GADGETGLOW BYTES

TUTORIAL — MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 The Backup You Think You Have: Building 3-2-1-1-0 Properly Three copies is the easy part. The number that decides everything is the last one — zero errors on a restore you actually ran. GB GadgetGlow Bytes Editorial Published September 14, 2026 · 9 min read · How we work Almost everyone reading this has a backup. Almost nobody reading this has tested it. Those two facts are the entire problem, and they explain why the standard advice — keep three copies, on two kinds of media, with one off-site — keeps failing people who followed it to the letter. The 3-2-1 rule was written for a world where the thing that destroyed your data was a dead disk or a house fire. Both are indifferent to where your backup lives. Ransomware is not. It looks for backups on purpose. The joint #StopRansomware Guide — authored by CISA with MS-ISAC, the NSA and the FBI — is blunt about why offline copies matter: many ransomware variants, ...

Tech Culture — Sunday, September 13, 2026 The Programmer Who Signed His Work in Secret — and Accidentally Invented a Genre Warren Robinett hid his name in a video game because nobody would print it on the box. Forty-seven years later, the industry he inspired has decided that hidden code is a crime scene. GB GadgetGlow Bytes Editorial Published September 13, 2026 · 8 min read · How we work There is a room in a 1979 video game that you are not supposed to be able to reach. To get there you have to notice a single grey pixel sitting in a corridor of a maze rendered in the same grey as the wall behind it, pick it up as though it were an object, carry it to a specific wall, and stand in exactly the right spot while three other objects are arranged around you. Do all of that and the wall opens. Inside, in letters that fill the screen and cycle through every colour the hardware can produce, it says: Created by Warren Robinett . That room is the reason yo...

TECH HISTORY — SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 The Baloney Slicer: How a Plum Orchard in San Jose Gave the World the Hard Disk Seventy years ago this month, IBM shipped 3.75 megabytes that weighed a ton. The machine it became still stores almost everything you own. GB GadgetGlow Bytes Editorial Published September 12, 2026 · 8 min read · How we work In 1952 IBM sent a small group of engineers to a rented building on Notre Dame Avenue in San Jose, California, overlooking a plum orchard. The valley did not yet have its nickname. The team's brief was unglamorous and enormous: find a way for a computer to reach any record it needed without first chewing through every record in front of it. Four years later they shipped the answer, and this month marks seventy years since the world found out about it. The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit held 3.75 megabytes, stood five feet high by six feet wide, weighed more than a ton with its air compressor, and needed most of a room. Every hard...