Feed: crystal's blog - AggScore: 14.1

#audio

Auslogics Disk Defrag has been part of my system maintenance toolkit for quite some time. With the release of version 3.2, it's now even better at tidying up and optimizing your system's hard disk drives. In addition to a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, Disk Defrag 3.2 offers improved single file and folder defragging, better processing of multiple disks, a simplified scheduling screen, and more informative tool tips. Auslogics has also fine-tuned the program's defragmentation and file consolidation algorithms.

For laptop users, there's a new option to lock the program if your system is running on battery power -- so scheduled operations don't kick in and drain your power source at an inopportune moment. If you happen to have an SSD installed in your PC, you can head to the Disk Defrag options and exclude it from scanning (many think that defragmenting an SSD is a very bad idea).

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free download and works with most versions of Windows.

Sure, Amazon's Cloud Player works -- as long as you're in the U.S. or willing to do some tinkering -- but it's fairly simplistic at the moment. There are plenty of features missing which we'd like to see added -- but since Cloud Player is a Web app we don't have to wait for Amazon!

Google Chrome users, for example, can add playback hotkeys with an extension called keyMazony. Once installed, you'll have keyboard control of your Amazon Cloud Player queue. keyMazony commands will work as long as you're in the same Chrome window as Cloud Player, even if its tab doesn't have focus. The key combinations are customizable as well -- just make sure you don't set up a combo that conflicts with another extension or Chrome's built-in keyboard shortcuts.

#gizexplains

For years, atomic clocks have been considered the most accurate devices for tracking the slow march towards obsolescence, a subatomic particle vibrating a given number of times per second with relatively few issues. Now the reliability crown might be passed to the nuclear clock, which in addition to sounding gnarly, could prove to be less susceptible to errors from outside stimuli. It goes like this: although an atomic clock will measure a certain number of vibrations per second, external forces such as ambient electric and magnetic fields affect the electrons used in atomic clocks, causing mishaps. The particles used in nuclear clocks that are measured for vibrations -- and thus timekeeping -- can be excited with a relatively low-energy ultraviolet light, allowing for fewer variations from the aforementioned fields. To wit, Corey Campbell and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have devised a scheme that uses lasers to carefully control the spatial orientation of the electron orbits in atoms. A nuclear clock containing a thorium nucleus controlled in this way would drift by just one second in 200 billion years, the team claims. Before nuclear clocks become a reality, researchers must identify the precise frequency of light needed to excite thorium nuclei; but this is what grad students are for, right?

[Image credit: University of Colorado / Science Daily]