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Saturday, May 14, 2005
Show #143
On today’s show:
A serious vulnerability in Apple’s new Mac OS X Tiger, and an easy way to block it.
Nuclear batteries in your cell phone? It’s what’s next.
BenListening says : Avant-Batteries.com is my favorite place for spare/replacement batteries for my consumer electronics. They had the best deal on the camera battery I needed & shipping was fast & the new battery performed better than the one that came with the camera ever did!
If you think $15,000 for a piece of toast with the Runaway Bride on it is weird check out the eBay Curiosities.
WinXPNo#1 says : Pope John Paul II 2005 Topps World Treasures Auto 1/1 selling on Ebay before Pope John Paul II passing away this year. The bid price is at $72,484.00 and 7-day listing, until it ends as of 5–15–05.
Today’s news items
Microsoft has revealed the details of the new Xbox, code named Xenon. It’s officially the Xbox 360 and it’s much more than a gaming platform. Interesting irony: videos of the Xbox are being displayed by Macs. Turns out the G5 is better at emulating the Xbox because it’s running PowerPC.
Apple is also hosting the trailers for the new Harry Potter film out this Fall.
Microsoft also announced a subscription-based security service. OneCare is aimed at home users who don’t have an IT department to fix their computers. Trust Microsoft to figure out a way to make money on its lax security model.
And Bill Gates is on the offensive against the iPod. He told the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “I don’t think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term, however good Apple may be. I think you can draw parallels here with the computer — here, too, Apple was once extremely strong with its Macintosh and graphic user interface, like with the iPod today, and then lost its position.” Sour grapes?
Two security flaws in Firefox have been patched. Click the update button to the right of your address bar to update your copy to 1.0.4. With that said CNN reports that Internet Explorer usage dipped below 90% a 6% drop since June of last year while Firefox had a 3 % increase as of October of last year. Firefox has roughly 6.8% of the internet browser market share.
The MPAA introduced a new round of lawsuits aimed at bittorent tracker sites according CNET.com 6 Bittorent Tracker sites have been targeted: ShunTV, Zonatracker, Btefnet, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven and Bragginrights with most of these sites homepages displaying notices of closure.
And a Massachusetts judge shut down America’s largest spam gang. It’s another success for the CAN-SPAM act.
11a-Noon
Laura - Mac Mail won’t open
Whenever a program won’t open the Mac it’s usually because the preferences or settings files are corrupted. That’s why I recommend having an unused Administrator account on your Mac. When there’s a problem like this, log into the other account to see if Mail will open. Your email won’t be there, but if Mail opens you know the problem is something specific to your login. Login as yourself again and move the Library/Mail folder somewhere else (don’t delete it - all your email is in there). If mail opens now, it’s something in that folder. Try deleting just the settings files. You can also delete the Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file.
Mark - burning podcasts to CD
For some reason when he uses Easy CD Creator to burn audio CDs it only allows one cut per disc. You need to create a playlist with your MP3s (as if you’re making a mix CD) then burn the playlist.
He’s also looking for a way to convert text to speech MP3s so he can burn his work reading to an audio CD and listen to it in the car. There are ways to do this on the Mac. Here’s Here’s one for Windows.
RHNet says
You should check out some free alternatives here on sourceforge
TTS is still in word as well as STT
James - understanding HDTV
Crutchfield has a good article on HDTV specs. Read Ultimate AV Magazine for set reviews.
Henry - upgrading his voice recorder
He wants to remove the EPROM memory in his Panasonic voice recorder and replace it with a larger chip. If it’s socketed that should be fairly simple, but surface mounted chips are hard to remove. Most consumer electronic devices are surface mounted. Read this article before attempting this hack.
A listener writes:
Stormy Weather over Microsoft - weather dashboard link on Apple site
This is a fun link
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/dashboard/doppleviewer.html
Noon-1p
Frances - synching Treo 600 to desktop not working
Sounds like a bad install. Uninstall the Palm Desktop completely (you might even want to use System Restore to restore your settings to just before you installed), then download the latest version from PalmOne and install a fresh copy.
Brian Writes:
It’s been my experience that any time a software installation fails on Win XP, the first question to ask is, “Do you have administrator rights?” Sometimes the installer will not show the warning dialog.
Joe - Adding a hard drive to a TiVo
I can’t pass up this opportunity to plug my book - it really is the best TiVo book out there because it covers everything from simple remote control codes to hardcore hacking. You can get a preformatted hard drive from Weaknees. For information on hardcore hacking, visit the DealDatabase forums. Hinsdale’s guide is the classic manual for drive upgrades.
Blue_Tiger adds: Don’t forget the helpful folks in the TiVo Community Forum. The ‘TiVo Underground’ discussion area is where I learned to modify my TiVo series one.
Scott in Temecula - Olympus pocket recorder
He wants to backup his recorded files. If they’re in a standard format (he says they’re WAV but I think it’s more likely in MP3 or WMA - depends on the recorder) you can use your CD burning software to copy them to a CD. Dragon Naturally Speaking will attempt to convert them to text, but the mics in portable recorders are so poor don’t expect very good results.
A listener writes: I have the Olympus 480pc and the ‘Digital Wave Player’ software stores the audio files in .wav format. They are stored in \My Documents\Digital Wave Player\Message\FolderA (or B,C,D). I have not done any audio to text converstions but I have made CD’s from them and even converted to .mp3′s using goldwave for my iPod. This little unit by the way really works great and I’m very pleased with its performance.
Jim in Palmdale - Pentium M choices
You got your Banias, your Dothan, and the newest Pentium M, the 770.
If it’s all confusing to you here’s Intel’s list of its current processors. You might also look at the new AMD Turion64 - a mobile 64-bit processor that looks quite promising.
Dean in Corona del Mar - music on the Mac
I recommend 1GB of RAM (or more - OS X handles memory very efficiently, but also benefits from more).
A Witt writes: Logic is not a simple program, it is actually more complicated than Pro Tools because of the MIDI functionality. If you are serious about Logic Pro then a G5 with 2 gig ram is going to be the way to go. The Apple Logic forum will answer all your questions about the minimums for Logic. http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?14@195.DCldaaXxyUV.1@.689be5d8
Bill-in-Germany notes:
An excellent out-of-state Mac source is www.macconnection.com
I’ve bought from this excellent mailorder house since 1984.
They’re based in NH, so no sales tax for California customers.
1–2p
OS X Tiger users - beware of automatically installing Dashboard Widgets - visit this site for a demonstration. WARNING: just clicking on this link will install the Zaptastic widget. It’s harmless, but it shows how a malicious web site could install automatically on your system. Remove the Zaptastic widget by deleting it from your /Library/Widgets folder. To prevent this exploit, open Safari’s preferences and turn off “Open safe files after downloading” or write protect your Widgets folder.
The free Widget Manager preference pane from Downtown Software House is a handy way to manage widgets (and remove Zaptastic if you clicked on the link above).
Au_Scott adds:
I have made an Automator action tha lets you chose widgets from a list and remove them.(it only works for widgets in the /Library/Widgets file path. not the users/youusername/Library/Widgets file path if any one knows how to get automator to go to the curent users /Library/Widgets please let me know) this is the link
Darren in Fountain Valley - Windows files disappearing
Now he’s got duplicate partitions visible to Defrag but not the Windows Disk Management tool. I have no idea what these could be. Shares? He says they look identical to the C: drive. Hmm. Do you know?
Andrew in Salinas - Backing up procedure
I recommend using Norton Ghost to image Windows and Program partitions, but don’t use backup software to backup your data partitions. A simple copy to CD or hard drive is the best way. Then you know you have a good backup and you can access them without installing any backup software first.
Robert in Thousand Oaks - Streets and Trips won’t copy files to flash card
He has an iPaq 2215 with the Pahros GPS. Microsoft Streets and Trips says he doesn’t have enough room for the map, even though he has a gigabyte smart media card installed. How can he trick the program into using it?
Eric in Pasadena - pop-ups in Firefox??
Heaven help us.
Interestingly enough the link on the nuclear battery above gave me a popup for spyware blockers. I’m using the latest Firefox - JerJer
BenListening adds : There are several persistant pop-up adservers that are affecting my Firefox also. The SpoofStick extension for Firefox (or IE) from CoreStreet.com can help you identify where the popup content is coming from. Spoofstick will write the domain name in the title bar of the popup.
Also by using Active Ports and right click/properties on the popup, along with IPWHOIS and WHOIS Lookup at DNSstuff I have been able to come up with some URLs and IP numbers, and IP ranges for the worst of these.
Like “z1.adserver.com” (got it at scienceblog.com too) and “casalamedia.com” and “fastclick.com” for instance.
I then block that IP or IP range at my router.
I will still get a popup window frame….but no content inside it!
It’s a minor victory…..right?
URL - defined
DNS - defined
IP Address - defined here and here.
Michael in Laguna Niguel - can you customize blogger.com sites?
I’m pretty sure you have complete control over the template at www.blogger.com, but I can’t find the place. Anyone have a suggestion?
Lots of sites are offering free storage and downloads for your music. Try Our Media. Google is offering free delivery of video too.
Tom writes: Also, there’s a new (also free)hosting site at http://spaces.msn.com/, but I haven’t figured out how to modify the templates there . . . .
jac writes: To modify your blogger template (or completely change it) open your blogger dashboard, click the blogspot you want to change, click on the template tab, and then change your heart out. Most templates are in css, so a little knowledge is required, but this is a great way to learn!
Jenny writes: You can get a lot more templates than just what Blogger offers. See their templates help page for more. Their help section is VERY useful and will give you a great insight on how to hack your blog.
And to add to jac’s comment— if you already have a customized page and you want to change it more, I suggest saving all the code into a text file on your computer, in case things go wrong with your new customizations, you can easily revert back to your last version. (speaking from experience!)
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