How to lose 16GB of your digital life, Just like that!

Posted by BA on Sep 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | 6 comments

I’ve been using a 16GB Micro SDHC card in my Nokia N82 and it’s been less than a year yet. I have been very happy with the performance and obviously the capacity. Then it started behaving a little weird. The read and write times were taking way more than normal and when listening to music, I could hear the music hanging every now and then.

I thought I’ve not formatted my phone for a long time and so many software and data on the phone, its being over loaded. I never realized that my beloved memory card is misbehaving. One fine evening I was taking a macro-closeup of a crawling insect that my phone actually clogged, hanged and got stuck right after the photo was taken. I waited several minutes but the phone did not come back. Only thing I could do was to pull the battery and boot it again.

To my highly unpleasant surprise, the phone worked just fine but the memory card never came back. I’ve tried all the card readers, phones, converters, jackets and means to try to get it back up and running but no luck so far.

What did I lose?

I have been so confident about these memory cards that I take backups only when they get filled up. And filling up a Sandisk’s 16GB Micro SDHC for a smart phone is not that common. As a result, not only I lost the card but I lost my past 6 months of photos, videos and other stuff like music and video collection that I used to carry on my phone all the time. Alas!

Lesson learnt:

Always take backups

Moreover, despite my efforts the card never came back and I had to end up downgrading to my 8GB card that continues to work fine so far.

Another Lesson Learnt
Always keep a backup storage medium. If you primary storage fails, you are up and running on the backup.

Yet another lesson learnt
Whenever you find your storage media or related devices working unusually slow or even differently, at least take a backup of your data!

I’ve learnt these lessons the hard way. I hope you learn them from my experience!

New Facebook Homepage squeezes in size!

Posted by BA on Apr 5, 2009 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

As all of us are getting used to the new Facebook layout, I just realized that the home-page after logging in has reduced in size significantly. Most web-browsers for desktop don’t tell you about the volume of data they have to download to render one page. Actually the size of the page is the sum of the size of text/html, images, animations, sounds and whatever you get to see on the page (and some data you even don’t get to see on the page). It is very important for the mobile phone users to know the size of each page they are surfing. This is because most of the networks charge their users on data-volume basis. That is exactly why my Nokia Browsers show me exactly how much data is being downloaded while it renders the page.

According to my findings, before the new Facebook came up, home-page after logging-in was of the order of 2.5 to 3 MB in volume. I know, the mobile version of Facebook is already pretty cool, but I do like to use the standard desktop version on mobile browser at times, especially when using WI-FI. And to my pleasant surprise, the new version of Facebook shows a home page worth 1.5 to 2 mega byte of size. Obviously it depends on what news, content, notifications and photos are being shown on the home page. That’s why its as low as 1.5 MB at times and grows as high as 2MB. But a reduction in size of the home-page by average 1 megabyte is ammazing!

Now this change actually has a lot to do with performance of the website on the desktop version as well. I know there are so many AJAX calls that keep updating the page and the web-page keeps spending your valuable bandwidth, but still I take it as an advantage. With smaller size, the home-page loads faster first time, and you don’t even have to refresh the home page now. Only the new information is fetched automatically by the AJAX. Moreover, most latest desktop browsers support data compression as well. That makes the home-page loading lightning fast!

Thankyou Facebook!