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Sunday, February 29, 2004

Show 18

It’s Leap Day! Academy Awards tonight. Let’s talk tech this afternoon!

The Apple Store opened in San Francisco yesterday. Early visitors were offered a mystery gift bag for $250. You would have been smart to take it. Inside: an AirPort Extreme Base Station, Bluetooth Keyboard, Bluetooth Mouse, D-Link Bluetooth Adapter, .Mac membership, a 10 percent gift card good for any single Apple Store purchase, iLife, and Keynote. Wow!

Join Steve Wozniak, David Pogue, and other Mac luminaries, including me, on the MacMania III Caribbean cruise, November 7–14. I’ll be lecturing about using shell script to automate OS X, and must have shareware and freeware utilities, plus I’ll have a behind the scenes look at TechTV. The cruise is filling up fast. Reserve online now at GeekCruises.com See you shipboard!

Jim from Lake Forest loves his Tivo. Says his Tivo time has been off since the DirecTV upgrade to 3.10. He also notes ghosting on one show on only one channel: Enterprise on UPN 13. Unfortunately it’s his favorite show. Anyone have any suggestions?

Mark in Cambridge, Maryland wants to make a tiled background for a web page. I couldn’t find the article from the Call for Help show we did on creating tiled images, but I found an even better article that describes everything you need to know to create cool backgrounds for your web pages. Read Toni Will-Harris’s Background Basics and all will be clear.

Richard in Corona wants to collect email addresses on his web site and send out a monthly email to his subscribers. Doing that requires a little programming on the web server side. These kinds of programs are called CGI programs and are typically written in PHP or Perl. You’ll also need a server-side database to store the names. Ask your web host if they have a pre-written solution - they may well, it’s a very common need. If not they can probably recommend a programmer who can help you. It won’t be very expensive - it’s a simple thing to do. I recommend PHP and MySQL for a simple solution that can grow with you.

Jim has his laptop setup just so and wants to make a custom restore disk that will put it back exactly as it was. Norton Ghost from Symantec will do this - it will even create a bootable CD or DVD for you.

John in Los Angeles wants to keep using a program even though the 30-day trial has run out. It’s next to impossible to disable those time checks. The information is usually very well hidden either in the registry or a hidden file. I suggest buying the program if you want to keep using it after the trial period - it’s only right.

Irene in Sherman Oaks is worried about a file that shows up in her Windows Task Manager called devldr16. From what I can tell that’s a driver for her sound card and nothing to worry about. Whenever you want to investigate something like this type the name into Google and see what shows up. You can also search the anti-virus sites. I use SARC.

Peter in Tustin wants to extract the music from a movie DVD. The music is stored, encrypted, in the video file on the disc, so you’ll need to 1. remove the copy protection 2. strip out the music 3. convert the music from AC3 to a format you can use, usually MP3. There’s a good program that does all three things called DVD Audio Ripper, free to try, $29 to buy from ImTOO Software.

Edward in Santa Ana has a 250 GB hard drive but can’t see it on his Windows 2000 machine. That’s normal. The original versions of Windows 2000 and XP could not see such large drives - they were limited to 137 GB. Install the latest service packs and you should be able to see the whole drive, unless your system’s BIOS is incapable of 48-bit LBA addressing. If you’ve got the latest service packs but still can’t see the full drive, you’ll need to buy an add-on UltraDMA IDE card. Read the Microsoft Knowledge Base article for more info.

Bob in Yucaipa’s power supply died and it sounds like his motherboard went along with it. The system still boots but only into safe mode. He even re-installed Windows but it still doesn’t work. I think he’s going to be buying a new motherboard but the first thing to try is flashing the BIOS to replace the system’s firmware. It may have been munged by a power surge when the power supply went. You should also check the cables etc. to make sure you didn’t jostle something loose when you installed the new power supply.

Jan in Corona using Norton Personal Firewall and it’s working too well. She can’t even surf the net. Firewalls are designed to protect you by limiting the kinds of network traffic, but if it’s too aggressive it can block legitimate traffic, too. In this case Port 80 is blocked. You’ll need to open the Norton Personal Firewall and click Internet Access Control. Unblock your web browsers. For instructions on restoring your Norton Firewall to its original settings read this article.

Charles in LA just bought a Sony notebook and he’s getting ready to edit video. He heard that he should partition before capturing the video. He wants to know how to do it without losing his existing stuff. You need a non-destructive partitioning program. I recommend Partition Magic from Symantec. (Incidentally I’m not on Symantec’s payroll - it’s just that the company has purchased most of the good Windows utilities over the years!).

The reason it’s a good idea to create a separate partition for video is that disk fragmentation can cause frame dropping when capturing video. Keeping the video on a separate partition reduces fragmentation. You could also run Windows disk defrag before trying to capture video.

John in Burbank wants to print labels for his data CDs. His Dell came with Roxio’s EZ CD Creator - that will print paper labels.

Buffy in La Habra is getting error #711 from Windows when she tries to get online. She’s using Earthlink DSL. Something is wrong with Windows dial-up networking. Crymic in the chat room says he worked for Earthlink and that happened frequently due to noisy lines. You could try to reinstall DUN, Buffy, and certainly uninstall and reinstall Earthlink’s software. I hate PPPoE dialers anyway. I recommend buying an inexpensive broadband router that supports PPPoE internally (Linksys routers do - the Navas Broadband Guide has a list of others that work, too) - then you can eliminate DUN and the Earthlink software entirely. Your computer will act as if it’s on a LAN and the router will handle all the nasty bits.

There’s also a freeware PPPoE dialer called RASPPPoE that generally works more reliably. Installing this might also fix Buffy’s problem. Download a copy from Monzoon Networks.