For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the TWiT Netcast Network

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Show #174

Today I’ll be doing a few extra hours after I get off the air from 2–4p. Call 1–800–520–1KFI and keep calling after 2p!

Call for Help returns to G4 on Monday. Tune in weekdays at 8a Pacific/11a Eastern.

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

The Kutztown 13 make a deal. The group of high school students was charged with felonies for tinkering with their school-issued laptop computers. The kids were putting iChat on their iBooks.

Eliot Spitzer, NY AG, fines AOL $1.25 million for making it impossible to cancel. Seems AOL paid reps to keep customers from canceling the service.

11a-Noon

Thomas in Riverside - moving from AOL to DSL

You might want to keep AOL using the $15 BYOA account so your email address doesn’t change.

Consumer advocate Clark Howard reports that another way to keep your AOL address is to use AOL’s “Account Hold Plan” which costs $2.95 a month. If you subscribe to the plan, you can send and receive your AOL e-mail by going here. Webmail only? You cannot access your mail through other e-mail providers. If you try to surf the Web, you’ll be charged $2.50 an hour. To switch to the “Account Hold Plan,” call 888–265–8008.
-Karl in Los Angeles CA

Walter in Gardner, MA - extracting music from my iPod

VersionTracker has a long list of programs that can do this. But be careful - when you plug in the ipod to the new comptuer iTunes will ask you if you want to attach the ipod to the new computer. Don’t! It will erase everything. Make sure to answer no. Those songs are your only copy and the iTunes Music Store will not let you re-download them.

Ricardo in Puerto Rico extracting music from iPOD

I haven’t tried xPod but you can Use TUNE TRANSFER for iPOD from WinMac

He’s also having trouble sending mail to Earthlink via Verizon. That’s because Verizon, like all good ISPs, blocks email relaying. You need to use Verizon’s outgoing mail server - not Earthlink’s.

Larry from PC Mall has a solution for sending email through Earthlink from a foreign network. Earthlink has an alternate authenticated mail server smtpauth.earthlink.net. Configure that as your outgoing mail server. It will ask for your Earthlink logon ID and password the first time you use it.

Jay in San Diego - looking for old Tandy game

It was a color space game in which you trade with planets. Is it MULE?
Homeworld?

Pretty sure the game could be Space Quest, it was made by sierra, and I had it for my old Tandy.
-adam from Springfield, MO.

Try also “Star Trader” by Steve Hartford, published by Computerware for the Tandy (TRS80) Color Computer, which was created in 1984. History of Star Trader
-Matthew Indio, CA

The game is “Starflight” came out in 1981. http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Maze/4979/starflight.html
—Craig— West Hills, CA

If the color ccomputer Could be Star Trader from Computerware. If so would need to use a Coco 1 or 2 emulator.

Nightwing

Noon-1p

Kirk in San Pedro - two machines two monitors

Is there a KVM that will allow dual monitors?

Ronbo suggests
checking out http://www.maxivista.com/kvm.htm. Not free, but it looks to solve what Kirk wants to do…

p0wermac suggests
check out a dual head kvm switch. http://www.kvm-switches-online.com/f1dh102u.html should be called a kvvm :)

Mike Suggests
This might be more laborious, but it might be cheaper… Could you use two seperate KVM’s, and then only hook the second monitor to the second KVM?

Jason in Lancaster - how do I move the Program Folder

Use TweakUI.

Brett in Davenport, IA - streaming video

He wants to stream video over the network. I recommend the free VLC.

Dorothy in Glendale - Windows Security Center doesn’t see her antivirus

The Security Center, part of XP Service Pack 2, doesn’t know about all anti-viruses. If you are sure you have a working anti-virus and it’s updating automatically, you can disable the warning by opening it, clicking “Change the way security center alerts me” and uncheck the virus protection box.

Frank in San Diego - halogen lamps cause interference

Frank called back on May 8th with a mysterious radio interference problem. Turns out it was caused by a neighbor’s halogen lamp.

[SparkieinParadise adds:] Frank, I was the one that suggested that you turn off the power to trace the problem. Many halogen lamp 12 volt systems use switching power supplies that cause a lot of interference. That was probably the case here. - Steve

Jeff in Downey - DVD Plus or Dash?

It doesn’t matter - they’re about the same.

Ralph in Highland Park….A good place to get DVD facts

…http://dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#4.3.11…

Christian in Washington DC - iPodderX creates protected files

When he sets the podcast client iPodderX to convert downloaded podcasts to bookmarkable AAC files they turn into protected files. That’s right - iTunes assumes all bookmarkable AAC files are protected. Just ignore it - they’re not really protected.

He also keeps finding a file AOLTemp.html in his Tiger trash can. It’s a temp file - you can ignore it. Seems to happen a lot if you can believe this Macworld forums thread.

1–2p

Steven in St. Louis - what’s in your utility toolkit

I use the Emergency Boot CD and find it very handy. I also put together a CD with the commercial tools I use all the time including Steve Gibson’s Spinrite for disk recovery, Partition Magic, and several anti-virus programs. I also take a bunch of anti-spyware programs including AdAware, Spybot, Microsoft’s Antispyware, Webroot’s SpySweeper, and CA’s Pest Patrol, plus Hijack This to support manual removal.

Hiren’s BootCD is a warez disk with a great selection of tools - use it as a shopping list.

Julian in Reseda - Do I need a cell phone anti-virus

Only if you have a Symbian 60 based cell phone with Bluetooth enabled.

He also wants to know why he has to dial all 10 digits even if the number is in the same area code.

bruceb: Why residents of “overlay” area codes must dial all 10 digits…

In a word, it’s for purely administrative, not technical, reasons.

Somebody (FCC I believe, but I’m not sure) decided that it’d be “unfair” if some businesses in the same overlay area code region as their customers could be reached with only 7 digits, while their competitors in the same area code region might need all 10 digits to be dialed by their customers to be reached. So, since there was no way that they could “reduce” the number of digits for all businesses, they went the other way and “increased” the number to 10 digits for all phones in that overlay region.

As far as I know, there’s no technical reason why you must dial all 10 digits if the destination phone number is in the same area code as the phone you’re calling from. There’s no technical difference from the way things are in a single (non-overlay) area code region, where callers are able to dial other phones in their same region by dialing only 7 digits.

—bruceb

Actually, the reason that all 10 digits are necessary is the fact that the
“new” area code is already used as the “middle” three digits. For example,
if an existing area code 444 is split into 444 and 555, the 555 area code
will have to be dialed by everyone if there exist 7 digit numbers of the
form 555-xxxx.
—dab

David in Riverside - Office 2000 won’t install XP

It says the installer is incompatible. Hunh?

I wonder if this Microsoft Tech Note helps?

LuckyPhil in Sydney, Australia recommends updating the windows installer: here

Julie in Culver City, CA - copying data from old Mac

Her hippy boss is at burning man and he asked her to upgrade his old G3 to a shiny new G5. Good news. When you turn on that new Mac it will ask you if you want to copy the old data and programs over. Connect the two with a firewire cable and walk away. It works great!

Chris in La Crosse, WI - iBook vs Powerbook

For all but the toughest power users I think the iBook is a better choice.

Rick in Temecula - Getting Hi8 video into his computer

Consider buying a DV camcorder with analog passthrough. Or you could buy an Analog input converter like Pinnacle System’s MovieBox DV.

He is also ready to buy a new computer. I strongly recommend buying a Mac. No viruses. No spyware. And it comes with the best software for turning videos into DVDs. Take a look at the 2Ghz 17-inch iMac with everything you need for $1499.

Chat Logs and Show Audio