How to Clean Out Your Overflowing Hard Drive and Get Your Space Back

Source: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-clean-out-your-overflowing-hard-drive-and-get-yo-510511720

Hard drives get messy. You save files and forget them, download huge chunks of data that pile up, and change your naming schemes a hundred times. It's spring, though, so why not do a little tidying up?

To make things simpler, we're going to look at this from the perspective of cleaning up a secondary drive that doesn't have an OS installed on it. You can use these same tactics for any drive, but there are other ways to save space on a system drive including clearing caches, eliminating old temp folders, etc. Right now, though, we just want to focus on your junk.

Find the Really Big Files

When you need to clear up hard drive space in a hurry, the first thing you want to do is find out just what's taking up all that space. WinDirStat is a crowd favorite for scanning a drive and finding out what you can get rid of to get a little extra leg room in a hurry. The results are even color-coded to let you know what are important, system files that you shouldn't delete, and what's cat GIFs and videos of your friend's wedding. If you're on a Mac, our favorite analyzer, Disk Inventory X, has a lot of the same features for the same price (free!).

Get Rid of Duplicate Files

Whether they're big or small, duplicate files take up unnecessary space. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can all use the handy Duplicate File Searcher to track down any files that you've downloaded more than once. Windows users can also use Duplicate Commander to remove the extra copies and replace them with hard links. This clears up the space while still making sure that any apps referencing the files are able to continue to operate without interruptions. Duplicate Cleaner Free also offers a nice, three-tabbed interface for finding duplicate files without all the mess.

Find the Really Old Files

Finding the big stuff isn't always helpful. After all, you probably downloaded those giant videos for a reason. If you'd rather just find the old stuff, you can do that with simple search operators in the search box for Windows 7 and up. You can search for the last date modified, accessed, or when a file was created, and further sub-filter by size or type. Unfortunately this method lacks the nice visualization of file size that WinDirStat has, but it can go a long way in whittling down the stuff you don't need or use anymore. There are bunch more search operators you can use to narrow down your searches here.

Rename Your Files

Okay, so you definitely want to keep those 12,462 wedding photos, but wouldn't it be nice if they were named something better than IMG01827.jpg? Batch rename apps allow you to bring a more uniform sorting scheme to your collections. Apps like Rapid Streams (Windows) or Name Changer (Mac) are straightforward utilities for doing simple renaming tasks. However, if you want to crank it up a notch or ten, Bulk Rename Utility for windows has more options than you could ever use. On OS X you can use the built-in Automator tool to accomplish many of these same tasks as well.

Move Your Files

Now that all your files have meaningful names, put them somewhere equally meaningful. Apps like TeraCopy will allow you to quickly move a bunch of files around and set batch settings for overwriting or renaming duplicate files. Ultra-copier is a cross-platform solution that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and is frequently much faster than the built-in solutions you find on most OSes.

Keep Your Private Files Really Hidden

Most of us have something that we'd rather not share with the world. Sensitive work documents, birthday gift ideas, etc. You can hide files in both Windows and OS X, but this only really makes your folders slightly nicer to look at. There's no real security there. You can use apps like TrueCrypt to lock down files, or even simple zip applications like 7-Zip to keep a collection of files under lock and key from anyone who may stumble on to your machine. These only really help protect against casual access to your machine, of course. If you want more powerful protection in case your hardware is ever seized or stolen, you may want to create a hidden, encrypted partition to store sensitive files on, using your main volumes as a decoy.

If you're like me, you probably have years and years worth of files laying around on your system that need to be cleared out, but it's not necessary to go through them by hand to clean them up.

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Electronic Bricks Means the Future Of Lego Is Even More Wonderful

Source: http://gizmodo.com/electronic-bricks-means-the-future-of-lego-is-even-more-510488026

At Sony Computer Science Laboratories' recent open house in Tokyo, the company gave the public a glimpse of some of the innovative research its team has been working on. Including a project called Toy Alive: a joint venture between Sony and Lego to develop microchip-embedded bricks that add a new level of electronic interactivity to the popular building toy.

Led by Alexis Andre, the project has already resulted in custom Lego bricks that allow creations to be controlled by a PlayStation controller, but that's just the beginning. LED-embedded bricks can be programmed to glow in unison when combined, so a model of a house can flicker like it's on fire. The new Lego pieces can also interact with a computer, allowing them to be remotely controlled or triggered with some basic Mindstorms-like programming. The researchers are even working on embedding bricks with tiny wireless cameras for an awesome minifig's eye view of a playset.

Sadly, the enhanced Legos are still a few years away at best. The crappy state of batteries means playtimes are currently very limited. But thankfully, in the meantime, good old-fashioned imagination is still perpetual. [Japan Times via Gizmag]

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M: The New Best Graphics Card For Your Laptop

Source: http://gizmodo.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-780m-the-new-best-graphics-card-for-510469807

Intel's new integrated graphics are better than ever, and AMD's are nothing to shake a stick at either, but if you really want to game on a laptop, nothing's gonna beat discrete. And Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 700M series just rolled into town with the best graphics you can put in your laptop.

The new GTX mobile cores come in 4 different flavors—760M, 765M, 770M, and the beastly 780M—and unlike last years GTX 600Ms which had a pair of Fermi stragglers, this year's batch are all the latest and greatest Kepler architecture, through and through. All four boast the full suite of Nvidia graphical enhancements like PhysX and GPU Boost 2.0 for overclocking, and they'll snap right into GeForce Experience for auto-customization and auto-driver downloading goodness.

On the whole, the crew of cards boasts (on average) a 30 percent performance increase over their respective 600M predecessors, with the new low-end 760M able to tackle beasts like Far Cry 3 and Bioshock Infinite on high settings at 1080p, and the high-end 780M able to rock those suckers on ultra/max settings with that same high-resolution. You know, real gaming.

You can expect to start seeing these bad boys rolling out from OEMs in the onslaught of laptops that'll be running Intel's upcoming 4th generation Haswell chipset, like that dope new Razer Blade. Your laptop still won't (ever) be a perfect substitute for a classic, upgradable gaming desktop, but these should be pretty killer.

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Hell Yes, Razer Made the World's Most Powerful Small Windows Laptop

Source: http://gizmodo.com/hell-yes-razer-made-the-most-powerful-small-windows-la-510358373

Yep, this might be incredible. The new Razer blade is a 14-inch monster... ultrabook. With a discrete Nvidia GTX graphics card. Basically, this is the smallest, most badass gaming laptop-cum-ultrabook we've seen.

It's Razer, so obviously this is expensive. The new 14-inch Blade starts at $1800, and scales up from there if you want to upgrade the 128GB SSD to 256 or 512GB. The full specs include next-gen Haswell Intel processors; 8GB onboard DDR3 RAM; Nvidia GTX 765M (2GB GDDR5 memory) & Intel HD4600 graphics; 14-inch 1600x900 display; and 3 USB 3.0 ports. It's claiming six hours of battery life, but good luck with that; we'll let you know what the number looks like under a gaming load once we get our hands on a review unit. Overall, there's nothing unexpected in the specs, really. The real news comes from Razer's well-made Blade sizing down to 14 inches.

There are other 14-inch gaming laptops, of course. But like the original 17-inch Blade, this one is a good deal slimmer than its predecessors. The Alienware M14x, for example, is 14 inches and 6.5 pounds (and comes with a 1.3-pound power block—Razer's always had nice power supplies).

Comparing it to non-gaming laptops and ultraportables, the 14-inch Blade's tininess holds up, more or less. The Blade weighs 4.135 pounds and is 16.8mm thick. The Aspire S7, one of our favorite ultrabooks, has a 1080p 13-inch screen is weighs just 2.86 pounds (11.9mm); the 13-inch Yoga is 3.4 pounds. A 13-inch MacBook Pro is 4.5 pounds (24.1mm), and the Retina 13 is 3.57 pounds (19mm). So it's is brawny and trim—thinner than a retina MBP 13, even—but not exactly an ultralight.

Until now, anyone who wanted a nicely made and designed but still powerful laptop was mostly looking at a 15-inch MacBook Pro. Nothing wrong with that, really, but some people like Windows. And Windows manufacturers have been sticking their A-team designers on less robust ultrabooks for a few years now (and didn't even have A-team designers before that, really).

Add in the fact that Razer's keyboards have been great on the past two Blades, and that the 14-inch drops the gaudy Switchblade keys on the right-hand side, and this should be a pretty awesome Windows laptop, and the best small one with a real graphics card.

The old 17-inch Blade, now the Blade Pro, also got bit of a makeover. It's mostly the same as last year's updated model, and shares the same specs as the 14-inch, except for that bigger 1080p screen. But now its Switchblade macro keys are updated to work better with professional uses. To that end, it also comes stocked with full versions of nice apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Maya. It starts at $2300.

We'll have full hands-on impressions shortly, so check back for that, but for now, going by the specs, this looks like it could be incredible. Assuming you've got the coin.

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Pioneer announces XDJ-R1 all-in-one digital DJ deck with MIDI, iOS control features (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/30/pioneer-announces-xdj-r1/

Sure, DJ controllers might be the emerging force in spinning, but CDJs are still largely the club standard. Pioneer has always had thumbs in both of these pies, of course, but the new XDJ-R1 sees the brand uniting them for the first time. The all-in-one unit offers two CD players, USB media playback and MIDI controller functionality. Additionally, you can keep things moving wirelessly via an iOS device thanks to a new dedicated "remotebox" app. Wireless direct means that you won't need to worry too much about flaky connections while you wander into the crowd with your iPhone. You'll still be able to control almost everything directly in the app. Back on the physical (and built-in) two-channel mixer you can spice things up with the usual loop, sync, hot cue and sampling features, plus a choice of color effects. The inclusion of XLR outputs and booth out shows that Pioneer wants to see this in the DJ box, and at $1,099, it should appeal to anyone who'd been eyeing up the component parts. It's available in June, but in the meantime there's a video tour cued up past the break.

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