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Saturday , February 26, 2005

Show #121

Back in the Leoville Labs today.

NOTE: If you’d like to add to the show notes, great! Please don’t sit in the web-based editor, though. When you save it will erase others’ work. It’s best to create and edit your comments in Notepad or some other local text editor then paste them into the wiki, quickly. Thanks!

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

Here are the stories I’ll talk about in the show today. For more tech news visit my blog.

We’ll talk about ChoicePoint - the “data broker” that’s been collecting information about you, legally, and selling it for the last year to identity thieves.

And what about Paris Hilton’s phone being hacked? Maybe she should learn to use better passwords.

Listerner aussie_ian adds: The “hack” into Paris Hiltons voicemail is not a simple as mentioned on air.There are a number of web pages comming up about this issue (like Om’s Blog. It basically appears the problem relates to Sprint or T-Mobile users who have the auto voicemail login enabled. What happens is there are now two major caller ID spoofing services (where you set the number you want displayed when you call somone) This mean is you want to call into a cell phone and it’s number is 555–555–555 but your number is 123–456–789 you use one of these caller ID spoofing services and get it to display 555–555–555 the voicemail system welcomes you with open arms because you appear to the system to be your friend and therefore authorized. The other “great” feature of one of the caller ID spoofing services is the ablity to record the call. So yep! you gueessed it, the hacker recorded all of Pari’s callers messages. So as Leo says daily, strong passwords people! Plus turn auto voicemail login off so you have to enter a password to get in. Throw out the welcome mat to caller ID spoofers!

Leo responds: Don’t confuse the Vin Diesel voice mail hack with the Paris Hilton hack. The media is getting this story all wrong. Probably because they don’t own a Sidekick II and don’t understand what happened.

The Vin Diesel hack Om and Ian are referring to is a problem for all T-Mobile customers, but it only gives people access to your voice mail, nothing else. The difference here is that all the content on Paris’s Sidekick was stolen - not just the voice mails. To do that you’d need to be able to log into her T-Mobile Desktop Interface. That’s completely different from voice mail, and the password is different, too (the T-Mobile voicemail password is a PIN, the Desktop Interface password is a normal text password.)

In Paris’s case, she used her dog’s well known name as the answer to her secret question. Which leads me to believe that the “hack” was actually trivial and not a systemic weakness at T-Mobile. The moral is: choose good passwords and obscure secret questions.

And Apple has cut prices on the iPod as much as 25% plus announcing a new 6GB iPod Mini.

Google is beefing up its search service. The new Google Maps is awesome, already better than Mapquest and Yahoo Maps, and now there’s a new Google movie search. Use movie: name to search for movie details. Add a zip code or town name to get theaters and times, e.g. movie:Aviator Brentwood, CA.

11a-Noon

Cathy in Granada Hills - Frank is going blind

It’s happening very quickly - he’s already lost 75% of his sight in the week since his diagnosis. Please put any recommendations for helpful technologies and agencies here. (Frank is a Windows user in So. Calif.)

Cathy can check for the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) chapter in her relative’s area. Other organizations that are helpful are Lions Clubs, American Council for the Blind (ACB). She can also see if CA has a dept. for rehabilitation services that helps people with disabilities with training and adaptive aids. Her uncle may not have to pay for all his adaptive aids. I’m in IL and there are these resources here. I am sure there are services there too. Goood luck.

You might check this site Council for the Blind, and this link American Council for the Blind Computer Resource Page. As well as this site Resources on the Web and Beyond.

Another viewer writes: I use a screen reader called Window Eyes from www.gwmicro.com. It’s a wonderful piece of technology and one of the two leading screen readers for the blind and visually impaired. It does an excellent job, particularly on the internet and is far less intrusive to a system than is Jaws for Windows. A demo can be downloaded from www.gwmicro.com.

Matt in San Bernardino - making a documentary about tunnel miners

He has a wireless spy cam he wants to get to digital video. The best way is to connect the wireless receiver’s composite video output to a DV camcorder with analog in. Here are a list of inexpensive camcorders that support analog in recording:

Todd in Kansas City: You can use an RCA Lyra RD2780 with a 20 gig hard drive built in to store the video in mpeg4. The unit comes with all the cables needed, can also be used as a photo wallet with built in CF slot

Peter in Florida - pausing books in the middle on his iPod

Audible books have this nice feature - you can stop listening to the book and it will pick up where it left off. But you can’t do this with books you create yourself from CD. That’s right - it’s a feature of the Audible audio format and I don’t know of any way to do it for other file formats. Some MP3 players support bookmarks, but the iPod does not.

He also recommends Belkin’s Digital Camera Link as his favorite (and fastest) way to archive digital camera images to the ipod.

Tony in Jakarta: For bookmarks audio book try ripping to aac and rename the file extension to .m4b Found info from http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/. I did try it and it works.

Dorothy adds: Leo, to make file “bookmarkable” the mp3 or iTunes ACC converted file MUST be exported using QuicktimePro to mpeg4 AND change the extension to .m4b, both necessary conditions. It works! I’ve converted your podcasts and it
works for me.

Also, there is an applescript avaiable for itunes that will automatically perform the necessary conversion. It’s much easier to just highlight a song and run the script on it. My Harry Potter books behave perfectly! To download the script go to http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=makebookmarkable.

Dorothy here for followup- yes I sent Leo that applescript link too (makebookmarkable) and it is working well, so please ignore my QuicktimePro hack (above!). Don’t forget you need to first convert the mp3 to AAC (can be done in iTunes), select the AAC encoded file in iTunes (if not sure, GetInfo and it will say AAC encoded); then apply Adams’ script. You will know for sure if it’s truly bookmarkable as the file will show up in your iPod in the audiobooks category.

JL! from Cupertino adds: I use this exact trick on all my podcasts, including Leo’s! Download the MP3, convert to AAC, and run the “Make Bookmarkable” script so I never lose my place. It works like a charm.

OC Sam adds: Some CD/mp3 player, mine is Riovolt SP90 ($40–50), has mp3 stop/start where you left off, without bookmarks. It’s great for travelling with audiobooks.

Eddie in Folsom adds: The creator of the very useful iPodSync (http://www.ipod-sync.com/) software is working on a new Windows program called iAudiobook that will convert your mp3 files to m4b files and automatically add them to your iTunes library. It also does batch conversions, and the current beta version shows a lot of promise!

‘’‘Geoff in Canada adds:” I have a 4G iPod and whenever I turn my iPod off in the middle of any track, whether it be an MP3, AAC, WAV, audio book, podcast, anything, and I turn it back on, I pick up where I left off at the last time. I have the 3.0.2 Firmware for my 4G.

Bryan in Chicago adds:If you’re manually converting your podcasts to AAC / M4B, you may want to check out Doppler as a podcast client. It can automatically convert podcasts to M4B on the import so you don’t have to! From their site:

To enable this: go to Tools - Options - Filetypes. Modify the mp3 file type and tell Doppler to add files of this type to iTunes. You will see an extra option : Convert to m4b. Take notice: iTunes uses quite some resources on your machine for the conversion. Furthermore, iTunes can only convert one file at a time. If Doppler is downloading several files they will be queued up for conversion.

Beverley in Thousand Oaks - cordless phone interfering with Wi-Fi

Try a different channel. In the US Wi-Fi access points can use 11 different channels. The lower channels often experience interference from 2.4 Ghz cordless phones - change to something above channel 4; 11 seems to be the best. You’ll have to change channels on both the computers and access points.

Noon-1p

Deborah in Burbank - thin and light notebooks

She’s looking at the Sharp Actius MM20 - it’s a great notebook but… there are some tradeoffs. Battery life is often shorter (because the batteries are smaller) and you usually don’t have a CD or floppy which can make software installation and backup tricky. But if you can live with those drawbacks, they’re great notebooks.

A listener writes (and I agree): If you can afford it, check out the Asus 5sn. It is well designed and very light. With the standard battery you will get about 2 hours. With the extended life battery, I get 5 hours and it still weighs just 5 pounds.

Kimberly in Covina - Earthlink bugs her every 15 minutes

How can she avoid the popups? Not using the Earthlink software to start with. If you can use the default Windows dialer instead that will probably eliminate the annnoying warnings.

She was also looking for the most efficient way to print photos to avoid wasting paper. 2-up and 4-up printing will help, but there used to be a shareware program that optimized printing. I’m still looking for it!

A listener writes: Here’s the well-buried solution to Kimberly’s Earthlink problem: Start Earthlink and click “settings” in the TotalAccess sign-in window (do not click “connect”). Click “Locations” tab. Click on your location in the window to highlight it and click the “Edit” button. Click the “Connecting” tab and under dial-up connection uncheck “Disconnect after ** minute(s) of inactivity” and OK. I had the same problem with downloads timing out and this was the culprit.

Ken in Pasadena - new DSL user

He received a wireless router/DSL modem but wants to disable the wireless for security reasons.

Keith in Covina adds: It sounds as if Ken has a Westell 327W from Verizon. Open your browser and type 192.168.1.1 in the address bar. Use “admin” as your user name and “password” for your password. Then you will be able to select wireless on the configuration tab and disable it. Take this opportunity to check the firewall settings as I found that mine was turned off by default. Also, you may change the user name and password to those of your own choice before exiting.

Rishabh from San Jose - security programs for Windows

He has a router - that’s the firewall. Change the default password and turn off UPnP. I also recommend NOD32 or AVG for your anti-virus, Spybot and Microsoft AntiSpyware for your anti-spyware.

He’s shooby in the chat room
(Shooby dooby doo….where are you?!)

Rob in Cleveland - Print sharing from PC to wireless Mac

This is tricky! I have been able to use my new Canon ip4000 with both my Macs on the wireless network and and wired Windows machine by connecting the printer to my Airport Extreme and using Rendezvous. Apple offers a Windows driver here.

Here are some things to consider:

1. Is it a printer that works with a Mac in the first place? Windows specific printers (GDI based) won’t work with a Mac unless you use software on the PC to emulate a postscript printer.
2. If it’s postscript printer, or one that works fine with the Mac, then there are other issues that could be causing problems. First make sure you can actually talk to the PC. Are your PC and Mac on the same network segment (192.168.x.x or 10.0.x.x)? Can you ping the XP box? If not, you’ll have to address that first. If you can ping it, can you get the PC to show up when you browse the network (Cmd-K in the Finder). Apple has a document on networking Macs and PCs that covers the basics.
3. If you’ve got the Mac and XP box successfully networked, but still can’t print, try these steps:

• Install Unix print services on your XP box: 1. Open the Add/Remove Control Panel and click Windows Components on the left 2. Open the Other Network File and Printer Services section and check Print Services for Unix 3. Click OK - you may need your Windows disc.
• Turn on the TCP Print service in XP 1. Open Administrative Tools/Services from the Control Panel 2. Double-click TCP/IP print Server. 3. Change the “Startup Type” to Automatic.
• Share the printer for TCP/IP printing 1. Click Start → Settings → Printers. 2. Right-click the print you want to share and select Sharing. 3. Click the radio button for Share as and fill in the share name you want to print to.

Now you should be able to Add the printer on your Mac (choosing IP Printing). You’ll need the IP address of your PC and use the share name you entered in step 3 of sharing. If you don’t see your printer model use Gimp-Print.

1–2p

Brandon in Washington - Linux distributions

We’re in search of the Linux Holy Grail - a desktop operating system that can replace Windows for non-geek users. We’re not there yet, but the best candidate Linux distributions are:

SuSE www.novell.com/linux/suse/
Mandrake www.mandrakesoft.com/products/101
Linspire www.linspire.com
Debian www.debian.org
Slax www.slax.org
Fedora Core fedora.redhat.com

Listener Mark adds:
SuSE and Mandrake are easier to setup for beginners than Debian.

Lee_O adds:
SuSE has the most support. Lindows(Linspire) is the most user-friendly. But distros called Mepis (http://www.mepis.org/) and Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/) are in between, depending on what kind of user you are, Windows or Mac.

JoeUser in SoCal adds:
apt was briefly mentioned. You can get apt up and running on RedHat/Fedora Core. Grab the rpm for your version here: http://atrpms.net/name/atrpms-kickstart/ To install:

Joe in Tennessee - Flash items launch Quicktime in Firefox

In Firefox’s address bar type About:Plugins to see how your Flash helper is configured. (Now how to we restore the proper plugin/helper settings??)

Read the Firefox Flash FAQ.

Type About:Config to bring up the advanced configuration items. Filter for helper and the top item will be browser.helperApps.alwaysAsk.force. Double click it to force Firefox to ask you what helper to use. The next time you go to a site with Flash it will ask you for the name of the Flash player. Browse to the player and it will remember it from then on.

Kevin in Palmdale - MSN search is no longer working

It’s likely that spyware has tried to change your search page and it’s not working properly. What a surprise. Get rid of that junk by downloading the free Microsoft AntiSpyware program. Once you clear out the spyware you can click the Advanced Tools icon and press the Browser Hijack Restore icon to restore your original search settings.

Mike in Palmdale - System recovery but no serial number

He wants to start all over with his six year old IBM Aptiva running Windows 98 but he’s lost the serial number. IBM and Microsoft won’t give him a new one. I say, steal it. There are lots of cracked Windows 98 serial numbers on the web. You can use any serial number, even a friends, since 98 doesn’t phone home like XP does.

A listener writes: Here is a LEGAL way to recovery your Windows (any version) and OFFICE installation numbers. But you must do this before starting a reinstall of Windows. Download Keyfinder. Run it and it will pull the installation keys from your Windows Registry.

BenListening says : I saved my XP activation keys with RockXP. It allows you to:

• To retrieve and change your XP Key
• To retrieve all Microsoft Products keys

Virginia in Silmar - iMac has a buzzing noise

She just bought it, she’s taken it back to the Apple store twice. They hear the noise, but they can’t find it. Escalate! I’ve found that the Apple Stores are very good about customer service. Ask them to give you a different machine. If they won’t help you, call Apple.

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