After decades of storing data for millions of computer users world-wide, the floppy disk is now officially dead. Sony has announced that they will no longer manufacture the disks, effectively bringing an end to one of the computer world’s most memorable eras.

The floppy has been on life support ever since Dell and other PC manufacturers stopped building the drives into their new computers back in 2003. With their vastly improved storage capacity and speed, optical discs made the floppy more or less obsolete in that year, and since then the market for blank floppies has been virtually nil.

There are still plenty of floppy disks around however. Most everyone who used computers back in the day has at least a box or two sitting in a closet somewhere, holding data that will most likely never be “read” again. But that’s OK. There are lots of memories locked away on those little pieces of plastic, and not all of them are stored as digital zeroes and ones.

For some time now cable and DSL providers have had a virtual monopoly on high speed Internet service in many of the areas they do business in, but that could soon change in a big way. Many cities and towns are experimenting with municipality-wide Wi-Fi coverage, and a large number of them are providing the service absolutely free of charge to their residents.

And why not? There are few services that provide more bang for the buck for taxpayers than free Wi-Fi. The installation and maintenance costs are mimimal when compared to traditional services such as water, sewer and police, and the benefits are both obvious and many.

The phone companies offering DSL have the most to lose as free Wi-Fi rolls out across the country because they are already losing landline telephone customers in droves. But the cable companies won’t be immune to lost customers either.

This is all great news for consumers, but if I owned stock in a cable TV or telephone company would I sell it ASAP.

Have you ever noticed how the expensive Lithium-Ion batteries that power many of today’s gadgets seem to wear out long before the devices themselves? Well, as it turns out that’s by design. Many modern batteries are controlled by a chip that’s programmed to render the battery incapable of properly holding a charge after a certain number of charge/discharge cycles. And of course when that happens, you’re stuck with two choices: either purchase of an expensive replacement battery or replace the device altogether.

I don’t know about you, but I find the practice of designing batteries to fail prematurely to be absolutely appalling. Not only does it waste precious natural resources by sending perfectly good batteries to the landfill (really now, how many people actually recycle old cell phones?), it also forces consumers to shell out their hard-earned money to replace a product that has not actually gone bad – sort of reminiscent of the printer ink catridge scam.

But there is a way to fight back. Instead of replacing a device or paying out the nose for an “authorized” replacement battery from the manufacturer, we can buy cheap third party batteries at a much lower cost. Of course Apple, LG, Nokia et al give dire warnings about “unauthorized” batteries possibly damaging their devices, but that rarely happens. And so what if it does? Thanks to the manufacturer the thing is going to have to be replaced anyway well before its “natural” death, so why not take a chance on a $6 battery purchased online before shelling out hundreds of bucks for a new device?

I realize that profit is the bottom line in the world of retail, but I think it’s just awful for companies to use technological sleight of hand to make a product appear to be defective when it really isn’t. Just my personal opinion of course.

If you’re a web developer you have probably seen a color on the screen that you would like to replicate on a website, but you had no easy way to determine the hexadecimal code for the color in question. Well, a nifty little utility called ColorGrab solves that problem once and for all!

ColorGrab is extremely easy to use. When you see a color you like on the screen, all you have to do is load ColorGrab and drag its small window somewhere out the way, then click the “Get Color From Screen” button. From that point on you can simply hover your mouse over any colored graphic or text on the screen and the underlying hex code for that color will be displayed in the ColorGrab window. Pretty simple, right?

I’ve used ColorGrab for a good while now and I absolutely LOVE it. The days of using trial and error to match up colors are long gone, saving me tons of time and effort on every website or blog that I create. The current version is ColorGrab 2.0. It’s small and lightweight, it doesn’t require installation like typical Windows programs, and it’s absolutely free! Cut your website development time dramatically by downloading ColorGrab 2.0 right here.

Does it take forever for most web pages to load even though your ISP claims that your Internet connection speed is just a tad shy of the speed of light? If so, your lightning-fast high speed Internet connection might not be performing as promised. How can you find out for sure?

CNET has a wonderful tool for measuring the download speed of your Internet connection. It’s called the CNET Bandwidth Meter, and it works like a charm. Simply tell it what kind of Internet connection you have (cable, DSL, satellite, etc.) and the name of your ISP, then the site will measure how long it takes to download a file from their server to your computer and display the results.

Since Internet connection speeds can vary greatly with the time of day, it’s best to run the test several times throughout a 24 hour period, paying special attention to the time periods when you are usually logged on and browsing the web. Click here to check the speed of YOUR Internet connection and see how your ISP stacks up against the competition!

If you use Microsoft Windows, there are probably times when you would like to capture an exact image of the screen. Luckily, Microsoft has made it extremely easy to create a screenshot in any version of Windows. Here is the simple procedure:

1 – Arrange the open windows on your screen however you want them to appear in the screenshot. You can maximize or minimize certain windows or move them around by clicking on the title bar and dragging them into the desired position.

2 – When the screen looks just the way you want it to, press the Print Screen key. This will save an exact image of your computer screen to the Windows Clipboard.

3 – Open a blank document in your favorite image editing program (I use Adobe Photoshop Elements but most any program will do, including Windows Paint).

4 - Paste the contents of the Clipboard into the blank document. Edit to your heart’s desire, then save the image. Congratulations, you have now a shiny new screenshot!

Back in my youth the South Korean company Samsung was best known for producing 2nd tier electronics items such as radios and TVs. If you had enough money to buy a “good” TV you bought an RCA, Zenith or other American name-brand set. If not, you paid considerably less for a Samsung unit and lived with a poorer quality picture and sound. And of course you knew that your brand new Samsung would eventually “tear up” long before a comparable name-brand unit would have.

But in the last couple of decades Samsung has made tremendous strides in the quality of their products. Today the massive company is a world leader in all things electronic. Whether it’s a radio, television, cell phone or computer component, if it has the Samsung name stamped on it you probably feel pretty good about your purchase.

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If you have been using Microsoft Windows for a while you are probably familiar with the “Show Desktop” icon on the Quick Launch Toolbar. Clicking on the “Show Desktop” icon does exactly that. All open windows will immediately be minimized and the Windows Desktop will pop into view.

But what if your Windows installation isn’t displaying the “Show Desktop” icon at the time, or you want to show the desktop without removing your hands from the keyboard? The answer is simple: Just press the Windows key (between the CTRL and ALT keys) and the letter D at the same time. Windows-D does exactly the same thing as clicking the “Show Desktop” icon, only faster since you don’t have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and then click on the icon.

Of course if you prefer clicking on the icon, that’s certainly your prerogative. That’s the method I use most often myself simply because my hand is usually on the mouse anyway.

Last September I wrote a post announcing the impending arrival of devices using the new USB 3.0 communication interface standard, and now they are finally starting to hit the market. First out of the gate is Buffalo Technology, which has just announced the release of a brand new line of USB 3.0 hard drives.

Buffalo’s initial USB 3.0 offerings include drives with capacities of 1 TB, 1.5TB and 2TB. These drives are backward compatible with USB 2.0 which means you can buy and use the drives now and upgrade to a PC supporting USB 3.0 later. But to streamline the switch to the new protocol ( and sell more 3.0 drives quickly), Buffalo is also releasing a 2-port USB 3.0 PCI card for upgrading older PC’s to the new standard.

Other companies also have USB 3.0 products in the pipeline, so look for plenty of the faster devices to hit store shelves in the near future.