PC Mechanic, New Article

Need An App For Your Android Phone? Invent It!
IcoFX Quick Tutorial [Video]
Do Green Drives Really Save That Much Power?

Need An App For Your Android Phone? Invent It!

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 03:30 AM PST

Using an Android-based smartphone does have its perks. If you need a particular app but it doesn’t exist anywhere, you can roll your own.

"But I’m not a programmer", you may say. Well, Google took that into consideration and put together the App Inventor.

This short video explains how it works in a nutshell:

As you can see, it’s not exactly a 1-2-3 super-easy thing, however it is a whole lot easier compared to manually coding an app yourself – even if you are a programmer. Lots of drag-and-drop involved, and thoughtful ‘puzzle piece’ style layout so it’s easy to connect things together to have your app perform certain functions.

You can check it out at appinventor.googlelabs.com.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Need An App For Your Android Phone? Invent It!

IcoFX Quick Tutorial [Video]

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 02:00 AM PST

In the video above is IcoFX, a freeware icon editor for Windows. While it’s true there are other more powerful graphics editors like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, IcoFX’s simplicity definitely makes it worth having installed.

If you do any sort of web design work, whether personally or professionally, a custom favicon.ico file is more or less mandatory these days. The best tool to make those with is IcoFX.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

IcoFX Quick Tutorial [Video]

Do Green Drives Really Save That Much Power?

Posted: 08 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST

It is no secret that I am a big time supporter of reducing our impact on the environment, so I enjoy reading tech related items on the subject. One article that caught my eye recently was an Ars Technica post titled "Ask Ars: are "green" hard drives really all that green?"

This article is a great read and breaks down the "green" drives from a variety of aspects. But for those of you who only want the highlights, here are a few excepts of interest:

When a drive is "green," the designation usually just means that it runs on the slower side—5400 rotations per minute, as opposed to the more ubiquitous 7200 RPM. But in some cases, this slowdown can translate to drives that are quieter, cooler, and less power-hungry.
[...]
In terms of cost, using a green hard drive compared to a normal one makes very little difference. Assuming your drive spends 4 hours reading and writing and 20 hours idle per day, switching from the WD Black to Green saves you only 45 kilowatt-hours per year. The national average cost of a kilowatt-hour is 11.93 cents, netting you a whopping $5.38 per year for your sacrifice of 1800 RPM. For comparison, changing one 60-watt lightbulb used 4 hours a day to a 7-watt fluorescent one saves you more, about $9.23 per year.
[...]
[I]f you are building a system that you’re not placing all your high-performance hopes on, like an HTPC or a NAS, a "green" drive isn’t a bad option. Quietness and coolness are valued characteristics in HTPCs when you’re looking to avoid drowning out the audio with drive spinning and fans or overheating the surrounding set-top boxes. Likewise, home theater and storage are relatively low-demand operations, so for most consumer purposes you won’t need a high-performance drive. And it doesn’t hurt that "green" drives are also cheaper.

It pretty much boils down to this: if you don’t need performance, green drives make a solid choice because they are cheaper and can end up saving you $20+ in power consumption over the life of the drive. If you have a simple RAID-5 storage box with 5 drives then can add up to $100+ in savings (also factor in the rising cost of electricity and the savings could be more).

Do you use green drives? If so, do you notice a difference over their non-green counterparts?

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Do Green Drives Really Save That Much Power?