How healthy is your disk? Find out with CrystalDiskInfo

How healthy is your disk? Find out with CrystalDiskInfo:

A computer’s performance can be affected severely by a hard disk with declining health. That being the case, it is a little odd to think of a hard disk in terms of health, more so when it is “declining.” Typically in the grand scheme of modern transistor-based electronics, devices just simply die and do not give us much warning about how and when the untimely death will occur. Wouldn’t be great if you had a virtual doctor that could report on your hard disk’s health? Enter the free CrystalDiskInfo.

At least on the computer front, modern day hard drives have a bit of a warning system built-in which can be utilized to check the overall health of said disk. This mechanism is called “S.M.A.R.T.” status. “SMART” is short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. SMART can tell you whether your disk is experiencing unusually high temperatures, sector read errors, vibration errors, and much much more.

Having this info is all well and good, but getting to this information is not quite so apparent. Many of us will never see anything related to SMART status other than that menacing “Imminent Hard Disk Failure” at system boot; and, if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to log into the computer and move our data (you should be backing it up anyway!) to a new disk.

This is where a handy-dandy bit of software can help you out.

CrystalDiskInfo is a great tool to get a read on what your hard disk is doing and how good it is “feeling.”

Some nice features of CDI:

• Email alerting when a threshold is reached (it works nicely with Gmail)


• Graphing over time for the various SMART statistics


• Run as resident mode in your System Tray with temperature status


• Capability of writing SMART events to your event log


• Localization for a LOT of languages

As mentioned above, CDI does have the capability of writing SMART events to your Windows Event Log. This means if you have other monitoring utilities that you use, you can tweak them to watch the Event log for detailed SMART events.

On a personal note, I’ve seen MANY computers that have slow performance and the user thought that their computer was dying, when instead, the hard disk was going bad. A quick swap with a new disk brings these machines back to life every time.

Get CrystalDiskInfo for Windows here.

Overwhelmed By Selection? How To Find The Perfect Laptop, Tablet Or Camera

Overwhelmed By Selection? How To Find The Perfect Laptop, Tablet Or Camera:

A while ago, I wrote about a web app that helps you make some sense of the vast selection of smartphones currently available on the market. While Geekaphone was great, it was limited to smartphones only, and we all know that’s not the only thing that comes with a huge selection.

Recently, I had to purchase a laptop for a family member, who couldn’t even begin to find her way amongst all the possible options. Even for me, the selection was overwhelming. Where do you start? So imagine my joy when I found out that the makers of Geekaphone now offer a similar service for other items, such as tablets, cameras, TVs and even laptops. With Sortable, you can sort through different products according to the things you find most important, and find out what the best product is for your specific needs. You can also easily compare different items, and learn about similar items for you to consider.

Getting Started With Sortable

The first thing you have to do with Sortable, is decide what you want to buy. And this is probably the hardest decision you’re going to have to make in the whole process. On the main screen, you can also choose your maximum price, but you can always change that as you go along. Now all you have to do is click “Go”.

If you’re truly dumbfounded and have no idea what you’re looking for, Sortable offers a list of popular devices in each category. You can start by browsing these devices, and looking at the most popular comparisons other people have made. This should get you up to speed with the hottest trends on the market.

Finding The Right Device For You

Before you even start digging in, Sortable will recommend the best devices based only on your price range. The best device will appear on the left side of the screen, and more options will appear on the right.

As you go along, you’ll think of things that matter to you more than others, or things the device you choose must have. You can easily screen the results by almost any imaginable parameter. This includes everything from brand, network and form factor…

…to card format, display and ports. These change, of course, when searching for different products. Simply go over these criteria, choose your preferences and watch what happens to the results below.

When you find a device you’re interested in, you can get a comprehensive overview of the device’s specs, including photos, advantages, tradeoffs and reviews from Amazon.

You can also see how the device matches up to its competitors in various categories, and get an idea of what other similar devices are on the market, and what makes them better or worse than this device.

Comparing Items

If you’ve found two items you like, and would like to know which one is better for you, Sortable offers a comprehensive comparison between any two items, which includes any differences and similarities, a full specs comparison, and even a visual comparison.

To compare two items, either check the compare box when browsing items, or click the “compare” link at the top left.

Here, you can fill in any two devices. You don’t have to remember the full name, simply start typing the brand name, and Sortable will offer different models for you to choose from.

You will then get a short overview of reasons to consider each device. You can already see significant differences here which can help you choose.

If this is not enough, you can bore down into the more detailed differences, including a full specs comparison of every little aspect of the devices.

Editing Information

As you can see, there’s a huge amount of information in those specs. Naturally, some information is missing, and some information may be inaccurate. But there’s something you can do about it! When you’re viewing a item’s specs, and you find a missing piece of information or something you believe to be wrong, simply click the edit icon on the right and add or change that spec.

You don’t even have to create an account to do this, but if you do, you can keep track of your edits and become a known contributor on the site. If you choose to claim your account (personalize it, as opposed to keeping it anonymous), you can sign in with either Facebook, Google or Yahoo.

On the front page, Sortable features all the top contributors for each category (even if they are anonymous), and you can view a detailed list of their edits.

More Products

Wish you could use Sortable to find more products? Well, it seems that they’re definitely planning on it. If you want to influence what those next products will be, click the Sortable icon on any page, and choose “Vote on what’s next!”

This will direct you to Sortable’s Facebook page, where you can vote on what new products you’d like to see on Sortable. Looks like cars are leading the pack!

Bottom Line

The only thing that’s apparently missing from Sortable is a price comparison feature between different stores. The site seems to be tightly integrated with Amazon, and all buy links direct to there. But price comparison engines are a dime a dozen, and once you manage to decide what you want to buy, finding the right price should be a piece of cake. In fact, ignoring the price makes the site much more usable internationally, since prices and stores vary depending on where you are. Specs usually don’t.

What do you think of Sortable? Know of other good comparison engines we should try? Share in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

How To Participate In An Internet Blackout (Like The SOPA Protest)

How To Participate In An Internet Blackout (Like The SOPA Protest):

You may have noticed on January 18th that plenty of big websites participated in an Internet blackout as a protest of the US government’s proposed SOPA legislation. Despite the SOPA plans being dropped for now, there are still numerous similar acts of legislation being proposed across the world.

If you’re planning on supporting future protests, or just generally curious, you might like to know what Google recommends you do in order to ensure your search rankings aren’t affected in any way while you are protesting. We’ll also let you know the quickest and easiest ways to black out your site.

Use A 503 HTTP Status Code

Google representative Pierre Far suggests that an HTTP status code of 503 is important in order to tell Google that this isn’t your normal page content. Generally this is used when the site is offline for server updates, but it works equally well for protesting.

The reasoning behind this can be seen easily if you consider that Google originally saw that you had a page full of, say, cat pictures and great content about cats. If they then crawl the site and the page says “We’re currently participating in an internet blackout as a protest” it looks to Google as if your page is a pretty awful resource when it comes to cats. Your site would drop in the pagerank system for cat information, which is probably not an ideal situation for your site.

Also, if all of your pages say the same thing, Google is going to think your content is duplicated all over your site and that you’re some sort of spam site. You really don’t want this!

Basically, the 503 HTML status says to the crawler “Hold on, this page is not what it normally is, so come back later”.

What Not To Do

To return the 503 error, it’s not advised to edit your robots.txt file as a robots.txt file change will ensure your site will not be indexed for a few days afterwards. Changing your DNS settings is also not advised. Basically, don’t do anything that takes a long time to change, to take effect or to revert.

Creating A 503 HTML Status Code For Your Site Using PHP

As long as you have access to your root directory for your website, this is a really easy process. Open up your favourite text editor and write this:

<?php
header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 3600');
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<title>503 Service Temporarily Unavailable</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Service Temporarily Unavailable</h1>
<p>We're currently participating in an internet blackout as a protest.
Please try again later.</p>
</body></html>

Then save your file as 503.php and drop it into your site’s root directory.

Obviously, you can change the human-read text to whatever your message is, including images and regular HTML elements.

A Quick WordPress Plugin To Black Out Your Site

For the SOPA blackout there was a handy WordPress plugin to black out your site. However it used a 302 redirect status code rather than the recommended 503 status code. If you want to know more about the SEO effect of using a 302 rather than a 503, read this article by Matt Cutts.

Despite this, if you’re not bothered by a bit of SEO damage, a plugin like this could allow you to quickly blackout your site without access to your root directory or without the need to learn too much technical detail.

This particular plugin was set to blackout just for the day of January 18th, but for future protests there will no doubt be more plugins available. Just search for one which uses a 503 status and you should be fine.

Let us know what other methods protestors could use on their sites if another Internet blackout is planned.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

Train Your Brain With AgameAday

Train Your Brain With AgameAday:

Here on MakeUseOf, we like to take on the occasional brain-teaser or word puzzle. Fortunately, I’ve found a site called A Game A Day (stylized “AgameAday”) – a great way to go throughout the year and enhance your thinking skills.

Despite its old school design, this site provides some fairly decent Java script games that are easy to use and fun to play. So if you have some time, you should definitely take a look.

The Basic Rundown

A Game A Day is one of the simplest sites that I’ve ever had the pleasure of using – no sign-ups, no hassles, no contract statements that involve me selling my future firstborn. It does exactly what would be expected of any good site, and that is for it to do what it is supposed to do. All it takes is for you to head over to the website once every single day to make this whole thing work.

The premise surrounding A Game A Day is that it provides one simple little brain teaser for you to play each day out of the year. Sometimes it’s just a question. Other times it’s simply a puzzle. Typically, these games are not very long seeing that they only involve one single problem, so this is great for people that are on the go. However, some of them actually seem to loop, so you can play once your brain has been fed. Basically, if you can check Facebook once a day, then you can play A Game A Day, too.

Raise The Bar

The games for the month are available at all times, so if you’ve missed a few days (or you want to skip ahead) then you’re in luck. However, if the month has already passed, then you are only able to play for the given month. The games come in two flavors – Level I and Level II – and while the first one is always good for casual players, the second one is just a smidgen harder. Dive in if you have a vast vocabulary and a mind with a knack for complex thinking. Granted, the games aren’t hard, and I believe anyone can figure them out. It’s just that one level might take a little more time out of your day than the other.

Most of the games are word puzzles dealing with antonyms or synonyms with a fill-in-the-blank type of format. However, there are quite a few meant to build up your word, geography, and visual knowledge. Some of the many games are listed below.

• How Do You Say? – Match up a common phrase in five different languages.


• Inquiring Cartographer – Identify countries on small land masses.


• Match Ups – Match symbols or images with their meanings.


• Antonyms – Simply write all the antonyms of the words you are given.

At first glance, the games may seem a little corny or too easy. However, they are great for a simple mind tease once a day, and they can get the brain going.

Conclusion

Like I said, this site is incredibly simple to use, and it serves its purpose well. The games are constantly updating, so you know that you’ll get something different each and every time.

What other brain teaser sites do you know of? Do you have any favorite games on A Game A Day?