Google Glass could be the virtual dieting pill of the future

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140926-google-glass-could-be-the-virtual-dieting-pill-of-the-future

In a year or two, augmented reality (AR) headsets such as Google Glass may double up as a virtual dieting pill. New research from the University of Tokyo shows that a very simple AR trick can reduce the amount that you eat by 10% — and yes, the same trick, used in the inverse, can be used to increase food consumption by 15%, too.
The AR trick is very simple: By donning the glasses, the University of Tokyo’s special software “seamlessly” scales up the size of your food. In the video below, you see a person picking up what seems to be an Oreo cookie, and then the software automatically scales it up to 1.5 times its natural size. Using a deformation algorithm, the person’s hand is manipulated so that the giant Oreo appears (somewhat) natural. In testing, this simple trick was enough to reduce the amount of food eaten by 10%.
In the same video you can also see the inverse effect applied, shrinking the Oreo down to two-thirds its natural size. In testing, this increased food consumption by 15%. As you can see, the technology currently requires the use of blue screen chroma keying, but moving forward the Hirose-Tanikawa Lab research team hopes to improve the software so that it could work anywhere.

This new research dovetails neatly with an area of nutritional science that has received a lot of attention in the United States of Obesity recently: That the size of the serving/plate/cup/receptacle directly affects your intake. It has been shown time and time again that large plates and large servings encourage you to consume more. In one study, restaurant-goers ate more food when equipped with smaller forks; but at home, the opposite is true. In another study, it was shown that you eat more food if the color of your plate matches what you’re eating.
The fact is, there’s a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly. Your state of mind as you sit down to eat, and your perception of what you’re eating, are just as important — which is exciting news, because both of those factors can be hacked. Until now, the inherent bulk of computers has prevented them from meddling with your perceptions of reality — but with smartphones, and soon AR headsets, that is beginning to change. For now it’s just your vision, but through other augmentations and implants it shouldn’t be too difficult to alter your perception of touch, taste, and smell.

Microsoft demos English-to-Chinese universal translator that keeps your voice and accent

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139945-microsoft-demos-english-to-chinese-universal-translator-that-keeps-your-voice-and-accent

At an event in China, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid has demonstrated a real-time English-to-Mandarin speech-to-speech translation engine. Not only is the translation very accurate, but the software also preserves the user’s accent and intonation. We’re not just talking about a digitized, robotic translator here — this is firmly within the realms of Doctor Who or Star Trek universal translation.
The best way to appreciate this technology is to watch the video below. The first six minutes or so is Rick Rashid explaining the fundamental difficulty of computer translation, and then the last few minutes actually demonstrate the software’s English-to-Mandarin speech-to-speech translation engine. Sadly I don’t speak Chinese, so I can’t attest to the veracity of the translation, but the audience — some 2,000 Chinese students — seems rather impressed. A professional English/Chinese interpreter also remarked to me that the computer translation is surprisingly good; not quite up to the level of human translation, but it’s getting close.

There is, of course, a lot of technological wizardry occurring behind the scenes. For a start, the software needs to be trained — both with a few hours of native, spoken Chinese, and an hour of Rick Rashid’s spoken English. From this, the software essentially breaks your speech down into the smallest components (phonemes), and then mushes them together with the Chinese equivalent, creating a big map of English to Mandarin sounds. Then, during the actual on-stage presentation, the software converts his speech into text (as you see on the left screen), his text into Mandarin text (right screen), and then the Rashid/Chinese mash-up created during the training process is used to turn that text into spoken words.
The end result definitely has a strong hint of digitized, robotic Microsoft Sam, but it’s surprising just how much of Rashid’s accent, timbre, and intonation is preserved.
In terms of accuracy, Microsoft says that the complete system has an error rate of roughly one word in eight — an improvement of 30% over the previous best of one word in five. Such a dramatic improvement was enabled by the use of Deep Neural Networks, a machine learning technique devised by Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto. A Deep Neural Network is basically an artificial neural network (software that models thousands of interconnected “neurons”), but with some tweaks so that it more closely mimics the behavior of the human brain.
Moving forward, the big question is when Microsoft Research’s speech-to-speech translation software will actually find its way to market — and yes, in case you were wondering, the software isn’t only limited to English and Chinese; all 26 languages supported by the Microsoft Speech Platform can be used, including Mandarin-to-English. The most obvious use case would be on your Windows Phone 8 (or 9?) smartphone, or Skype: You could call up a company in China or Germany or Brazil, speak normally in English, and they would hear your voice in their local language. You could also use your smartphone as a universal translator while travelling. As you can see below, Microsoft was toying with real-time phone-to-phone translation all the way back in 2010:

Presumably Microsoft is working on such applications — but it’s probably being held back by practical considerations, such as the processing power required to do speech-to-speech translation, or providing an easy-to-use interface for the training/learning process. The training process itself might require more processing power than a home user can feasibly provide, too. There’s always the cloud, though!

Stop worrying, and embrace RFID

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/141277-stop-worrying-and-embrace-rfid

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a simple way of using embedded chips as a form of tracking and authentication. It’s now fairly common to have pets implanted with RFID chips so they can be identified even without their collar attached. As RFID use has increased in frequency in the developed world, there has been a non-trivial amount of pushback from luddites the religious, and privacy advocates. In reality, RFID isn’t that scary, and we should embrace it.
Wired has an article explaining a recent kerfuffle between a student and her high school. Simply put, the school requires students to use RFID-equipped badges so they can track movement on campus for funding and truancy purposes. The student refused to wear the badge on religious and privacy grounds. In response, the school suspended her until she agrees to use the school ID. A legal battle ensued, and a judge temporarily lifted the school suspension until the case can proceed later.

In reality, these concerns are minor and based on fear of technology. This is just a tinfoil hat situation on a larger scale than normal. It appears from the known details about this story that these badges aren’t even being used at the individual class level. The low-tech method of having teachers taking roll call in class is even more refined than this RFID solution. If this was legitimately about privacy concerns, advocates would be against roll call in school as well. Instead, this whole situation is about fear mongering — not privacy concerns.
While there are some issues with the technology, specifically relating to other people accessing the information on the chip, this doesn’t showcase them. Preventing unauthorized access to the chip’s data is a problem, but it can be handled with cryptography. For example, requiring a password or using rolling codes can thwart evil-doers successfully. If you’re really worried about other people reading your RFID chip, it can be rendered harmless simply by covering it in a sleeve that works like a faraday cage.
Behavior is the real problem here — not technology. RFID is a useful tool that is already being used by companies like Walmart and organizations like the Department of Defense in the United States for authentication and tracking purposes. While RFID can be abused just like anything else, the technology isn’t inherently bad. Even the more paranoid among us should embrace RFID, and stop worrying about the tech so much. After all, common technology like smartphones and tablets are more susceptible to nefarious use. Give RFID a break.

Turning the smartphone from a telephone into a tricorder

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/138658-turning-the-smartphone-from-a-telephone-into-a-tricorder

Earlier this year, well known cardiologist Eric Topol published his highly successful book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine.” In it he describes several examples where smartphones, particularly the iPhone, have been morphed into first-rate medical devices with the potential to put clinical-level diagnostics in the hands of everyday users. Coincidentally, Topol was on a flight not long ago, returning from a lecture where he had spoken about a new device made by AliveCor. The pilot intoned an urgent, “is there a doctor on board?” In response, Topol took out the AliveCor prototype, recorded a highly accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) of an ailing passenger, and made a quick diagnosis from 35,000 feet.

As the leader in the smartphone revolution, the iPhone has been the platform of choice for early adopters in the health and quantified self arenas. Even so, there are a few shortcomings to development on the iPhone which, at least among DIYers, has led to Android becoming the path forward. Apple’s single-vendor solution and sequestering of many low-level input/output details behind the premise of ease of use have made interfacing the device to external sensors both a difficult and expensive proposition.
While it can be nearly impossible to write an Android app that will work on every device out there, writing an app to work on one’s own smartphone or tablet is fairly straightforward. Another challenge to the smartphone as a medical device is that many important sensor variables are analog in nature. It is possible to use the analog-to-digital converter on the audio input for data acquisition, however in the absence of sophisticated multiplexing one is limited to a single channel (unless some kind of expansion device is used).
Run tracking and calorie counting apps can certainly be regarded among the successes of the smartphone, but without dedicated sensor hardware, the philosophy of “there’s an app for that” only goes so far. A host of products now available for Android let users with a little bit of technical know-how create powerful devices previously found only in the domain of hospitals and law enforcement. One of the most successful expansion boards that allows Android devices to control external instruments and to orchestrate the collection of a variety of sensor data is the IOIO board. The system works well in wireless mode with most Bluetooth dongles, and its on-board FPGA gives 25 I/O channels, including plenty for analog input. It also handles analog output via pulse width modulation (PWM).
Vendors like Sparkfun, a popular supplier for the Arduino developer market, have realized the power inherent in readily programmable smartphones. They provide inexpensive heart monitors, as well as CO² gas, dissolved oxygen, and blood alcohol content (BAC) sensors. These sellers provide documentation and, most importantly, access to the source code. With this information, interfacing with a BAC sensor, for example, is relatively straightforward and, if appropriately calibrated by the user, very accurate.

MK802 Android PC

USB stick computers running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or newer, like the MK802, readily connect to boards like the IOIO, and can take the cost out of dedicating a phone or tablet to a sensor. They can log data to any of several storage mediums and cut a nice form factor when keyboards and displays are shed.
Despite the advances, a few ugly details in the smartphone-based health field are no longer capable of being ignored. The FDA will be increasingly faced with the task of deciding when a phone or tablet becomes a medical device that needs to be regulated as such, and when it is simply the front end for another device. Manufacturers of products for the seemingly straightforward task of monitoring glucose or insulin will have to tread carefully. Others seeking to enhance the absorption of medications through the skin by opening transient microchannels with current or ultrasound, perhaps built into a smartwatch, even more so.
In just a few years children wearing smart devices could become the norm. These gadgets could monitor variables like ambient peanut allergen using nanopore immunosensors with processing power to spare for forming dynamic early warning networks as conditions indicate. Without an efficient governance dispensing timely permission to use devices like the AlivecCor in humans, the initiation of life-saving care may too often begin with hardware designed and approved only for our pets. But if our regulatory structure organizes on the side of opening technological advancement, the future of these medical gadgets will be bright.

Why the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is Apple’s best laptop

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138605-why-the-13-inch-retina-macbook-pro-is-apples-best-laptop

On October 23, the big announcements from Apple raised many questions. What is the difference between the different MacBook Pros? With these Retina displays, where does this leave the Air? Turns out, the new MacBook Pro is jumping to the front of the pack.
If you’re looking for a new laptop with some dazzle, you now have two excellent choices in the MacBook Pro line. The 15-inch MacBook Pro was updated earlier this year with a screen that puts last year’s model to shame. Now, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is available with the same high-quality screen in a smaller package. Now that we have these high-res displays, it’s hard to imagine ever going back.

The entry level 15-inch Pro is undoubtedly more powerful than the 13-inch. At $2199, it certainly better be. A bigger SSD, a quad-core processor, and a discrete graphics card make it a powerhouse. It’s a fantastic computer, but it just isn’t worth the extra weight and cost when compared to the 13-inch. The smaller model is a mere 3.57 pounds (1.6kg), while the 15-inch is almost an entire pound heavier. The entry level 13-inch is $1699, and that makes it $500 cheaper than its big brother. If you’re not specifically looking to dedicate your MacBook Pro to high-end gaming or video rendering, the 13-inch is clearly the better purchase. There are always tradeoffs between the two models, but this generation lands squarely on the 13-inch’s side.
So, what of the Air? Well, the cheapest 11-inch model is $999, and the 13-inch model starts at just $200 more. They’re certainly small and lightweight. The 11-inch is less than two and a half pounds (1kg), and the 13-inch is more than a half a pound lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Here’s the rub: they’re still underpowered, and their screens just don’t match up to the Retina-caliber displays in the Pro line. The 1440×900 resolution display n the 13-inch Air just doesn’t come anywhere close to the quality of the 2560×1600 resolution on 13-inch Pro. Until Apple gets around to updating the Air series, it is incredibly difficult to recommend them to anyone except the heaviest of travelers. To be fair, things will get a lot more interesting when we see Retina-caliber Airs.

As it stands with Apple’s current laptop line-up, the 13-inch MacBook Pro comes out smelling like roses. It doesn’t have the raw horsepower of the 15-inch Pro, and it doesn’t have the extreme thinness of either Air, but it does have the overall best value. With its respectable internals, mid-range weight, and brilliant screen, the 13-inch Pro is simply the best laptop Apple sells now. A week ago, that wasn’t the case. The previous version of the 13-inch was good, but the new version is fantastic. Unless you have very niche and specific needs, this is the laptop you want to have.

New tack for OLPC: Let the students teach themselves

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138997-new-tack-for-olpc-let-the-students-teach-themselves

After delivering laptops to poor schools around the world (mostly in third world countries) in order to improve education, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization is trying something completely different: student self-learning.
OLPC decided to conduct an experiment. The organization picked two Ethiopian villages and dropped off Motorola Xoom tablets with locked-down software (that disabled the camera and froze the home screen settings) to the children there. The interesting part is that the workers gave absolutely no instructions on what to do with them. The boxes containing the tablets were still taped up when they got there.
Conventional wisdom says that the children would just play with the boxes and then get bored. That’s not what happened. Instead, the children opened boxes and then figured out how to switch on the tablets. And that was within four minutes of receiving the shipment.
Within a week, the children had completely figured out how to use the tablets and were using apps like crazy, up to 47 a day. Within two weeks, the children were learning the alphabet and the written word. Within five months, they hacked Android to bypass the camera restriction and customize the home screens!

OLPC’s Xoom tablet

While these are promising results that show that children can learn and be creative on their own, conclusive findings will require more experiments over a multi-year period. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte stated that if it gets funded the organization would have to start over in another village to redo the experiment and observe for another “year and a half to two years.”
This is not the first time Negroponte has talked about this idea. Last year, he mentioned that some computers would be airdropped to children with no instructions whatsoever. This appears to be what he was talking about then, though apparently the Xooms were not airdropped.
This is an exciting development in education experimentation. However, we often forget that children are very capable absorbing information. Children are mentally flexible and learning-by-doing is how humans are supposed to be educated, after all. Indeed, the scientific method is simply a codified version of that for the purposes of research. While the first world has largely switched to instructional learning, developing nations still have huge swathes of children not taught in this manner.
If nothing else, this will be a very interesting experiment to follow, because it may result in some surprising conclusions that will improve education around the world.

iPad Mini review round-up: Apple’s beautiful but compromised cash-in

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139252-ipad-mini-review-round-up-apples-beautiful-but-compromised-cash-in

Early this morning, right on schedule and in perfect synchronicity, the first hands-on reviews of Apple’s iPad Mini hit the web. In a rather refreshing and pleasant twist, the reviews aren’t universally positive. In fact, it looks like Apple may have finally released a non-perfect mobile device — the perfect accompaniment to the rushed, botched release of Apple’s own Maps app in iOS 6 earlier this year.
At $330 for the cheapest, WiFi-only iPad Mini — a $130 premium over 7-inch tablets from Amazon and Google — we had expected a truly premium product. As far as the actual, physical device is concerned, reviewers universally agree that the iPad Mini doesn’t disappoint; as expected, the Mini looks and feels awesome. Beyond that, though, it seems Apple made a lot of compromises to bring the iPad Mini to market — compromises that really shouldn’t exist in a $330 device.

For a start, you can forget about Apple using some kind of magical hocus-pocus to ameliorate the issues caused by the low-resolution (163 PPI), 7.9-inch display. There is simply no getting around it: The iPad Mini, with just 1024×768 pixels to its name, isn’t as sharp as the competition. If you have used a higher-resolution device (such as almost every other tablet and smartphone on the market), the iPad Mini will look jaggy and fuzzy by comparison.
Then we have the internals — namely, the A5 SoC that debuted with the iPad 2, 18 months ago. To be quite frank, it’s utterly insane that Apple thought it could use an old chip and get away with it. Almost every review notes that apps can take a long time to load, and some others note that the device just feels laggy — a bit like the iPad 2, even, which was powered by the same SoC. The minimal amount of RAM (512MB) might also play a role here. On a plus side, the iPad Mini’s rear-facing camera is being reviewed very positively.
There also seem to be a few complaints about the actual form factor of the device, too. By sticking to the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio, the left/right bezels on the iPad Mini are very small, which means it can be quite hard to hold the device in portrait orientation. Apple has tweaked the Mini’s version of iOS so as to ignore accidental thumb taps, but reviews suggest that this feature isn’t quite perfect yet, sometimes resulting in intentional swipes and taps being ignored. Some reviewers also say that the iPad Mini’s incredibly svelte dimensions (it’s just 0.68lb/308g and 7.2mm thick) are almost too thin and light to get a proper purchase. The Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, with their 16:9 aspect ratios and significantly fatter bodies, obviously don’t have this issue.

Milking the cash cow

The obvious question that we have to ask is why? Why did Apple compromise so brutally on the internals of the iPad Mini? For a few cents more, Apple could’ve put an A5X, A6, or A6X inside the iPad Mini, ameliorating any performance issues and instantly making it the fastest tablet on the market. For a few dollars more, Apple could’ve sourced a high-res display. But it didn’t — why?
The only explanation that fits is that Apple is intentionally low-balling the consumer, just to make more money. By making the iPad Mini beautiful, and cheaper than the real iPad, Apple guarantees millions of sales — even if the hardware spec isn’t up to scratch, or there are a few rough usability edges. Then, in six months, Apple can release the iPad Mini 2, with a faster processor, more RAM, and perhaps a Retina display — and boom, another billion dollars of profit.
In England, we have a delightful idiom: mutton dressed as lamb. It succinctly describes the act of taking something slightly old, haggard, or cheap, and dressing it up as something new. The American equivalent, I think, is putting lipstick on a pig. Apple could’ve produced the iPad Mini two years ago — but it didn’t, because the iPad and iPhone were generating more revenue than you could ever imagine. Now, with the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD establishing a 7-inch beachhead, Apple has been forced to respond. The cynic in me says that Apple has the iPad Mini waiting in the wings for years, but perhaps I ought to adjust my tinfoil hat.

Historically, I would’ve said that Apple knows exactly what it’s doing — that it knows exactly how to play to its strengths of superlative industrial design, and masterful control of human needs and desires. With the recent firing of Scott Forstall (who was in charge of the iOS 6 Maps debacle earlier in the year), though, and now the iPad Mini, perhaps Apple is off balance, on tilt.
I’m still absolutely sure that Apple will make a fortune from the iPad Mini, but I’m less positive about the company’s long-term prospects. It seems the company has undergone a sizable ideological shift. The old Apple — Steve Jobs’ Apple — was all about building visionary products, and then inviting people to come play with them. The new Apple seems more interested in simply making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible — which works in the short term, but will come to an abrupt halt when another company takes up the visionary mantle.

How technology is creating a reading revolution

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139052-how-technology-is-creating-a-reading-revolution

Reading has truly seen a big change in the last few years. With high-definition video, hyper-real video games, and high-quality audio so readily available, it is a little counter-intuitive that boring old books, and the technology behind them, are still going from strength to strength. Really, there has never been a better moment in history if you like reading books.
The technology of reading can’t be discussed without bringing up electronic paper. The technology that drives the Kindle %displayPrice% at %seller% and the Pebble has made low-power and long-lasting dynamic reading devices possible. Not only can electronic paper (e-ink) devices be used in direct sunlight without having glare issues, it also has the benefit of only needing to draw power when the display updates. Just like its printed counterpart, an e-ink page draws no power, so it can be left on all of the time.

At the same time, more traditional backlit displays are getting much better for reading. The incredibly high-res displays in the iPad $569.00 at J&R, Kindle Fire HD, and recently-announced Nexus 10 allow for images to be displayed at such a high resolution that the human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels. That’s what Apple calls “Retina.” Even phones have become good reading devices, now that squinting and zooming is no longer needed to make out a paragraph. These high-quality screens are making huge steps forward in readability, and it is forcing the traditionally low-res computer monitors to get their acts together.
It’s not all about hardware, though. Content availability and pricing are a huge factor in this reading renaissance. Places like Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the Internet Archive are offering countless public domain and creative commons books. The Amazons, Googles, and Apples of the world are offering new e-books in the eight to fifteen dollar range. Now that WiFi and cellular have proliferated North America and Europe so heavily, you can download a new book virtually anywhere you go in highly populated areas. Even if your connection is spotty, flash storage allows us to have entire libraries with us at all times. This truly is a revolution.

This is a boon for most of us, but what about people with disabilities? Recent technology has probably changed the most in the area of reading for the disabled. Built into every Mac, iOS, and Windows device is a text-to-speech engine, so that simply selecting text will allow the user to play it back out loud. The wonderful OpenDyslexic font might look strange at first sight, but it’s designed so that people with dyslexia can more easily read text. Apps like Instapaper are already including it. Audiobooks, once something very pricey and inconvenient, are now affordable and easy. Audible and iTunes are both great places to get high quality audiobook content that will play on pretty much any device you want. Digital distribution and the proliferation of computers and smartphones have made reading much more accessible to the visually impaired, and that is something for the industry to be very proud of.
Reading has never been easier, and we keep seeing breakthroughs every year. Without a doubt, we have the capacity to be the most well-read generation in history.

Tips and tricks for clearing up a cluttered hard drive

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139359-tips-and-tricks-for-clearing-up-a-cluttered-hard-drive

No matter how big our hard drives get, we’ll end up filling them to the brim. Spinning disks are increasing in size rather rapidly at a very low price, but SSDs are still relatively expensive and small. Managing your data is particularly important when you’re on a laptop with the small amount of wiggle room as far as external disks go. It’s not really very practical to schlep around a USB 3 or Thunderbolt drive everywhere you plan on bringing your laptop. Using these tricks, you’ll be able to identify what is taking up the most room, gain back some of your space with file compression, and know how much space you should have free at any given time.

Fragmentation

First off, how much space do you really need to be free on your main drive, and why can’t you just use it all? Two things: swap space and fragmentation. If your disk is too full, your computer doesn’t have any room to move data out of RAM. This can make your computer act up something awful, and can even lead to freezing up. I have a relatively small Bootcamp partition on my iMac, and I wasn’t particularly watchful about how much space I was using. After a few lock-ups, I realized I was down to only about 4% of my total drive’s capacity. You’ll want to leave around 10% of your drive capacity available at all times so your drive doesn’t become overly fragmented. This is much less of an issue with SSDs, but hard drives can lose a lot of performance if overly fragmented. In fact, sometimes you won’t even be able to effectively defragment your over-full drive unless you boot from another disk.

Freeing up space

Now, how can you tell what is taking up so much space on your drive? Sure, you can always take a peek at the properties of known media-heavy folders. There is a much better way of visualizing what’s using your disk, though. Apps like GrandPerspective (pictured above), DiskInventoryX, WinDirStat, DaisyDisk, and KDirStat are a godsend for the data packrats among us. These apps show a scaled and color-coded visualization of your entire disk. The bigger a rectangle is, the more space it takes up. This is particularly useful for sniffing out pesky large files, like unused virtual machines and remnants from video editing projects.

Compression

So, what if you can’t get rid of anything on your drive, but you still need a bit more space? There is the option of file compression. Your computer’s file system can dynamically compress and decompress data on the fly. Since Snow Leopard, this has been available in Mac OS X’s HFS+ filesystem, but NTFS (Windows) and ZFS have this capability as well. On the Mac, a simple app called Clusters is available for only $12.95, and it allows you to selectively choose which files and folders you want to be compressed. On Windows, it’s as simple as right-clicking what you want to compress, going into the properties, and toggling a checkbox. Of course, all of this can be managed through the command line, but GUIs are a better option if you’re new to transparent file encryption.
Compression doesn’t just magic up free space, though. Even on your super-fast SSDs, this does come at a performance cost. Your computer has to decompress the data every time you access it. Don’t go too crazy with your compression, or you’ll end up looking at your watch and tapping your toes while your computer tries to catch up.
With a few tools and a little vigilance, your drive doesn’t have to be full anymore. Your best bet is always to buy a bigger drive, but it won’t be long until that’s filled up as well.