If you have a Facebook account with more than just a few friends on your friend list, you’ve no doubt spent time reading posts that were completely uninteresting to you. With a large friend list, it is inevitable that you will see something you don’t want to read. Wouldn’t it be nice if Facebook had a filter that allowed you to enter the words or phrases that you don’t want to see on your wall, and it then hid any post with those words or phrases in them. For example, if profanity offends you, you could hide all posts with foul language, instead of completely hiding all posts by the friend who loves to swear. Or perhaps you don’t want to see YouTube videos on your wall, and you could scrub those away by entering the words youtube. Does NASCAR bore you? Celebrity news get under your skin? You get the idea. This would be a very powerful tool for streamlining your Facebook wall so it contains only what you find important. Facebook runs on a very complex infrastructure that already does some impressive “smart” filtering. With 500 million users, a new filter would certainly add quite a load to the system, but Facebook obviously has the resources to do such a thing. This is evident in the constant additions of off-site integration with other services. While it may seem a bit arrogant to wish for more from a free service, since Facebook makes money through advertisements, it is in Facebooks best interest to do everything it can to maximize the number of users who enjoy their experience on the site.

Cherished pictures, home movies, tax documents, books, diaries.  What if you suddenly lost access to things like these? It’s a possibility that is ever present, yet often pushed to the back of our minds. With computers becoming as ubiquitous as nearly any other common household item, they have also joined the list of things we take for granted. We expect our microwaves and vacuum cleaners to just work, and when they don’t, we replace or repair them. Other than the cost, there really is no personal loss associated with these situations. Can you say the same about your computer? Could you replace it today without the loss of anything important that you had stored on the hard drive? While some of us can answer yes to this, a much larger percentage cannot. The unfortunate truth is many people do not back up their computers, and there really is no good reason for this to be true. There are several simple solutions to preserving anything important on your PC, and many of these are free.

Undoubtedly, many people do maintain a backup using an external hard drive. While this is a very good idea when properly practiced, it does provide a false sense of security when that external drive resides in the same house as the computer(s) that it is protecting from data loss. If you lost the data on your PC due to a malfunction, you could easily replace those documents, photos, music, etc. on your repaired or new PC with the backups from your external drive. However, if you became a victim of natural disaster, or even theft, an external drive is likely to suffer the same unfortunate fate as your computer. In a situation like this, your backed up data becomes just as lost as your PC. So what is the answer? Offsite storage, either on the web or in a different physical location.

A simple, but possibly inconvenient solution, involves the aforementioned external hard drive and adds one more step to the backup process. Once your important data is copied to the backup drive, the drive should be moved to a separate location such as the house of a relative or a safe deposit box. The drawback to this solution is it requires you to physically retrieve the drive when you need to update your backups, or have two backup drives that you alternate between on site and off site, whenever you back up something new. As you can see, the ability to quickly get your backed up data using this method could be affected by outside factors. For example, your relative isn’t home, your spouse has your car, or the bank is closed. Depending on your backup needs, there are online solutions that may work better for you.

Several free online services provide storage space for photos, videos, music, documents, and files. Google offers a free photo managing program called Picasa, which will find and group all the photos and videos on your PC, and lets you easily upload them in albums to free storage space on the google servers. Flickr and Photobucket both offer similar services, minus the photo managing software, but still allow you to create online albums of your uploaded photos. For backing up more than just photos and videos, Microsoft provides Windows Live and SkyDrive, with 25GB of free online storage and the ability to create folders online for any file types you’d like. Included in Windows Live Essentials is Photo Gallery, which performs similarly to Google’s Picasa by finding all your photos and helping you organize and upload them to your personal space on SkyDrive. Making it even easier for you to get started, all these services let you log in with pre-existing accounts from associated services. You can log in to upload photos using Picasa with a Google/Gmail account,   Winows SkyDrive with a Hotmail account, Flickr with a Yahoo account, and to Photobucket using a facebook account. This means there is probably a free option you can use without having to create and keep track of yet another new profile. Now that you know it makes no sense to not backup, what are you waiting for? Hopefully you’ll never need to recover lost data, but if disaster does strike, you’ll thank yourself for utilizing one of these options. Or curse yourself if you didn’t.

Windows Live

Google Picasa

Flickr

Photobucket

The American Science & Engineering company has sold more than 500 mobile backscatter scanners to U.S. and foreign government agencies. Backscatter scanners are the type used for full body scans at airports and courthouses. The mobile scanners are used in vans and trucks, allowing drive-by scans of anything suspicious. The U.S. Department of Defense has been using the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now local law enforcement is using them to scan for terrorist threats such as car bombs. While it is a bit disturbing to know a vehicle full of agents could be looking through our walls, the usefulness of this technology is evident in places of high interest to terrorist plotters.