graham.reeds/

Skanked!

A while ago I purchased a 320gb hdd for my media center. When it arrived Windows recognised it as being 298gb in size. I didn’t quibble – I wish I did now.

Recently I replaced it with a 500gb drive by the same company – Western Digital – but Windows recognises it as being only 465.76gb in size.  Where’s my other 35gb?

I’ve been caught by one of those 500gb = 500,000,000,000 bytes (500x1000x1000x1000).  If you do the maths properly, you get 500,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 465.66gb.

In other words, if you are in the market for a new drive, steer clear of Western Digital. I used to like Maxtor drives, but I switched because Maxtor were more expensive than the competition, but now I wish I’d stuck with them. It seems Maxtor were charging more because they were giving you the actual drive size – not an imaginary number.

Update: Even my Maxtor drives are doing it now: I have 2 40gb maxtors in this machine of varying ages and they both report differing amount of available space.  One is 39.6gb in size and the other is 38.1gb. Neither quite 40gb but both above the 40,000,000,000 mark:-(

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I can see again!

Finally upgraded my monitor from my ageing 17″ CRT to a 22″ WS TFT. It’s an Acer X222W and was bought from Amazon. I set the screen to white and black and no dead pixels!

Currently trying out different things. Games playing is a bit weird – not all games support widescreen (notably the older ones).

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Organizing PDF’s

I’ve got a lot of PDF’s and they are getting out of control. So I’ve decided to do something about it. First I hit google (note the lowercase g) and didn’t get very far – the range of programs are very naff. Then I hit meta-filter and got a lot more results. From there I learnt there is a lot of programs that do exactly what I want, look stylish and some are even free, but unfortunately they are all written for the Mac, except one that doesn’t do what I want (it does it all online I want it offline).

All I want is a program that you can point at a directory and that will plow through them and list your PDF’s. It can make guesses at content by keyword and the list the abstract (if it has one of course) and allow me to tag it. For instance, does the PDF book Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# belong in Unit Testing folder, the C# folder or the Pragmatic Bookshelf folder? It doesn’t it belongs in all three.

Half tempted to halt on my current crop of projects (Galaxy, Missile Command, Lock-Free Lists and a Deque implementation) and try at writing one that stores all the PDF’s in MySQL and you can ‘download’ them to open them via Foxit or open them directly in your browser.

Apparently iTunes does what I want it to, but I don’t want to install a music program to organize my PDF’s – it doesn’t seem right…

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