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Saturday, April 23, 2005

Show #137

The MacGathering is coming to Southern California. May 13–15 at Beverly Garland’s Holiday Inn, 4222 Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood. Take the Vineland Exit off the 101.

Today’s news items

The Pope might have some trouble registering a web domain. A Florida man purchased benedictxvi.com two weeks before the new pope was elected. Paul Cadenhead bought six in all — including ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com and PiusXIII.com. Some domains, like JohnPaulIII.com and JohnXXIV.com, already were taken. And an Canadian man has PopeBenedictXVI.com (he bought 40 variations in early February.)

But at least the Pope has an email adddress: benedictxvi@vatican.va. In Italian: benedettoxvi@vatican.va.

According to the Economist and IBM, Denmark is the most web savvy country in the world, followed by the US.

Google posted a quarterly profit on Thursday that was nearly six times higher than a year earlier, blowing away Wall Street targets, as search advertising continued to grow at a rapid clip.

Yahoo announced another blow-out quarter Tuesday, doubling first-quarter profit from a year earlier and handily beating analyst expectations.

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11a-Noon

Jerry in Rialto - Laptop recommendations

Pentium M
built in Wi-Fi
combo drive (CD burner and DVD player)
512MB RAM
Also try before you buy. Make sure to look for dead pixels on the LCD before you take it home.

Bryan in Michigan - online fax service

I use eFax and I’ve been very happy with it but it’s $13/month plus a per fax fee. You might want to look at the much more affordable MaxEmail. Their lite account is $9 per year for up to 500 pages per month. Both services work the same: you give people a regular phone number for your fax number, but faxes arrive in your inbox. You can send faxes by email or through the web interface. Read the review at TidBits. Tidbits also reviews several other services including Faxaway, K7, and Innoport.

Leo, on air you said that efax.com doesn’t deliver the faxes as pdfs. That used to be true, but now it’s a preference you can set. It’s one of the FAX Options in preferences. I’m very happy for that, as I always found the efax program to be irritating to use on my Mac. -Chuck in Vermont

Matt Smith says:
Bryan, try AirCom USA (www.aircomusa.com). I’ve been using their service for years, and it’s extremely easy to use and extremely reliable. Their customer service is amazing as well, which really can’t be said for some of the other “efax” providers.

David in Montana - Digital Video Editing

Dual Xeons vs Athlon 64. The AMD Athlon FX 64 is still the fastest single processor out there. Dual Xeons are faster but only if your OS and applications are threaded and can take advantage of both procs.

DirecTivo does not support TivoToGo and as far as I know DirecTV has no intention to.

Craig felt it necessary to point this out

Leo: During this show you indicated that anyone who edits video on a PC is “nuts” and “killing themselves”. This is absolutely NOT true, my friend and I don’t want people to think this way. I am a PC user (who thinks that Macs are wonderful and I may get a Mini soon!). As a 20 year veteran in video production, I have used both Mac and PC, and of course tape for many years. I now do professional quality productions of Weddings, Slideshows, and all of my personal videos as well… all on a PC running Sony Vegas. If you have never used Vegas, I can understand why you might say what you did. Premier on a PC is buggy, and other packages are not worth talking about. I have used Vegas for two years and never had a single crash, freeze or glitch. Anyone I know who uses it boasts the same. Anyone who has a decent PC (I started on a Celeron 800mhz), $40 bucks for a firewire card and $100 for Sony Vegas Movie Studio (the little sister of Vegas pro version) can VERY successfully edit and produce amazing videos. To the above caller: Before you buy Premier, get a free trial of Vegas 6.0 . The interface is different than other video editing programs but give it a week and you’ll never look at Premier again. I don’t want people who own PCs to think that they can’t edit their home videos UNLESS they get a Mac, because for many people, that’s not in the budget and not necessary.

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Noon-1p

Chris in Encinitas - upgrading 98 to XP

Make sure to read my instructions on Installing Windows. You’re better off doing a clean install (formatting the disk first) but it’s a lot easier to upgrade on top of 98. I recommend backing up your data, collecting your applications and serial numbers, then upgrading. If it’s not reliable, then do the clean install.

Rainey in Reseda - Where’s the BSD subsystem?

Apple OS X does offer the option not to install BSD, but I don’t know why you wouldn’t. You can do it by hand by inserting your OS X disc and opening the Optional Installs folder. Double-click the BSD Subsystem.pkg icon and run the installer. I say, wait til Friday and just upgrade to Tiger, it’s just about my favorite operating system.

Henry and Rafella in Riverside - setting up a web site

Yes you can run your own web server but I wouldn’t. Set up an account at www.blogger.com.

For help setting up a webserver on a DSL connection for Windows/Linux
http://www.dslwebserver.com

Julio in Caracas, Venezuela says: Don’t forget .Mac. It’s great for quick and easy web pages, serving files and integrates seamlessly with the iApps.
http://www.mac.com

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1–2p

Apple documents the new features of OS X Tiger on their web site.

Jason in Hesperia - memory managers for XP and Real Player aternatives

FreeMem Pro is worthless on XP.
Real Player alternatives

Realnetworks has an Enterprise edition of Realplayer that doesn’t come with the junk that comes with their consumer editions.

http://www.realnetworks.com/products/rpe/index.html

Santa Rosa Steve says
Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install the official RealPlayer. You do need a media player that is capable of playing RealMedia files. The included Media Player Classic supports it. Supported are RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealVideo (.rm .ram .rmvb), RealText (.rt), and ReadPix (.rp). Not fully supported are: Streaming smil files (.smi .smil) and Realmedia embedded in webpages.

Publisher: KL Software
License: Freeware
Web page <http://www.codecguide.com/about_real.htm>
Download page <http://www.codecguide.com/download_real.htm>
Download file v1.37 - released 24-Apr-2005: realalt137.exe [6.18 MB]
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BenListening adds :
The above URLs kick over to Filesharing.bz. for me.
I found Real Alternative info & files here :
CodecGuide.com
and BetaNews.com

It might also be worth mentioning QuickTime Alternative, which lets users view QuickTime content without having to download Apple’s QuickTime player, which is big, bloated and has that annoying “Upgrade To Pro For $29.95″ message appear each time you go to view a QT movie. It is available from http://www.codecguide.com/about_qt.htm

Rob in Redlands - Hidden partition on HP

Delete it with partiton magic or a Live CD of Linux like Knoppix, but be careful. You won’t be able to use your HP install discs if you delete it.

Ed in Maryland - archiving family photos

How high resolution should I scan the photos? Experts (like my buddies Mikkel Aaland and Alex Lindsay) say scan your image at 1200 dpi and save it in an uncompressed file format like TIF, PSD, or BMP (not JPEG).

Pete in Huntington Beach - Windows 98 SE

uprgrade from 98

Charles in Santa Barbera - partitioning the drive

Justin in North Hollywood - region encoding

Region encoding is yet another Hollywood conspiracy to keep us from enjoying our DVDs. The idea behind region encoding is to limit where you can play a DVD. That way a DVD released for the US and Canadian market won’t hurt the box office of a movie when it’s released later in Asia. There are seven region codes:

Region 0: all regions
Region 1: North America (including United States and Canada)
Region 2: Western Europe and Japan
Region 3: Southeast Asia
Region 4: South America and Australia
Region 5: Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia
Region 6: China

Most commercial DVDs have a single region code burned into them at the time of manufacture. You’ll need a DVD with a matching code to play it back.

Most DVD players are region encoded, and PC DVD players started doing it, too, a few years ago. On a computer, as you’ve noticed, you have a few plays to decide which code you’re going to use.

As usual, though, whenever someone comes up with a protection scheme, wily hackers come up with a way around it. Various third parties modify DVD players to offer “multi-region” or region free devices. These are almost always unwaranteed by the original manufacturer.

Most DVD ripping software can read any DVD and remove region encoding. You’ll be able to either copy the DVD to your hard drive for later play, or make an unprotected copy. Try SmartRipper.

There used to be a program, DVD Genie, that modified PC DVD players to unlock region encoded DVDs. I don’t think it works with modern DVDs but it might be worth a try. Read all about it at http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/articles/region.html

Nordberg from the chat room says to check for remote control back doors that turn off region encoding in some DVD players.

You might also want to look into AnyDVD ,which can decrypt and unlock regions for PC DVD drives.

Leo, you mentioned getting around the regional lockout to play a region 2 DVD. As you said, many players have a backdoor way of changing the region coding of the player. But, you forgot to mention something more challenging to get around, PAL to NTSC conversion. A player may play a region 2 DVD, but it may not play it correctly on an NTSC television. I have a Philips DVR-642 DVD player I bought at Target which works great. It can play a region 2 DVD in it by setting the region coding to 2, and it will automatically convert the PAL content to NTSC and it plays just fine on my NTSC television. (It also plays DiVX/MPEG-4 files, perfect for watching your favorite Canadian computer shows right on your US TV.) The region can be changed easily with a few remote control button presses, no risky firmware updates needed.

Incidentally, it is important to make sure you can set a DVD player to a specific region (the Philips model above can), not just set it to “region free”. If a disc has RPC-2 protection, the region of the DVD and the player must match.

www.doom9.org, www.vcdhelp.com and www.afterdawn.com are all excellent resources for your DVD needs.

Did anyone try to backup the “Lords Of Dogtown” DVD? I think there is a new Sony encryption on this one. The DVD structure is very complicated. It will play on settop players but will not decrypt with any DVDDecrypter software. This could be the end to backingup DVDs thanks to Sony’s new Arccos copy protection. Please check afterdawn web site for info.
afterdawn.com.

Leo, I have a Lite-On dvd burner that allows me to change the region code up to 4 times. the burners are very inexpensive now and can be added and connected to be viewed on puter or tv.

Rick in Temeculah - digital camera recommendations

I like the Nikon 7900 right now, but read the reviews at www.digitalcamerainfo.com before you buy. A good free photo album program is Picasa from Google. Also sign up for a Flickr account to share photos with your family and the world.

John D Geek says: I have had great success with the Olympus Zoom C-60 and C-765. They are both great cameras that allow a novice to intermediate photographer take amazing pictures. Most cameras that you buy these days will come with some sort of album software. I prefer not to use a second or third application for this. Instead I save my pictures in a directory structure and use PaintShopPro to browse each directory.

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