Hard-disk performs the most important job of storing your data, keeping a check on their health and performance should be the topmost priority for prevent any data loss. Ashampoo HDD Control 2 monitors, reports and maintains your hard drives for optimal reliability and performance. The simple to use utility features S.M.A.R.T drive failure warning system, automatic disk defragmentation, data recovery, benchmarking, ability to adjustment noise level and power management of your hard drive(s) and much more. The software usually costs $24.99 to purchase but is being offered for free under a limited period giveaway.

Yes, you read that right. Huawei's UltraStick is an SD card with no storage, however, the SD-card comes with an nano-sim slot and features an 3G radio with 21Mbps (HSPA+) download speeds. The accessory aims to provide 3G connectivity for low-end tablets, one simply slips the card into readily available SD-card slot and there non-cellular WiFi only tablets magically transforms into the expensive high-end counterpart with 3G connectivity.

We have seen Wireless charging solutions like Palm Pre Touchstone and eCoupled, both of which requires devices (power provider and the device being charged) to be in physical contact with each other to transfer electricity which is not exactly the picture which comes to one's mind when hearing the term "Wireless Charging".

Cota is the name of brand new revolutionary technology which will deliver the expected behaviour of a real "wireless charging" solution, Cota can transmit electricity wirelessly at up to 30 feets and that to focussed at a particular device using radiation safe as WiFi signals. The Cota technology consists of a charger and a receiver, the inherently safe technology can deliver wireless electrical power up to from a central transmitter to multiple devices. Receivers will be built into devices or batteries which will get automatically charged, imagine the utility where you can simply buy a Cota enabled standard battery, inset into your device and forget getting bugged about charging/replacing them. Do watch the video demonstration shared below to see this in action.

Gesture and touch controls are the future of human-to-machine interfacing, BendDesk is an innovative multi-touch desk environment that seamlessly combines a vertical and a horizontal surface with a curve into one large interactive workspace. This workspace can be used to display any digital content like documents, photos, or videos. Multi-touch technology allows the user to interact with the entire surface using direct manipulation and multi-touch gestures. Do watch the video posted below.

aria2 is by far the best download accelerator for Linux, now you can enjoy the acceleration power of this multi-threaded downloaded utility for your apt-get package installations and upgrades.apt-fast is a shellscript wrapper to apt-get/aptitude which utilizes the more efficient and powerful aria2 download accelerator to fetch binaries from multiple mirrors with multiple connections in parallel per package resulting in drastically improved download times.

When it comes to perfect backup's, RAW disk-images are the choice for safest form of backup and restoration of fully functional operating-system installations. We have shared two methods of using the same to backup Raspberry Pi SD Card from Windows as well as Hot Backup's from RPi itself using Linux DD disk imaging utility. Once created we can also Mount these backup images with full read-write access for various tasks like Data recovery (For example imaging an corrupted disk and accessing the disk-image from another working computer to recover data).

OSFMount is a free Windows utility which allows you to do that, the software enables users to mount local disk image files in Windows with a drive letter which can be accessed like any other partition. The images can be mounted in read-only mode as well as write-enabled mode, OSFMount also supports creation of RAM disks (See What are RAM Disks and How they can be used to make use of non-addressable wasted RAM on Windows) which offers a huge speed boost over using disk-based images.

We earlier shared "The Truth About Where Apple Borrowed New iOS 7 Features From" video and here's a simple image explaining the same.

If you are using multiple NIC's (Network Adapters) to access more than one network, it gets tricky from where you internet connection comes from. Here is one such scenario and solution to make Microsoft Windows prioritize internet connection from a particular network over the other. In my example setup I have one LAN connection (192.168.0.1) and one WiFi connection (192.168.1.1) and would like Windows to use internet from my fixed-line broadband connected via LAN.