This week, a look at some shitty robots, a new format for storing data for a long time, but first, what you can do with all of those photos on your computer.

Print your photo products locally with London Drugs

With digital cameras everywhere, in the form of DSLRs and mobile phones, we’ve all got big archives of photos on our computers. And sometimes we like to do crazy things with them, like make prints.

It’s not like there are photo shops on every corner like there used to be, though. So if we want to get some 4×6s of that family reunion, most of us are using an online service. Which is actually really simple to do.

And digital photography and innovations in printing digital images means that we can do much more than just get some snapshots. We can print greeting cards and posters. We can put our images on t-shirts and coffee mugs and fridge magnets.

A couple of weeks ago, the coaches of my daughter’s soccer team decided that they wanted to give the players a memento of their four years together in the form of a photo book.

That’s easy to do, too. But while many of us may think to create a project like this with Apple or Shutterfly, you may not realize that you can do it right here in Vancouver. Well, Richmond.

London Drugs has always had a fantastic photo department, and while there’s not a lot of film being processed anymore, the company’s Photolab has completely kept pace with technology.

And anything you can print at an online service you can print at London Drugs. Like mugs and mousepads and ornaments.

Including books. And London Drugs pricing was, depending on the product, on par or cheaper than what was available anywhere else.

So last week, I took about 70 photos that parents had taken of the soccer team in the past four years, and I used London Drugs’ online system to create a 20-page softcover photo book. It was so easy to do, too. I uploaded the images to the server, then was able to simply drag and drop images into the framework of the book that I chose (from a whole list of templates).

I was able to zoom and crop and make tweaks to the images, and it only took me an evening to put it all together. Then I set a quantity, pressed a button, and the print job was sent to the London Drugs print centre in Richmond. They were ready seven days later, and I was able to pick them up at my local store. No shipping cost.

Yes, you can print these products elsewhere. But if you can produce them locally, in a week, and avoid any shipping and border costs, why would you?

Store your data for ever and ever and ever

Want to keep those vacation photos forever?

Scientists have come up with a way to store 360 terabytes of data for up to 13.8 billion years. That’s about how old the universe is.

The nanostructured glass disc made of fused quartz encodes information in five dimensions: size, orientation, and the three standard coordinate dimensions (x, y, z).

DNA can store more data than the new 5-D glass discs (Quartz suggests that all of the data on Earth could fit onto a teaspoon’s worth of DNA), but DNA isn’t nearly as robust as the new discs.

The problem with storing data, though, may end up having less to do with what we store things on, and more to do with making sure that future hardware is backwards compatible.

Anybody still have a computer that can read 5 1/4 floppy discs?

The lighter side of robots

Last week we were afraid of robots. Now I’m laughing at them again thanks to Simone Giertz, a Swedish programmer, maker, and inventor who creates – her words – shitty robots.

And then she regales the Internet with videos of her creations. Among them, an applause machine, a wake-up machine, a breakfast machine, and a lipstick robot.