Google decided to close the doors on Google News Archives yesterday, announcing that they will no longer digitise back issues of newspapers. That means that Google won’t be accepting any news about the Rapture today even for posterity’s sake. More »
In 1945, after Japan had conceded defeat in World War II, Sony founder Masaru Ibuka invented a product to try and serve the millions of homes who had electricity but lacked the appliances to use it. The result was this electric rice cooker. More »
The Library of Congress announced this week that they’ll be archiving every public tweet made since 2006, but they’ve been keeping track of some people’s Twitter accounts way longer than that. We’ve collected some of the great tweets from yesteryear: More »
The Salman Rushdie archive on display at Emory, with its handwritten journals and 18GB scattered across four Apple computers, is unlike any other – you can log in to a computer, search his folders, scan his Stickies, run his apps. More »
Manufacturers are powering up on their Blu-ray disc development, now the format war’s over: just two weeks ago we had the 6x speed ones, and now Delkin have these archive-quality discs. According to Delkin they’re the first BDs “guaranteed to preserve data safely for over 200 years” and they use some sort of patented phase-change tech to make the discs resistant to UV degradation. They’re also 25GB, 4x speed burnable, and have an anti-scratch coating. You’re only going to want to preserve really important stuff on them though: a ten-pack will cost you US$250. Now, to find a Blu-ray player that’ll last two centuries… [Reghardware]
The manuscripts that later became On The Origin of Species are going online for the first time. The good guys at the Cambridge University library, who were the only people with access beforehand, have put Charles Darwin’s notes on his book and another 20,000 archive items online, turning it into one vast educational/scientific resource. Apparently it’s actually so vast that if you downloaded one image a minute, it’d take you two months to view it all.
Okay, so the CD is maybe slowly on its way out but for a while there’ll be enough around to make the Ripserver NAS gadget useful. In use it’s as simple as its case design: slot in a CD, and it automatically rips it, archives to its hard drive, and spits the CD out again. Linking up to your home network is then handled by gigabit connection. It rips in MP3 or FLAC format, syncs with leading home music streaming systems and even has USB ports allowing you to make backups or add on yet more storage. Available now in black or white, US$1,200 for 500GB or US$1,400 for 1TB. [Ripfactory via Techdigest]
Digging through websites cached from the ’90s is akin to seeing a celebrity’s high school yearbook pictures – during the early, awkward years of the web, brave companies made a stab at winning consumer hearts through 15-inch CRTs and 14.4k dial up modems. Inspired by this MSU page, we decided to take a gander through the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine (a service that started saving pages in 1996). Needless to say, we found some funny stuff. More »
Uploading movies to the internet doesn’t always have to cause “injury that cannot be compensated or measured in money.” By donating to the Academic Film Archive of North America’s “Save a Film” initiative, you’ll be spotting them tax-deductible support for the uploading of a rare film from their over 6000-title 16mm film archive for free-as-in-beer public viewing at the Internet Archive. You’ll also get a DVD copy of the movie you chose to sponsor. More »
