archives
Gadgets
Delkin Archival Gold Blu-Ray Discs Keep Your Data Good for Two Centuries
10:00AM Gizmodo US Edition | 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] More »
Online
Darwin Manuscripts Evolve From Paper Notes to Online Archive
11:50PM Gizmodo US Edition | 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. More »
Peripherals
Ripserver NAS Makes CD Archiving Easypeasy
1:36AM Gizmodo US Edition | 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] More »
Random Stuff
Old Websites Sure Are Funny
3:59PM Mark Wilson | 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″ 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 »
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