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Saturday January 1, 2005
Show #105
Happy New Year! My first show of 2005 begins my second year at KFI. Thanks for making this Los Angeles’s #1 high tech talk show!
toc | toc
The year in review. Tops stories for 2004:
- Spam continued to be a problem but…
- Windows viruses and spyware became an epidemic
- Digital camera became the standard
- iPod dominated the music scene
- the RIAA lawsuits continued, but legal music stores began to become the preferred way to buy music
- The MPAA got into the fray - suing BitTorrent tracker sites
- NASA had two big successes with the Martian rovers.
Noon-1p
Clint in Escondido - answering machine he can copy audio to
I don’t know of one. That’s why I had to write a dedicated Linux app for They Might Be Giants’ dial-a-song.
It’s expensive for home use, but you can try a Talkswitch 24 unit from Centrepoint (www.talkswitch.com). Units are widely available second-hand on eBay.
Stuart from Tampa offers a cheap method for Clint. Radio Shack may have your answer if you can record your outgoing mesage from a telephone. It requires a telephone line recorder adaptor that you will use in reverse. Instead of feeding the signal from the phone line into a recorder at “line input” levels, you will plug it into the “line out” from your sound card. This works since most components in the recorder adaptor are passive. The only active components supply a contact closure of sorts to turn on/off the recorder. The passive part converts the impedance from low/balanced to high/unbalanced . Depending on your answering machine, you may need to keep the telephone off-the-hook while recording the message.
John in Los Angeles - wants to scan 1000 paperbacks to DVD
To convert print to text you need to:
- scan it - I’d choose one with a page feeder
- OCR software to convert the scanned images into text. I recommend Omnipage from Scansoft.
To see how the pros do it, visit Project Gutenberg, they’ve converted over 13,000 public domain books to text.
Daniel in Nevada - work offline is missing in his IE file menu
Apparently this is something that can happen if you use a local homepage. Microsoft has a workaround in the Knowledgebase.
Daniel’s Klah recipe is in our tips section.
Daniel asked ‘Has anyone started working HDTV PC tuner card with Analog Signel’
Reply from thetron:
As Leo said they have been out for awhile now. Since then they made alot improvement to the software and making better drivers.
My personal experience is with a Twainhun Visionplus DVB-T card. Great card, But disappointing feature of use the card is the poor software support. If you wanted transcode/re-encode files with the provided software was a PAIN or talent. It just didn’t have a builtin functions to convert files to DIVX
If you buying a DTV card make sure your shop around. Check out some on Digital TV discusion forums for getting feedback. Heres couple of links:
DVBowners.com
Tv-cards.com
Wikipedia - Digital TV info
Howstuffworks - How Digital Television Works
1–2p
Harley in Santa Ana - commercial spyware removal
I generally recommend two free programs for removing spyware: Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D. But if you need something more I like Pest Patrol. With Microsoft’s purchase of Giant Spyware I’ve become more aware of that program and from what people are saying it seems very good. I just hope Microsoft does the right thing and gives it away. Soon.
Harley uses the Avant browser. But it’s still IE. I prefer he’d use Firefox.
To move data and apps from an old computer to a new one I recommend Aloha Bob’s PC Relocater - read PC Mag’s review for more info.
Hana in Costa Mesa - does she have to use Service Pack 2?
Yes. Once Microsoft publishes a fix, hackers know how to exploit the flaw, so an unprotected computer is a sitting duck. More so than before the patch was issued. However, you can make SP2 less annoying. Open the Security center preferences and tell SP2 to let you manage your anti-virus and firewall yourself.
Deniece in El Cajon - using a netcam with a firewall
You need to find out which ports your video conferencing software uses then “port forward” those ports through your router. She’s using Yahoo! Instant Messenger, so she needs to tell the router to forward traffic over port 5100 to the computer it’s running on (by local ip address: 192.168.1.??)
Reply from Dorian:
Hmm…strange. I used a LinkSys router and Yahoo! IM video conf. and it worked w/ no problems. Maybe she has XP SP2 and the built-in firewall is the one causing the problem. She should download TCP View from SysInternals and monitor the ports that Yahoo! IM is opening. That way she will know what is going on with her computer’s ports.
2–3p
Kevin in Temple City - computer for his Jr High daughter
We’ll find out January 11 if Apple is actually releasing the rumored sub-$500 Mac. Visit ThinkSecret for the rumor details. ThinkSecret is being sued by Apple today for divulging trade secrets, so there is a good chance that the rumors of the sub-$500 Macintosh are true. Can’t wait for next Tuesday.
Brandy in Riverside - can’t save JPEG in PictureIt
Photoshop Elements
Free program Irfanview from http://www.irfanview.us/
Joseph in Pomona - new motherboard recommendations
Athlon 64 vs 32. The 64 is the best PC processor out there right now not just for performance but also for its support of Windows XP SP-2′s execute protection (AMD calls it Enhanced Virus Protection, but it actually protects you against all buffer overflow exploits).
Joe in Hawthorne - hard drive media player for living room
This is a hot new category and I expect there will be many at CES next week. Joe wants a remote control and a display - portable units need not apply. I thought Roku might have something suitable, but they focus on Wi-Fi connections to your PC. You really need a media server. I’m sure the next version of XBox and Playstation will do this. Of course, a Windows XP Media Center Edition based PC will, too. TechTV’s Best of CES last year was Denon’s entry, but I think it’s too expensive. Any recommendations?
The XBox will do it now if Joe is a bit of a computer geek. Xbox Media Center is a great project and tops about everything on the market. It does take a modded XBox tho. Search Google.
I second the modded xbox. If you get a 4th gen chip like a xenium or xecutor 3 you can even add an lcd screen so you don’t need a tv. You can stream off ANY computer running several different kinds of streaming protocols including samba. You can also play off discs and off the hard drive. While the stock hard drive is 8 or 10 gigs, you can replace it with ANY size hard drive you want. This will allow you to load a hard drive up with ANY FORMAT of audio, video, or pictures and load everything right off the hard drive. Xbox Media Center supports just about every format imaginable and is expandable, the only format it chokes on is quicktime 6, but the program is updated daily and has thousands of people developing for it since it is open source. You can use any kind of mod from softmod to tsop to any chip to use xbox media center, but the only the newest chips support the standalone lcd screen. Hope this helps. -AceMilo.
By setting up the modded Xbox with Xbox Media Center Extender (and big drive) are you avoiding the need to have another PC running the standard XP Media Center? I ask because the MS site on Xbox Media Center Extender says you need to have the standard MC running.
Xbox Media Center will stream from ANY computer running several different protocols. Windows, Mac, and *nix all support samba with no need to run Windows XP Media Center Edition. It is true that the extender that MS sells NEEDS MC to stream stuff, however XBMC is an open source free program (altho it is technically illegal) that can use any computer (or no computer at all) to play movies. I use it every day for watching stuff and cannot use my computer to watch downloaded videos, XBMC spoiled me :). -AceMilo
Is XBMC really illegal? If you’re just streaming mp3s you own or DVDs you own then aren’t you acting legally — “fair use”? I’m guessing that the law is fuzzy here. Facts: You own the box, the modification hardware, the media… what’s the problem? No copyright has been infringed.
Reply from Lee O:
I’m thinking that just a regular Xbox and wireless controller will take care of the music part of your question. There’s about 4–10 GB of an untouched (virgin) Xbox has that you can play with.
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