format

Some readers took exception when I stated in a post from last month on future-proofing your data archive that Microsoft's proprietary Office file formats may not stand the test of time. Well, compatibility problems have already surfaced between the two most recent releases of MS Word.

Several people report spaces being dropped randomly from documents created in Word 2010 when the files are opened in Word 2007 on another machine. (A post on the Microsoft Answers forum explains the problem in more detail.)

The quick fix is to set both systems to use Adobe PDF as the default printer … Read more

As your e-mail inbox fills up, it can be difficult to distinguish the important messages from the ones you can read later--if at all. One way to help identify personal e-mails from impersonal ones is by the number of recipients. By highlighting messages sent only to you, you're less likely to miss mail requiring your immediate attention.

Last November I described how to merge multiple e-mail accounts and organize them by using filters and labels. This can help shuttle less-important messages out of your inbox and into folders you can peruse at your leisure.

But not all the non-filtered … Read more

Today Pentax announced the smc D FA 645 25mm f4 AL SDM AW lens for the 645D digital medium-format SLR camera. This is the second lens in the 645D series, along with the smc D FA 645 55mm f2.8 AL SDM AW lens($1,100). The new D FA 645 25mm f4 is an ultra-wide-angle lens offering the equivalent focal length of 19.5mm in 35mm format terms. When mounted on a 645 film camera the new lens has an equivalent of 15.5mm. This is the widest of all Pentax 645 lenses.

The 25mm 645D lens, along with … Read more

Phase One, the Danish maker of high-end digital camera gear, announced a new top-end product: an image sensor with a whopping 80 megapixels.

The IQ180 is a digital back, which consists of an image sensor, viewing screen, and associated electronics housed in a removable module that fits on the back of a medium-format camera body such those from Phase One-controlled Mamiya. The medium-format market, which consists largely of photographers shooting expensive subjects such as fashion models and jewelry, is a demanding one willing to pay a premium for the very detailed images made possible with medium-format gear. Phase One's … Read more

It's easier than ever to make sure copies of your most important records, documents, photos, videos, and other personal data will be readable/viewable/playable long after the hardware and software used to create the files have bitten the dust.

The four keys to safe data archiving are to choose file formats that won't become obsolete, use storage media that won't deteriorate or become inaccessible, make multiple copies stored apart, and check your archived data regularly to ensure it's still readable.

Don't get stuck with outdated data formats Most of the files you want to … Read more

Sometimes people may have issues either with installing OS X where the installer may not show the drive as a valid installation source, or in the case of cloning from a previous boot drive the system will not boot. This likely happens in cases where people have acquired a system second-hand, or are reconfiguring a system that has had multiple drives and partitions on it, but can also happen if a current system has crashed to the point where the OS needs to be reinstalled.

While people might try using Disk Utility to format the hard drive to the recommended &… Read more

What's SEP? If you Google the SEP file extension, you might think it's an enhancer for The Sims, the popular game. Or maybe it's a TIFF, or maybe a printer separation page. For our purposes, SEP stands for Sursen e-Paper. It's a proprietary digital document technology that competes with Adobe's PDF format, especially in China, where it holds a substantial market share, according to the developer. So, sooner or later, a lot of people will probably need to open and read SEP files. That's where Sursen's SEP Reader comes in. It's a … Read more

Digital audio won the popularity contest years ago, and nowadays almost every sound you hear coming out of a speaker is digitally encoded. Sound is always digital, whether it's on your phone, computer, radio, TV, home theater, or in a concert hall. I'd go so far as to say most people never hear analog recordings anymore. Unless you're a musician, or live with one, virtually all the music you hear live or recorded is digital.

Digital audio eliminated all of analog audio's distortions and noise-related problems. In that sense digital is "perfect." When analog … Read more

Music was forever changed in 1983. Up to that year we had lived in a digital-audio-free world, where musicians and the music industry flourished in a state of pure analog bliss. Vast numbers of people actually listened to music--without doing anything else--on a regular basis.

An analog recording corresponds the variations in air pressure of the original sound. A digital recording is a series of numbers that correspond to the sound's continuous variations, but the numbers have to be reconverted to analog signals before they can be listened to. No wonder analog and digital sound so different from each … Read more