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The traditional way of life appears to be fast vanishing down the memory lane, thanks to modern technology.

According to a British study, things like writing a letter to reading a map are among the top 50 tasks that have been wiped out by technology.

Top of the list of 3,000 adults quizzed was the fall in ringing the cinema to check the times of films. Printing out photographs was the second least popular activity these days. While VHS (Video Home System) recording came third in the list, thanks to a reliance on recordable DVDs and catch-up TV, the Daily Mail reported.

The findings show how one in five people admit never being out of reach of an internet device, as an average Briton now has more than four computing devices at their home – more than double the number they owned a decade ago.

The study found the smart phones’ popularity has eliminated the need for telephone directories, address books, or reversing the charges in phone boxes.

Computers have led to a decline in the number of people with pen friends while most of us rarely buy TV listings, have no need to try on hundreds of pairs of shoes on the High Street, or go into banks to conduct their business, the study says.

Paying bills at the post office, checking a map before or even during a car journey are also falling by the wayside. Booking online has seen a decline in trips to the travel agents while using public telephone boxes, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones, is also close to non-existent for most of us, it further says.

Claire Galbois-Alcaix of online back-up specialists www.mozy.co.uk, which commissioned the research, said: “These findings show that Brits are using technology to replace many of our traditional ways of life, as we move to a more digital world.”

There’s always times when we have a want or need to send large files over the internet to another location. Trying to send large files through email rarely works, as many email companies impose file size limits on email attachments. For some people, this can be quite a nuissance, especially if your file is just above the limitations that they give you.

In the early days of the internet, this wasn’t usually to big of a problem simply because data transferred so slow back then. People typically opted to standard mail diskettes or hard drives that contained large amounts of data.

As the internet speeds around the world quickly rose to that of DSL and cable modem speeds we know of today, the time it took to transfer large amounts of data shrunk to a few hours, versus several days. This now allowed people to send or upload several gigabytes of data in a relatively short amount of time. However, this is right around the time where lots of places began to impose their file size limits, to help manage their own bandwidth usage.

To counter this, several companies soon rose up to handle the problem of having no reliable way to send large data over the internet. One of the first of the major file sharing/hosting sites was called RapidShare, and they are actually still around today and remain one of the largest file hosting platforms in the world. They can even support up to three million users simultaneously! RapidShare works like this: You first specify the file you’d like uploaded to their servers. When the upload is complete, you will receive an email with a download link to download your file from their servers. You can send this link to whoever you’d like, so they can also download your file.

Since RapidShare, tons of other companies have popped up and offer similar services.

Here is a pretty comprehensive list of available file transfer services, and their file size limits for free accounts. These services are especially useful to send uncompressed audio, video, and images to family and friends. Feel free to try one of these fine services after you have completed a video transfer, or audio transfer order with us!

You may have noticed that it was hard to find a deal on any hard drives this past Black Friday, or any deals at all in the last couple months. Some stores have even started limiting customers to one drive per person. So, what’s the deal with the price of hard drives?

The reason behind the price markups and limited on-hand quantities is that there is currently a world-wide shortage of hard drives. One of the primary factors that caused the mass shortage was due to the deadly flooding that has plagued regions such as Thailand for the past couple of months. Industrial facilities, including those where many of the assemblies for the world’s output of hard drives are made, were seriously affected.

Since the flooding began, the prices of hard drives started to rise dramatically. The price increase could even affect companies like Dell, Gateway, and Apple’s prices on their pre-built computer systems, who will be forced to pass the cost on to the consumer. Many suppliers are estimating that they will be 35% short on supply this quarter alone. The cost of a 500GB internal hard drive has risen from $45-50 before the flooding to $60 now, and could even rise to $70 by the end of December.

Some makers are starting to feel the effects of the shortage. Just today, Apple has said that iMacs with 2TB drives are currently at about a 5-7 week shipping delay, which is a huge increase over it’s usual 1-3 day shipping times.

Industry insiders are suspecting that hard drive vendors will push up prices even further in the first quarter of 2012, which will drive up the cost of components for PC makers and individual buyers.

Seagate, one of the biggest makers of hard drives, has lowered its target for shipments in the quarter to between 40-45 million units. It could take between nine months and two years for hard drive production to return to normal!

If you do need a hard drive in the immediate or near-future, you should plan to get one ASAP, before the prices increase even higher!

Transferring learning how to rip a CD to your computer has a couple great advantages. First, you can consolidate your whole collection in one location, or even place it on a hard drive for safe keeping. Once it’s on the computer, organizing everything is a breeze. You can use a music organizing program such as iTunes, or just organize them yourself by placing them into folders that you create. In addition, you can also take your music with you on the go by placing the music files on your portable cell phone or music player.

If you’re looking for a quick way to rip a CD to your computer, it might just be easier than you think, and can often be accomplished without puchasing any equipment! If your computer has windows media player installed, you shouldn’t have any problems creating your music files.

To rip a CD, you need to make sure you have the latest version of Windows Media Player, a music CD, and a CD-ROM drive. For this example I am using Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7. The Windows Media Player software typically comes bundled with Windows when it is installed on your computer. Once you have determined that Windows Media Player is installed, place the CD you’d like to be ripped into your CD-Rom drive. Depending on your settings, it might even start to play right off the bat, if not, go ahead and open windows media player and go to the options by clicking organize->options at the top toolbar. Once you open the options window, select the “Rip Music” tab at the top and you should then see the screen below.

Feel free to tweak with the options here, as there are a few things to play around with. You can adjust the directory to where the resulting audio files will be placed, you can select what format you’d like them in, and finally you can adjust the ouput quality of the files. Choosing higher bitrate will improve the quality at the expense of large file sizes. If compression is your goal, you will definitely want to adjust the quality slider to choose the appropriate size for your project.

Once everything is selected to your specifications, press apply, then hit OK. At the main window, all you need to now do is click the button that says “Rip CD”.

The audio files will be placed in the directory you specified in the options menu. That’s it! You can now use this method to rip a CD to your compter or music player. This process will work for all audio CDs including ones you receive from cassette to CD, or LP to CD transfers.

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, is coming up from January 10-13, 2012. This is a yearly show hosted in Las Vegas that features all of the new and upcoming gadgets, computers, software and technology that is being developed by the world’s top corporations and technological companies. Over 100,000 people regularly attend the show yearly!

With more than four decades of success, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive.

The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $186 billion U.S. consumer technology industry. CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products. All profits from CES are reinvested into industry services, including technical training and education, industry promotion, engineering standards development, market research and legislative advocacy.

If you’re into gadgets and cool electronic devices, this is the place for you. You’ll get hands on previews of all of the cool gadgets for the year. Tell all your friends before they’ve even heard of it!

Some of the DVD Your Memories staff was present at one of the most recent shows and were able to sample new software aimed at revolutionizing video restoration in San Diego. To find out some more information about CES, check it out here!

In the year 1982, Sony released the CDP-101, the first consumer Compact Disc audio CD player, was released at a price of about $1000. At the time of release, it was marketed as high-end home audio equipment aimed at audiophiles, as only a very small number of albums were available — only 16 to be exact. In just a few short years later, the compact disc had taken the world by storm, with nearly every major artist or act available on CD. Audiophiles loved the lack of background noise and deep bass that could be produced off of a CD, but weren’t as happy about the digital compression techniques used. Fast forward to 2012, the question we ask now is “Are CDs obsolete?”

Several years after the first CD players were introduced, computers were starting to become equipped with CD players, which allowed people to now save their music collections onto their computers. This, then eventually, led to what we know and use today such as portable digital music players, online streaming music, and popular paid online digital music download stores like iTunes or Rhapsody. Could this sudden popularity with paid downloads spell the end of the CD?

Many sources are now reporting that record companies are secretly planning to abandon the CD format by the end of 2012, concentrating instead on online/streaming formats and release CDs as limited edition collector’s items only. This would only make sense, now that more and more people are getting their hands on computers, laptops, smart phones, and other portable devices capable of internet connections and digital music playback. This would also certainly raise the value of original CDs, considering they will no longer be produced.

However, CDs are still extremely versatile. When used as a CD-ROM, you can put not only music, but photos, video and other computer data. Don’t expect all CDs to vanish entirely, as they will still be used heavily in the next decade, especially with computers. In addition, many people like to have an actual physical copy of their media, especially if it’s important family media such as a CD from an audio cassette to CD transfer, or a reel to reel to CD transfer.

Looking for a place to scan your collection of old family photos? Our office in Los Angeles is equipped with state-of-the-art photo scanning equipment to transform your photos into digital images that you can cherish for a lifetime. The whole process is even easier than you think!

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First, you’ll simply drop on by our store with your photos by either appointment or walk-in. One of our technicians (usually the one who will be working on your order) will ask a few basic questions to help guide you through the order taking process and come up with an initial estimate. Once the specifications have been decided, the technician will give you a completion date, and your copy of the estimate.

Here are some of the advantages of choosing DVD Your Memories for your photo scanning in Los Angeles:

All your images are scanned and transferred to 100-year archival DVDs. If you choose to place your images on one of our DVDs, we’ll place everything on our Taiyo-Yuden DVDs rated to last up to 100 years.

We don’t use document scanners to scan your photos. We only use high quality flat-bed scanners to digitize your photos.

All scans are performed in-house. We never outsource any of your media. All of your photos will be scanned here at our local office. In addition to photos, all of your media will be transferred at the location that you dropped your images off at.

We’ll make sure that each and every one of your images are cropped and rotated correctly. We even have a second technician check over your order prior to finalizing to make sure it is 100% accurate, start to finish.

Free custom folder and file naming, meaning that we will organize and name your photos to your specifications. For more details, check out our photo scanning page.

If you opt to place your photo scanning order onto one of our DVDs, you can title the disc however you’d like!

Many Rare formats supported such as photo albums and large format photos. In addition, we also support many rare and obsolete formats for slide scanning and negative scanning.

Contact sheets allow you to view your collection of images quickly in an indexed format. For a small fee, we can include contact sheets with your order to help you quickly catelog and organize your images.

Slideshow creation services are available for photo scanning orders that need a little more flair or touch. You can even sit down with our in-house editor to create something truly fantastic. The options are limitless!

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