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Sunday, October 23, 2005

Tech News

Nintendo DS gamers will get free Wi-Fi in 6,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the US. A similar deal is in the works in Canada.

Are there secret codes in our color printers that can be used to track documents? You bet. Tiny dots visible only under blue light contain the printer’s serial number, and the date and time of the printout according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The US Secret Service says they’re there to help fight currency counterfeiting.
Woden adds: The printers in question are color laser printers, not ink-jet. See the EFF printer page for more details.

Jack Thompson, virulant anti-videogame violence activist is embroiled in yet another battle.

Meanwhile, the latest FBI statistics are out and this is the least violent generation of kids the US has ever seen. Quoting the FBI report: As for trends in arrests of juveniles for violent crime, a comparison of 2004 data with those of 2003 indicated that the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes declined 0.8 percent, 5.5 percent compared with 2000 data, and 30.9 percent compared with 1995 figures.

listener gjime writes - this is a trend predicted by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss and covered in their book Millennials Rising : The Next Great Generation amazon link.

Put Yahoo! maps on your iPod with www.ipodiway.com. And apparently the NYC subway maps are back!

11a-Noon

Richard in Fullerton - moving old drive to new drives

Use Maxtor’s MaxBlast to copy the data bit for bit. Most other hard drive manufacturers offer similar programs.

• Western Digital
• Maxtor
• Seagate
• Hitahci (IBM)
• Samsung

Kevin in Palestine, TX - building an online TV network

BitTorrent makes it easy to distribute the large video files without a huge bandwidth bill. Take a look at Broadcast Machine - it’s a simple way to implement BitTorrent on your site. Or you can use Google Video and www.OurMedia.org. They’ll give you free bandwidth but you won’t control the user experience.

From Mike in Minnesota — Apple does allow independant artist to add their music now. Here is the application.

Mark in Santa Ana - making voice calls from your notebook

Vonage
SkypeOut
Asterisk
Asterisk@home
Wi-Fi, Linksys

Jason in Richfield, MN - Cataloging CDs

Sax player for The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir and The Jaztronauts. He’s been using CD Catalog Expert for Windows to keep track of his CD tracks. Is looking for better recommendations.

Delicious Monster is an amazing Macintosh library program that uses the iSight (or other camera) to scan the bar code on CDs, DVDs, books, and videogames and instantly populate the database with the product cover, artist and track info, reviews, etc.

A listener writes: I suggest checking out the Pedia programs over at Bruji.com. They have DVDpedia, CDpedia, and Bookpedia which are all great programs. They are also able to use scanners and cameras to look up bar codes. I find Delicious Monster to be a little slow & clunky. Conor & Nora over at Bruji are nice people to boot and definitely supportive.

“From listener Drew:” I have gotten great use out of “Media Collector”, an application package from Intelligent Software (www.intellisw.com). The package comes with a USB (or bluetooth) barcode reader that finds information regarding CD’s, DVD’s, and books from many different sources and puts them into a database. The software is constantly improving and support is quick and friendly.

For backing up I recommend a large external hard drive and Microsoft’s new free SyncToy to ensure that whatever’s on your computer is automatically copied to the second drive. I also suggest you periodically burn a copy of My Documents onto a CD and move it off site.

I do not recommend expensive (and unreliable) backup software. Just do a straight copy or synchronize with SyncToy. (I’ve been using an excellent shareware program called Second Copy to do this for years, but SyncToy is free and seems to do the same thing.)

Noon-1p

Ida in Lake Elsinore - taskpanel.exe error on startup

She’s an Earthlink customer and the taskpanel program is part of its dialup software. Reinstalling the software should fix the problem.

Michael in Syracuse - dead motherboard

sounds like it

Paul in Green Valley - sound card not working

Hercules sound card with Windows 98. Make sure to use Windows 98 drivers - the XP drivers will not work.

David in Mexico writes: Sometimes my sound card just disappears from the computer. No amount of driver manipulation seems to make it word. But if I just change the slot that the card is in, the computer will recognize it again and all is well.

Michael in Ventura - USB wi-fi adapters with Mac

USB wi-fi adapters require drivers. If the company offers OS X drivers you’re ok, otherwise they’re not compatible. Read this article on MacOSXHints.

http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=35&FamID=85&ProdID=239&AppleComp=1

from hawking technology

OrangeWare makes a $15 driver that works with many USB Wi-Fi dongles.

If you go to mac update and do a search for the DLINK DWL-122 USB Dongle. There is a 1.4.7 drive on mac update just install that and your good to go. I have 2 of these dongles and they work perfectly.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15997

>>>>> Mike from Orlando - I use a Linksys Bridge on my MAC G4 to connect to my wifi network. Program it on a Windows PC and then just plug it into the ethernet jack on the MAC and you are good to go.

-The MasterPenguin

I’ve used a D-Link Ethernet Bridge (maybe the DWL-G810), it has a similar browser based interface to other D-Link products which I find more confusing than other routers etc. But once you get it working it has a nice strong signal probably because of the external antenna. I like the idea of it too because you could use it with switches, hubs, gaming consoles etc. and no drivers needed.

-Stephen Quirk in Portland, ME

1–2p

Abe in Malibu - Running the latest Java software on OS X

Apple’s official Java distribution is 1.4.2, but some sites want Java 2SE 5.0. You can download it directly from Apple. Both versions will be preserved. In general, if you’re having problems with Java go to www.java.com - it will point you in the right direction.

Joe in Los Angeles - upgrading his Mac

His 2002 Emacs both died (Apple was having serious quality control problems in 2002–3). He’s using Final Cut Pro on his G3 Tower. He needs a new Mac, but I recommend buying an inexpensive Mac mini and waiting until the MacIntel Towers come out. They look to be much faster than the PowerPC models.

Richard in Garden Grove - automatically recording LPs on Mac

He wants to transfer his LPs and cassettes to MP3. Is there any Mac software that automatically senses pauses in the audio and create separate tracks.

From Garner: The freeware AudioSlicer for Mac will do exactly what Richard needs. It listens for silences in the audio (times are adjustable), and splits the file appropriately. For now, it only works on MP3 files, but it should do what he needs.

From Bryan: I have been converting LP’s lately and tried several solutions. The easiest I have found is to use “CD Spin Doctor 2″ that comes with Toast 6 to record, then let it identify the individual tracks. It generally gets them about 90% right, but it is very easy to delete, add and move track markers to get the individual tracks right. You then edit the track names to change “Track 1″ to the actual song name, then click a button to convert the file to individual tracks named by song name. It doesn’t add the other meta-data, but it is the easiest I have found. You can delete the file with the whole disk side to save space if you want.

Bob in Whittier - mouse bounce virus

To get rid of this sucker you need to find its name. Get a good anti-virus program, there are free versions of AVG and Antivir if you can’t afford NOD32. Or use an online scanner. Once you figure out what the virus is called you can go to for a free removal program.

Michael in Cattawissa, PA - machine locks after 10 minutes

He can’t restart it for another 10 minutes afterwards. Definitely overheating. Make sure your fans are working properly. And get Motherboard Monitor to keep an eye on the temperature.

Gino in Pasadena - damaged Mac hard drive

He ran an incompatible version of Micromat’s TechTools Pro on his drive and now he’s getting the dreaded “invalid b-tree node” error. The good news is your data is probably intact, but your directory is toast. Try Alsoft’s Disk Warrior to fix it.

From Bert: Try Data Rescue II from Prosoft Engineering for recovering data when the drive won’t mount or the directory structure is badly damaged. It costs $100 and I’ve used it twice in the past month on two hard drives that went really bad in two different Macs. Recovered just about all the data on both drive, with a very small number of corrupted files. Well worth my business money.

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