01923 555048|info@chno.co.uk

WWW Turns 25. Really….just 25?

Apparently, 25 years ago today (March 12th, 1989) Tim Berners-Lee presented a blueprint for what eventually became the world wide web that we all use pretty much daily now. Is it just me that can’t believe it’s so young?

To think that 25 years ago, the idea of reading the news, or watching movies via the Internet was a mere pipe-dream, shows how much we’ve moved along in those times.

I remember having a family discussion some time ago about which decade was the era of most change for the UK, and I recall it getting quite heated with different generations calling for their ‘own era’ to be classed as the most influential. Whilst I concede that the sixties saw some huge cultural changes, I still think that there really isn’t a period that stands out as being ‘the greatest’ because, certainly in my lifetime, the pace of change just continues to escalate. I think I argued the case for the 90’s originally, being the decade when the Internet became mainstream, but if I look back to what we were using the Internet for back in the 90’s, it’s almost seems like a different concept.

The scariest part of all this is that I remember when “the Internet” was only available to people on dial-up modems, and sometimes having to redial for 45 minutes to get a connection (and it had to be after midnight on a Friday because that’s when you stopped paying hourly fees). And when you look at the world of sport and entertainment, many of the personalities that are famous around the world weren’t even born before the world wide web was born. I have to point out that I’m not old though!

What do you use […]

Offsite Backup for Photographers

After visiting the Photography Live show in Birmingham at the weekend and chatting with many photographers, I was reminded how few of them are really aware of how important it is for them to ensure their images are protected against drive failure, theft and disasters. And again this morning, I read of another photographer who had lost images because their storage wasn’t set up to keep them safe. If you’re in the same boat, you need to to talk to a specialist like us who will offer some suitable strategies for storing and protecting your images.

I’ll be doing some more videos on this subject in the coming weeks, but for today I wanted to show you a neat feature of the ToughTech Duo enclosure that I sell. This handy little device gives you protection against single drive failure when you run it as a mirrored, portable RAID. However, because the drives are easily removable (without tools), it also allows you to create an offsite snapshot of your data within about 30 seconds.

If you’re interested in this, or its bigger brother (the RTX220) that allows for mirrored drives of up to 4TB, please do give me a call on 01923 555048 or contact me through any of the normal channels.

Have a great day

Bag your new domain name before someone else does!

Recently there’s been a whole new raft of Top Level Domains released. We used to have .com and .co.uk available to us, but this has been added to over the years, and now we have several “industry” type domain names available to us. For instance, we’ve just obtained chno.technology……and you can now get yourname.photography.

Now, obviously many of you will already have websites that you don’t want to have to change. But…..would you want someone else to be able register yourname.photography and have it not show your images?

We can obtain your domain name and have it forwarded to your existing website and email addresses. No effort required on your part, and no changes necessary. There would just be an annual charge for registering the new domain.

Speak to us today on 01923 555048, or fill in the form below and we’ll contact you to discuss securing your new .photography domain before someone else does.

By |February 27th, 2014|Services|0 Comments

External Drives Spin Up/Spin Down Solution

Hi

Speaking to a couple of photographers recently, I  found they were constantly frustrated by their Mac ‘pausing’ for a second or two to spin up an external FireWire drive when they were accessing data (even if the data they were accessing wasn’t on the FireWire drive!) so I’ve spent a little time researching this over the past day or so.

It seems that in many cases, turning off “Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible” in the Energy Saver settings in System Preferences will resolve it once and for all. But for some drives, Western Digital seem to be one of the main problems, this setting does seem to get ignored and the drives will spin down after not being accessed for a period of time.

Well, the good news is that having found a bit of software that would possibly sort the problem, I asked Glyn Dewis to try it out, and I’m happy to report that he’s had success with it so far. Its a free bit of software called “Keep Drive Spinning” (inventive huh?), and it allows you select which drives it controls. Whilst spinning drives down may be preferable in terms of energy use, you will get better performance from keeping your drives spun up, not to mention the fact that constant starting and stopping drives creates more significantly more stress on them than just keeping them running.

For those people who’ve upgraded to SSD recently, this problem will have become more noticeable, so I’m pleased to give you the link.

If anyone has anything to add, please do let us know.

Storage for Photographers

Happy Monday everyone

I’m pleased to report today that we’ve linked up with Glyn Dewis Photography to focus on computer storage solutions for photographers here in the UK. Thanks to our partnership with CRU, a Vancouver, Washington based manufacturer, we’ve got some fantastic products into Glyn’s hands to make sure that his library of images is suitably protected against drive failure, theft and (local!) disaster.

I’m sure over the coming days and weeks, Glyn and I will be publishing more information about the systems we’ve provided him with, but until then…..think about what your livelihood is. Does it rely on data stored on a hard drive (if you’re a photographer, it most certainly will)? If yes, how many copies of it do you have? And where are they? Would you still have a business if you were a victim of crime? Or (given the recent weather we’ve suffered throughout the world) a disaster situation at your home or office?

We try to create packages that fit your needs, but more importantly don’t impact greatly on your time or need much in the way of computer knowledge. We tailor the solution for every client and this advice is completely free. Give us a call today on 01923 555048 or email us on info@chno.co.uk to arrange a conversation.

Speak soon
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