Dell on a roll!

The biggest computer company in the world, once known for their ugly and boring “beige boxes,” has been hot in the last month, shipping new products and getting the media abuzz with products in the labs. Here’s what’s been coming out of Dell lately: Read more »

TNR Tip: “physically” label your external drives

For our first TechNest Report weekly tip, we talk about… hard drive organization the old-school way!

I don’t know about you, but I have a few external hard drives that I use on a regular basis.  Some I use for backing up specific machines; others I use storing ripped DVDs (that I purchased, of course).  And yet others I use for transferring large amounts of data between machines.  Whatever the use might be, I have found it very practical to physically label my drives.  I have given these external hard drive labels the following attributes, as you can see below:

• Drive name
• Capacity
• Format
• Contents (optional)

What’s in a name?

This might seem a little out of the “ordinary”, but I give unique and distinct names to my external drives.  This way, I can call a drive by name and automatically know the purpose that it serves in my digital life.  Moreover, naming my drives and then putting those names physically on them lets my friends and family know exactly which drive to take out of my “tech drawer” when it comes time to watch a movie or when I call home asking to be sent a specific file that’s stored on a specific drive.  (I usually don’t take all of my drives with me, so let’s hope that this is a rare occasion.

The moral of the story is that if you have a multitude of external storage devices and want to easily remember what’s on each drive, give your drives unique names and physically label them.

PS: the physical labeling part is a temporary solution, of course, until technologies like embedded e-ink get to be mainstream.  Until then, I can dream of displays like these taking the place of my Avery sticky labels.

[View with PicLens]

Monetizing Microblogging: customer service, marketing, and feedback mechanisms into the clear

Microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce are gaining steam, popularity, and new users by the bucketful every day.  This article, however, is not about why I like to use these kinds of applications or how much I look forward to getting Twitter updates by person x.  No, this article is about the (as of yet unexplored) applications of microblogging services that could bring them into the black on the income statement.  What is this untapped use I write of?  Two words: customer service.   Read more »