Serdar Yegulalp

As USB thumb drives and memory cards get larger and cheaper, it's getting easier to trust much more of your data to them. It's also much easier to mistakenly erase data or have them hiccup on you. And if you're in the habit of holding on to that data for too long -- for example, not transferring photos from your camera's memory card -- disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?

While there's no end of data recovery software packages out there, most of them are primarily designed to reclaim data from system drives. In this roundup, I look at the following six packages in terms of how well they recover data from mobile storage such as flash drives and memory cards: CardRecovery, PhotoRec, Recover My Files, Recuva, Remo Recover and Undelete 360.

As USB thumb drives and memory cards get larger and cheaper, it's getting easier to trust much more of your data to them. It's also much easier to mistakenly erase data or have them hiccup on you. And if you're in the habit of holding on to that data for too long -- for example, not transferring photos from your camera's memory card -- disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?

While there's no end of data recovery software packages out there, most of them are primarily designed to reclaim data from system drives. In this roundup, I look at the following six packages in terms of how well they recover data from mobile storage such as flash drives and memory cards: CardRecovery, PhotoRec, Recover My Files, Recuva, Remo Recover and Undelete 360.

Once upon a time there was a browser named Firefox -- an open source project that many people happily picked up and spun off into their own versions with names like Iceweasel and Pale Moon. Now the same thing has happened with Google Chrome. Its open source incarnation, Chromium, has become the basis for a slew of spinoffs, remixes, and alternative versions.

Naturally, a variant version of a browser needs to be broadly compatible with the original to be useful, but at the same time have enough new features or enhanced functionality to be a compelling alternative. Just as a remix of a song combines something from the original with something new, Chrome spinoffs inherit Chrome's speed and rendering prowess while striking off in new directions.

The single most common complaint you'll hear about any smartphone is how lousy the battery life is. Granted, battery life is like mileage on a car -- it will vary widely depending on your usage. You can always buy more time by making fewer calls or downloading less data. But then, you probably carry your smartphone in order to use it.

Luckily, there are things you can do to extend your smartphone's battery life without making major sacrifices. The easiest option is to use a third-party app that intelligently modulates your phone's energy usage based on demand and behavior.

With each passing year, hardware devices grow less dependent on proprietary components and more reliant on open source technologies. Network routers are among the main beneficiaries of this trend, especially those that can support a variety of third-party open source firmware projects. One variant, DD-WRT has become a common out-of-the-box option for many routers, but also exists in stand-alone implementations that can be placed on routers that support it. Hundreds of routers can run DD-WRT firmware, including nearly 100 Linksys models alone.

DD-WRT has a slightly convoluted history. In 2002, Linksys started releasing a variety of router, the WRT54G line, that used Linux as an embedded system. The company was eventually obliged to release the source code for those routers under the terms of the GPL. Another company, Sveasoft, picked up on the results and created its own third-party firmware (aka Alchemy). Eventually this work was turned into a commercial offering, which encouraged the folks at DD-WRT.com to launch their own branch of the project.

More and more, we rely on Web services as a matter of course. The key word is rely: We assume that the data we upload to, say, a photo-hosting account or blog service today will still be there tomorrow. In large part, that's because we assume the services themselves will still be there tomorrow.

But over the past few years, we've seen plenty of examples of sites that are here today and all-too-gone tomorrow -- for example, Friendster (which dumped user data for a redesign in May) and GeoCities (which shut down in 2009).

After years of marginal acceptance, e-books have finally started to eclipse their printed-and-bound ancestors. Casual and sophisticated readers alike are growing much more accustomed to reading from a device -- a Kindle, a smartphone, an iPad or a laptop. They're also catching on for business and technical audiences -- for example, HR departments can distribute employee manuals digitally, while IT staffers can carry around 800-page references for their favorite programming languages or operating systems without having to dislocate a shoulder.

One of the most attractive features about this process is that you don't have to be a professional publisher to produce a useful and well-formatted e-book. Almost anyone can take an existing manuscript -- a technical manual, a corporate white paper or even a personal biography -- and turn it into an e-book.

When we were kids, my friends and I used to play a game where we fantasized about which technologies from Star Trek were most likely to be real-world inventions within our lifetimes. The transporter and warp drive -- not likely. But the communicator, the voice-commanded computer and the universal translator -- very likely.

When speech recognition arrived on the computer desktop, it seemed like a great idea -- but for most people, it wasn't a replacement for the keyboard and mouse. Now speech recognition technology is being put to use in a whole new environment: phones. And its presence there is further driving its use and development in directions it might never have headed on the desktop.

Most video editing suites are aimed at either the consumer or the video pro. But what about business users, who fall squarely in the middle of these two categories?

Today's midlevel editing packages offer a good deal of flexibility and power when it comes to working with videos. In fact, features that used to be available only in professional editing software a few years ago are now commonplace, like the ability to remove jitter from footage.

Most everyone who's had some experience with free open source software has learned about the OpenOffice.org suite of productivity programs: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and drawing tool that provide a good deal of the functionality of their commercial counterparts. For users who need powerful productivity tools but don't require a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft-formatted files, OpenOffice.org is almost a no-brainer.

But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts. All of them are available for Windows, and nearly all are available for Linux and Mac OS X as well.

Most everyone who's had some experience with free open source software has learned about the OpenOffice.org suite of productivity programs: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and drawing tool that provide a good deal of the functionality of their commercial counterparts. For users who need powerful productivity tools but don't require a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft-formatted files, OpenOffice.org is almost a no-brainer.

But apart from OpenOffice.org, what else is there? I dug into my own program folders and searched the far corners of the Web to come up with a cache of free and open source productivity applications for a range of desktop productivity tasks: word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of these tools are worthy substitutes for expensive commercial counterparts. All of them are available for Windows, and nearly all are available for Linux and Mac OS X as well.

When word began to circulate about Diaspora, the hype about it being a potential Facebook killer took on a life of its own before a single line of code had been released. Now the first developer's alpha version of Diaspora is out in the wild, and the hype is being replaced with scrutiny and well-deserved skepticism.

Its creators claim Diaspora to be a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" -- and maybe someday it will be. But there are more pieces missing than in place, and Diaspora has a long and rocky road ahead if it wants to achieve even half of its stated goals.