In addition to erase and partition, your Mac has four Secure Erase Options in the Disk Utility. Don’t Erase Data. Zero Out Data. 7-Pass Erase. 35-Pass Erase. 7-Pass Erase meets the US Department of Defense 5220-22 standard to wipe a hard drive. If that’s not good enough, try Chris Breen’s manual method.

Allow me to propose the Multi-Pass Sledgehammer option. If you need your data to be totally unrecoverable and are willing to sacrifice a hard drive to make that happen, extract the drive from your Mac, take it out back, and beat the living hell out of it.

Funny, yet effective.

This one belongs in my Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics file. The U.S. Census Bureau says 270-million cell phone subscribers sent an average of 407 text messages back in 2008, double that of 2007. From CBS News:

Americans punched out more than 110 billion text messages last year, double the number in the previous year and growing, as the shorthand communication becomes a popular alternative to cell phone calls.

What’s the problem? The headline, Texting Now More Popular Than Cell Calls. More popular? How? Sheer numbers, not texting time vs. talk time, for sure. That said, we added texting to our iPhone plans to keep in touch with our children.

Interesting stats, though. The average length of a cell phone call is down to 2.3 minutes. The average monthly phone bill remains flat, at about $50. The average teen sends more than 2,000 text messages a month.

There was a time when my radio was always on. Home, pocket, car. Radio was my personalized elevator music. Today, the only radio I listen to is in the car. Internet radio is everywhere else, and one of the top services is Pandora; so perfect for iPhone users that Pandora founder Tim Westergren said it is totally responsible for internet radio growth. From Benny Evangelista in the Chicago Sun-Times:

The iPhone single-handedly kicked off that phenomenon. It changed the way consumers think about what Internet radio is. You’re no longer limited to thinking it’s just a computer radio.

Think of Pandora as radio without commercials; free for the first 40 hours a month, 99-cents after that, $3 a month for a full subscription without ads. Interestingly, ads displayed on Pandora while music plays brings in most of Pandora’s revenue, so capitalism is alive and well, even as radio morphs from the airwaves to the internet.

There was a time when radio was limited to the few dozen local stations within reception range. Today, using the internet, I can listen to any of thousands of radio stations from every part of the world. Times change and this is a good change.

It was just a matter of time. Recording music on tape is long dead, replaced by digital recording on hard drives, which is about to be replaced by… the iPhone? Clive Young:

Ask anyone with an Apple iPhone what he thinks of it, and odds are you’ll hear a rave about how it can do most anything. As if to underline the point, indie band The 88 recently created its latest single, “Love is the Thing,” on the ubiquitous device, using FourTrack, a recording app by Sonoma Wire Works. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the song is now for sale on iTunes, where it’s the top-selling song of the band’s online oeuvre; what is surprising, however, is just how good the quirky chamber pop song sounds when you consider its origins.

What’s next? Indie movies recorded and edited on the iPhone?

UPDATE: First music video on the iPhone 3GS from Reyna Perez.

Clever music video by Oren Lavie.

Refreshing. Delightful.

Unless you’ve been on a sabbatical to Elbonia, you know that Apple, Inc. is about to release a tablet computer. The unannounced, unknown device is commonly known as iTablet, iSlate, iPad, or Jesus Tablet by technology pundits. Arik Hesseldahl in BusinessWeek:

The hunger for information—and misguided speculation—reminds me of the mistaken prognosticating about the iPhone before its introduction three years ago. It may be time to step back and realize that Apple may uncork a product so surprising that the company again leaves the tech industry scrambling to catch up to its products’ smooth operation and sleek design.

So, what should we expect from Apple (besides the unexpected)?

Apple may throw everyone a curve ball here. Imagine an Apple tablet about the size of a 11-in. spiral notebook with an iPhone-like touch screen. How about the ability for the machine to recognize voice commands and dictation of text? A built-in video camera and maybe a mini-projector for meetings would be nice. And if the reports of Apple’s discussion to land print media content in the iTunes store are true, how about an easy-on-the-eyes display for reading electronic magazines and books?

Besides email, music, movies, TV shows, and browsing on a larger screen device, what will the Jesus Tablet do that isn’t already being done by an iPhone or a Mac?

We use PCs and laptops to get things done when we’re stationary; we use mobile devices to stay informed and complete small tasks when we’re out and about. This device, it seems, will either have to incorporate both paradigms or have to create one of its own.

Basically, nobody but Apple knows.

But I’ll buy one.

Is blogging in the 21st century as transformative as the telephone was in the 20th century? Everyone has a blog and everyone has something to say, whether anyone is listening or not. Media mogul Barry Diller in 2006:

Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting. Talent is the new limited resource… There’s just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs.

Scott Rosenberg paraphrasing Andrew Keen’s, The Cult of the Amateur:

The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

I blog, therefore I am not talented?