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Saturday, March 26, 2005

Show #129

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This Week In the News

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in the MGM vs. Grokster case. At stake, whether Grokster and Morpheus are legally liable for copyright violations that occur on their services. The http://www.riaa.com/news\newsletter\012505.asp Recording and Motion Picture industries, Bush Administration, Christian Coalition, Don Henley, Sheryl Crow, and the Dixie Chicks have all filed briefs (PDF) in favor of MGM’s case. Intel, the Consumer Electronic Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and numerous computer science and law professors, are on the other side, claiming that a decision overturning the court’s 1984 Sony Betamax decision will eliminate the VCR, DVD recorder, iPod, Tivo, the PC, and on and on. Needless to say, this is a very important case for all of us who love technology. I recommend studying up at the EFF’s site then crossing your fingers on Tuesday.

Microsoft is going on the offensive against technologies it considers threatening to its Windows monopoly:

• The company is claiming that Firefox is less secure than Internet Explorer. Some “independent” columnists are taking the bait.
• Microsoft was also exposed for funding a report that claimed Windows was more secure than Linux. The report by the Florida Institute of Technology and Security Innovation was delivered at last month’s RSA security conference, without disclosing who paid for the research.
• Check out the page at Microsoft.com on “How to buy an MP3 Player.” Hard drives? Bad. Built-in voice recorder, FM recorder, or stopwatch. Good. Getting “locked into one online store” cough-iTunes-cough very bad.

The Sony Playstation Portable, PSP, shipped on Thursday. Sony made sure there were plenty of units to go around. Despite long lines in San Francisco I was able to walk into a Best Buy in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, at 6p and pick one up. The store had expected 70 units and received 200. Best feature so far: built-in free Wi-Fi gaming in Twisted Metal: Head On. Booyah!

This Week on the Web

• How virtual memory works from Adrian’s Rojakpot
• The truth about speaker cables from TNT-Audio
• The Top 25 Innovations of the past 25 years from MIT-Lemelson
• Transparent screens from Flickr
• PSP Site from IGN

(add your favorite new links below…)

• A life hacks wiki from 43Folders

11a-Noon

Dina in Ventura - looking for a laptop

she bought the Panasonic DMC-FZ3 with 12x zoom and loves it. Now she’s looking for a laptop, she wants wireless networking, will be using Photoshop, Powerpoint, Word. I recommend getting a CD burner for backup, too.

I like the Apple iBook, Toshiba Tecra S2, the Sony Vaio FS, Averatech, Asus.

Chris in Redondo Beach - do I need a UPS?

He says he’s experiencing short power outages as much as three times a week. Heck yeah. A UPS is battery backup that will give you a chance to shutdown normally if the power goes out. Sudden outages can cause data loss. A UPS prevents that. I recommend UPS’s from APC (I use their Back-UPS XS1500 at the Leoville labs - see left) and TrippLite. Chris says Costco is offering a Tripplite 1000VA UPS for $100. That’s an excellent deal. Check the calculator at APC or Tripplite to see how much UPS you need.

KDM writes: Hello, I heard you talking about UPSs today. Sam’s Club has the APC 1000VA for around $115, but this is not the true sine wave model. The models which you said are around $700 are most likely the true sine wave models and are better. It is important when you use a UPS to not have any surge suppressors connected to them, especially if you don’t have a true sine wave model since the suppressors will fight the UPS and drain power much quicker.

Using a UPS on your video equipment is a good idea too since it protects from power problems. If you don’t have a UPS, you should turn everything off after the power goes off and leave it off for a short period of time afterwards. Often the power will come on for a short period of time, then go off again. Most of the damage to equipment comes from power cycling, especially when the power is not clean (this is true for normal use too).

Tom in New Jersey adds: KDM brings up a good point. I work at a major datacenter where we’re so concerned about power quality, we have UPS’s backing up UPS’s. (Our smallest one is 300,000VA.) I recommend UPS’s to everyone I know for anything electronic that they care about, not so much to be able to ride out a short power outage or brownout, but to protect the equipment against the nasties that can find their way through the power lines. A car hitting a telephone pole, a transformer’s windings melting down, even a short circuit at a factory a half mile away can send some awful fault currents through the power line and into your home. A good quality UPS will provide a lot of line filtering for sensitive electronics at a reasonable cost. I look at it as a $100 insurance policy.

If you’re experiencing a lot of electrical problems (say, in an electrical storm) where the power keeps dropping out and coming back on, the safest thing to do is unplug all of your expensive electronics until things stabilize. Simply shutting off your computer or TV isn’t enough because their power supplies are still connected to the power lines and are therefore susceptible to any spikes, sags or surges that may enter your electrical system. Be sure to have some sort of surge protection on your phone and cable TV lines as well. And if you want an extra measure of protection for the entire house, have an electrician install a lightning arrestor/surge protector in your main electrical panel.

Carlos in San Dimas - Windows says the boot drive is jumpered wrong

Check the equipment inventory on boot up - it’s likely true.

Make sure there’s nothing else on the cable connecting to the hard drive, either. If there’s another Master device on the cable it could cause confusion.

Noon-1p

Pablo in Monrovia - synching Mac and Pocket PC

I recommend Pocketmac. It’s not perfect, but it does the best job. For information about using your Bluetooth capable cellphone for data I recommend visiting www.mobilewhack.com and searching for the model and cell carrier.

All instructions are specific to your hardware and carrier. For example, here’s how to get a Nokia 6600 working with Mac and Cingular.

You might want to look at Using Your Cellphone ForMobile Internet On Mac OS X for a software suggestion from a listener.

Chris in New York - why is tech support so awful

I agree tech support and quality control have gone way downhill, but that’s the price we pay for inexpensive products. Something’s gotta give.

His “office” is the Starbucks at Columbus and 67th in New York City. I do the same. T-Mobile and Wayport seem to dominate the hotspot business. As an existing T-Mobile customer I pay an addition $20/month for access to all T-Mobile Hotspots. That includes Starbucks and many airports. Jiwire has a handy hotspot locator.

He recommends checking refurbished laptops from IBM and Dell. I agree - refurbished equipment can be a very good deal as long as it’s backed by a reliable company.

Wes in Hollywood - DVD video and sound out of synch

Magnavox DVD/VCR combo loses audio synch on commercial DVDs. There’s nothing you can do about this. Get a new DVD player. Why don’t DVDs have some way of keeping audio and video in synch? Shouldn’t this be a part of the spec???

A listener writes:This is not uncommon with older Magnavox DVD players. Sometimes pressing pause then continuing with the movie fixes the problem.

John in La Canada - Editing DVD files

He converted his home videos into DVD but now he wants to copy some clips to edit them. You need to convert the DVD’s VOB files into AVI. Try Video Converter.

Netaku writes: If you want free, try VirtualDubMod. VirtualDubMod is a free application that can be used to cut .vob files and save them as .avi. XviD and DivX are two popular .avi codecs that you may want to try. After installing the codecs, you can set VirtualDubMod to use them by choosing “Video” in the top menu and opening the “Compression” dialog. Compression can take a good deal of time, so I suggest making a short clip and playing around with different codecs and compression settings and see what works for you.

Lee in Westminister - online scanners

He’s looking for online antivirus scanners. Here are three good free ones:

• F-Secure
• Trend Micro’s Housecall
• Panda’s ActiveScan

But since he’s worried about his daughter’s computer being unusually slow, I’d check for spyware, too. The very reputable SpywareInfo has one as does Anonymizer.

Read my article on Must Have Security Software.

All online scanners use ActiveX so you’ll have to visit them with Internet Explorer.

1–2p

Bob in Torrance - making DVDs

He has a Sony DV Handicam and Dell Dimension computer. The Sony has iLink - that’s Sony’s name for Firewire/IEEE 1394. Connect the camera to your PC using a Firewire cable (if your computer doesn’t have a Firewire port you can cheaply add one via a PCI card), then use software to import the video. Edit it, then use DVD authoring software to burn a DVD. I recommend Adobe Premiere Elements for the editing and burning. It’s excellent and only $79.

Leo, I heard you mention that most new Dells come with Firewire. I hate say it, but I’ve bought a bunch of Dells lately and you have to specifically purchase the Firewire card for something like $38. Now, if you are a proud owner of a JVC DV Camcorder, you will most likely need to use a Firewire Card with a TI (Texas Instruments) chip. To my surprise, the Dell Firewire card did not use the TI chip and my JVC would not work. All I got was a blank capture screen with Studio 8. I picked up a Belkin Firewire card from Walmart and it worked fine.

The DV standard of 720 x 480 video with 5:1 compression requires 3.6 MB/sec or almost 13GB of disk space per hour of video.

To put the video on a DVD you need to recompress it to MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is more like 2GB/hour. It’s smaller but lower quality. For best results store your video as DV.

Craig in Hamilton Canada adds:
When we talk about losing quality by putting your video on DVD, I worry about giving newcomers to this process the impression that they can’t create good quality DVDs of their videos. Just like converting CDs to MP3s, there is a loss in quality, but if done correctly, the loss is really not noticeable. A DVD recorded at 8000Kbps (over 1 hour per DVD disk) looks just as good as the original, and encoding at a carefully selected Variable Bit Rate can give you 2 hours of very good looking video per DVD. Only under VERY close analysis can you detect any difference. As for storing the DV footage… Blank DVDs are so cheep now that it makes sense to store the original, edited DV footage on Data DVD disks (you’ll fit about 20 minutes or so on each DVD) AND in addition, make DVDs that will play in your DVD player. Every 5 years, make copies of the disks.

Jim in Ventura - looking for a laptop

see my notes for Dina above.

Kevin in Glendale - can’t play some AVIs on his Mac

Even if you have the Windows Media Player you may not be able to play back all AVI files. That’s generally because they’re compressed using a codec you don’t have, most commonly Divx or XviD. Download and install the codec and the files will play fine:

DivX
XviD

A listener writes:After spending way too much time looking for the right codecs to watch various video files, I found an opensource program called VideoLAN. So far, VideoLAN has played every type of video file I have tried playing in it.

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