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WD today made the good old portable hard drive concept something totally new again.

The storage vendor announced a new family of portable external hard drives for Macs and Windows PCs, called My Passport Edge, that's ultrasleek and ultraslim.

There are minor differences between the Mac version and the Windows version of the new drive.… Read more

WD has just upgraded its storage solutions for Macs on both USB and Thunderbolt fronts.

The storage vendor today announced its first USB 3.0-based portable drives for Macs, the My Passport for Mac, and a new Thunderbolt drive, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo.

Apart from USB 3.0, the My Passport for Mac also increases the capacity to 2TB while remaining compact and portable. The reason WD waited until now to release a Mac portable drive that supports USB 3.0 is because USB 3.0 has just been added to the new version of the MacBook Pro and … Read more

If you prefer something a little fancier than a word processor file for journaling, there are plenty of options to choose from. All My Journals Free is one of the better such programs we've tried. It has a simple, classy interface with plenty of useful features and none of the gimmicks that journal programs seem so fond of including.

All My Journals Free looks very much like a word processor. There are menus across the top that give users access to text formatting options, tools, a search feature, and so on, and a few buttons down the left side … Read more

The new school year can be hectic enough.

So I figured that I would round up some useful smartphone apps for students trying to survive their first few days back at school. While I assume this column will be read by college students starting a new semester or quarter, I can only imagine younger kids and parents can find some use in this as well.

Given the increase in smartphone use across all ages, I wouldn't be surprised. Fortunately, much of the advice applies to everyone.

Some of these may be obvious, but hopefully not all of them are. … Read more

Generally, for network storage needs, I would recommend getting a dedicated NAS server, such as the Synology DiskStation DS1511+. However, if your needs are limited to casual usage, such as sharing documents and streaming music and photos, then a router with built-in network storage capability -- one that comes with internal storage or can host an external storage device and shares that with the rest of the network -- fits the bill better.

While much inferior to a NAS server in terms of features and especially performance, some routers actually have more to offer, in terms of storage, than one might expect and may just be what you need. In any case, getting a router of this type plus an external hard drive is a lot cheaper than a dedicated NAS server.

Following is a list of five top routers with built-in support for network storage that I've reviewed in recent years. … Read more

Windows has to be all things to all users, which leads to enduring compromises like the built-in Search Files and Folders module. Many third-party developers offer improved search tools for Windows. NirSoft's SearchMyFiles is a portable freeware search tool that lets you scour your system with greater accuracy and specificity than the built-in Search tool. You can search by wild card and the usual attributes as well as by content (text or binary). SearchMyFiles is a compact application that is frequently updated. The latest version we saw added a new feature, a Recent Config Files menu that lets users … Read more

Embedding a copyright-infringing video on another Web site is not illegal, a court ruled yesterday.

Judge Richard Posner ruled at the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that MyVidster, a social video bookmarking site, did not infringe the copyright of Flava Works, a porn production company, when it embedded copyright-infringing versions of Flava Works content from third-party Web sites.

The decision overturned a preliminary injunction from 2011, imposed by a lower court after Flava Works filed suit against MyVidster in 2010.

According to the Appeals Court ruling, MyVidster "doesn't touch the data stream" and therefore doesn'… Read more

MyLife, a people-finding Web service, hopes to expand its presence in the social media world by offering a new dashboard to organize your feeds and e-mail accounts.

The dashboard, which went live today, takes a user's Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and combines them with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL accounts.

CEO Jeff Tinsley said people often start their days by accessing their social media, so MyLife wants to simplify the process by putting them all on one dashboard.

"Consumers are just overwhelmed," he said. "They're using many different services and they're jumping … Read more

Interested in creating your very own detailed family history complete with photos, sounds, and videos? My Family Tree by Chronoplex Software is a free genealogy application designed to help anyone do just that.

The software, which supports standard GEnealogical Data COMmunication (GEDCOM) files, presents an appealing and easy-to-understand interface. There is also a Help file to aid the user in putting the genealogy software through its paces. You can build your family tree from scratch or edit an existing one. The information for every individual is very detailed and it allows the upload of audio, photos, and videos for that … Read more