for out there for the Android. I also realize that a lot of them are really good. So how can I pick just three? Well, it wasn’t easy, but I settled on the three I play the most: Angry Birds, Words with Friends, and SongPop.

Let’s start with Angry Birds. When I say Angry Birds I mean all the different versions together. I myself play five – Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Space, and Angry Birds Star Wars. That is also the order in which I downloaded and started playing them. There are some I haven’t tried yet. I like some more than others but still it’s hard to put in order of preferably. The games can be quite challenging. You need a fair understanding of Physics as they take into account gravity, trajectory, and propulsion. You use a sling shot to propel different shaped and colored birds at obstacles in order to take out the evil pigs. Each different bird has a different “power”. In Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Seasons you have simply gravity, trajectory, and propulsion to take into account. However, Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars they actually involve the weightlessness of space and the effect of planetary gravitational fields. It can become quite tricky to complete the puzzles with the amount of birds allotted. You sometimes have to play it multiple times to figure out how to use the allotted birds in the right spot to successfully take out the pigs.

Words with Friends, on the other hand, is basically Scrabble. I assume they could not use the name, scrabble, without stepping on Hasbro’s toes. With this game you play against any other player. You can play against more than one person or even multiple games with the same person. (But each game is just two players). I probably have about 10 different games going at one time. The other players can be from other droids, Facebook apps, or even iPad, anyone on the game’s network. You can play against friends or random players. When you challenge someone or accept a challenge you receive a standard Scrabble – type board and seven letters. Place the letters on the board creating words. Each letter has a different point value and the boards also have places where you receive double letter value, triple letter value, double word value or triple word value. The player with the highest point total after all tiles has been used or there are no more turns WINS!

SongPop is more a Trivia game. I think of it as “Name That Tune” for the Android. You challenge a friend or, again, a random player on the game’s network. You chose a music genre and the game will time you on your responses to a music snippet. You may be asked the songs title or the Artist. Your speed and accuracy is pitted against your opponent’s. Even though you may have gotten more songs or artists correct, you may still lose if your opponent was quicker answering the ones they got correct than you were. It can be a very exciting game, and who knows you might just surprise yourself with the music you remember. There is also a chance for you to totally space and guess the wrong one even though you knew it or hitting the wrong button. So be carefully when playing, but remember, don’t take too much time. I have lost by one point before, which is basically the difference of tenths of a second’s difference!

Today, a phone has become so much more than a device that allows us to phone and text people. The Smartphone of today’s generation is a gadget that has become part of most people’s daily lives and has the ability to pretty much everything apart from make you a coffee.

Whether it’s a sat nav you are looking for, a bar code scanner, or a social management tool, your phone will be able to help you out.

So why do people still hang on to a second phone? You would think that a pioneering phone such as the iPhone or Galaxy S would give people enough confidence to let go of their old phones, right?

Well, the team at SellMyMobile.com decided to find out the answer to this question by running a survey that consisted of 2,000 people, to find out just why they hang onto second phones.

The survey results were pretty close, apart from one choice which stood above the others. This choice was:

• So I have a spare phone in case my current phone breaks

This answer alone accounted for 52% of the total votes.

Does this show us that even though phones are becoming far superior, that they are prone to breaking down, losing battery etc?

The second choice:

• I’m too lazy to get rid of it

This answer was the second most popular choice, and accounted for 19% of the votes, and shows us that British people tend to just sit on their phones as they don’t want the hassle of having to try and sell the phone on auction sites, to friends, or mobile phone trad-in sites.

The third choice, which was close behind with 18% of the votes:

• I don’t know what else to do with it

Even though mobile phone trade in sites are increasing in popularity, due to various TV advertisements and media campaigns that have been run across the country, we are still seeing a lot of the population not knowing what to do with their old phones.

Most people know they can’t throw them in the trash, so what else is left to do with them? Pop them in a drawer or up in the attic to gather dust.

Other choices in the survey consisted of:

• I can’t let go of old gadgets
• I don’t know how to wipe data from the device
• I don’t know where I put my old phone(s)
• It’s a company phone I was given but I have changed jobs now

This shows that there are a broad range of reasons to why people still hang on to one or two spare phones, even though they probably own a top of the range phone as there main phone. Whether it comes down to the fact that battery life is a problem, they are scared of losing their primary phone, or just prefer to have a back-up, every person has their own reasons in doing so.

Do you currently own a second mobile phone, if so do you reasons differ from the ones that we have mentioned above?

We would like to thank Craig Timmins for helping gather information and stats that have been used in this article. Craig currently works for the mobile trade-in comparison company, SellMyMobile.

What do you do when you want to find out about something? You probably jump on your laptop and search for it on the Internet. You might sit down and watch the news on your massive television, or you could even take your fancy mobile phone out of your pocket and call a friend. We rely on technology when we want to communicate these days. Even paperback books are becoming extinct as eBook readers slowly take over the world.

Do you remember when you were a child and you wanted to see if your friend was coming out to play? You would have to walk around to their house and knock on the door. Did you try to make a telephone out of two empty tins and a long piece of string? We’ve come a long way and it’s only going to get more exciting as we get older. If you’re wondering about some of the ways you might be communicating in the future we can take a look at some crazy ideas.

Lifelike holograms

You need to imagine that you’re sitting in your office and someone tells you it’s time to speak to a room full of people in China. It’s a bit late to jump on an airplane and fly there in person, but you don’t need to. All you need to do is wear a suit and speak like you normally would. Everyone in China will feel like you’re actually there because they will be looking at a lifelike hologram. It will be a great way to conduct business and you won’t need to go away for a few days.

Telepathy

Sooner or later we will be able to speak to someone just by thinking what we want to say. We already have prosthetic limbs that can be moved using the power of our thoughts. One day in the future we will have a chip implanted in our brain and when we think of something it will be sent to the person you’re trying to communicate with. Maybe it’s not real telepathy because we have to use technology, but it’s real enough and it will change the world.

Virtual reality

I bet you’ve been listening to stories about virtual reality since you were a small child. Will we be able to put a mask on and be transported to another world? It will happen and there will be so many things we could do with it. Our children won’t need to go to school because they could sit in their bedroom and be transported to a virtual classroom. Google are paving the way with their augmented reality glasses which should be ready very soon.

3-D display computers

It’s not going to be long until we won’t need to sit in front of a flat screen when we browse the Internet. Computer displays will eventually become three-dimensional and we can pick and choose things with our hands instead of having to control a mouse. If they’re going to become available for computers you can guarantee it won’t be long until they are also available for smartphones. It’s going to be one exciting future.

Speech to speech translation

When you are in a completely different country it’s hard to get around because of the language barrier. Can you imagine walking into a restaurant and being able to order anything you want? You might not have to wait much longer because you will eventually be able to understand other languages without speaking them. You just need to wear a gadget that listens to what someone is telling you and it will translate the words into your own language.

Are you ready for the future?

I’m sure you will agree that the future is going to be special. Is there any special futuristic technology you would like to see? What is your favorite one we’ve talked about today?

Author of this post, Alan Wilkins; works for Georgia telecom. Communication technology, is his subject of interest and has researched about the same for many years. He likes to blog about various technological issues and has come up with a gem in the form of this article.