Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Phone eats my photos

And Blogger eats blog postings...

Let me see if I can reconstitute this post.

My Razor v3m ate some of my cell phone pics tonight. I was transferring pics to my microSD card when the phone decided to erase all but two of the pictures on the card. And no, I did not accidentally choose to erase the card. Otherwise it would have gotten the two that it left behind, eh?

So I went looking for some free file recovery apps to see what I could get back.

Softperfect File Recovery is a tiny download and doesn't require an install. It quickly recovered 36 images and three .3g2 files. It didn't recover all the images and some of the images it did recover were corrupted. The .3g2 files wouldn't play.

PC Inspector File Recovery requires install. It had the same results. 36 files recovered, same corrupted files, .3g2 files won't play.

So I guess the missing/corrupted images are not gonna come back.

The PC Inspector app also has a find lost files option where it scans the media cluster by cluster, and that found a long ago deleted xls file. So you may be able to get some extra stuff back using that method.

This is the second time I have lost the contents of a microSD card. The first time, the card sprang out of it's socket and just happened to land right under the wheel of my chair. So when I turned to look for it....'crunch'.

That one: my fault. This time: yer pissin me off Motorola.

Google vs Facebook? I don't think so.

Just finished reading this article on the internal economy of Facebook. Mostly it is about Facebook's growth struggles and how recent changes in layout have hurt the businesses of lots of Facebook App Developers. But one small part was about Facebook's place in the larger web ecosystem.

The Article maintained that Facebook aims to be the OS of the Web, "making the web fundamentally social across all sites and applications." In this, it competes with Google.

"Google says the modern day operating system, or at least the starting off point on the Web, starts with search. Facebook believes it starts with people connected via social networking." ~Developers Struggle Amid Fragile Facebook Economy

This reminds me of my thinking about the web ca. 1995. There is a basic truism about the internet. People get on the net to get stuff done or to mess around. Save time or waste time. I think maybe 'search' is weighted towards saving time, and web 2.0/social apps are weighted toward the waste time end. So, Google and Facebook aren't even in the same market. Folks aren't going to get on Google to check in with their friends and they aren't going to use Facebook to find a grant for their non-profit or to search for a part number.