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Sunday, November 6, 2005

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Crimmie’s Caller Of The Week web site

11a-Noon

QFrank in Garden Grove - DVD recorder drive is flaky

He has the excellent Panasonic DMRE80-H, but the drives on DVRs tend to die sooner than PC discs because they’re working so hard. And Panasonic does not provide any way to reformat or scan the drive. You might be able to pull the drive and use utililties to repair it, but be very careful about the file system it uses. I believe it’s Linux. If you boot into Windows with the drive connected it can permanently damage it.

LuckyPhil in Sydney Australia recommends checking out this thread on the AfterDawn Forums.
It’s a possible solution but it requires you to have a spare hard drive.
There’s several other results I found on Google but the afterdawn forums seem like a good place to start.

Doug in Alaska: What about using SpinRite http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm to check the disk’s integrity?
Oops, sorry for the redundancy.

QMike in Lake Arrowhead - EasyShare is broken

Sounds like the uninstall failed - and it’s keeping you from reinstalling the software. Kodak offers a Clear utility to completely uninstall. Try that. And make sure you make your own backups of your photos.

I had the same issue with my EasyShare software. I worked with Kodak and found that the “Windows installer 3.1″ was the culprit. I removed this in the add and remove programs and I was able to then re-install the EasyShare software. In the “Add Remove Programs” you need to click the “show updates”
checkbox at the top to see the “Windows Installer 3.1″. Hope this helps!

QMark in Santa Ana - will iPhantom mess up my spam filtering

In a word, no. iPhantom will strip out any email viruses or spyware exploits, but they are not a spam solution and won’t block messages.

He also asked about Graylisting to fight spam. I’ve been using it for a while and it works very well. The idea is to send all incoming servers a “busy - try again signal.” Spammers almost always move on. They rarely try again. The only drawback is that some misconfigured servers may not try again for as long as 24 hours.

Web based surveys. PHP is the way to do this most easily. If your host supports PHP you can insert survey code into your HTML page.Hotscripts has quite a few to choose from.

That’s one of the advantage of dynamic web site software (like this wiki).

From Listener - Derek
Try www.phpsurveyor.org + they have a link to other opensource survey scripts at http://www.phpsurveyor.org/compareus.php

Q Jason in San Luis Obispo - recording TV from a digital cable box

He has digital cable and is taking S-VHS out of it into a Plextor USB tuner and then into a Mac mini, but the quality stinks. You can probably get better quality with a better box like El Gato’s EyeTV but it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to access the digital stream. The cable company keeps tight control of that to prevent piracy. There are some devices that support digital cable through Cable Cards, but these require cooperation from the cable company.

He was using Skype out to call us.

Brad in San Diego adds: Jason mentioned being able to call toll-free numbers using SkypeOut without incurring any fees from Skype. Therefore, you can call anybody for free using (800)FREE-411. This 411 service will connect you without charging you, but you will have to listen to an audio advertisement.

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Noon-1p

Q Jim in Rialto - loan officer buying a laptop

Wants to know if he should get a Mac. It depends on how specialized your software and web sites are. If the programs you use require Windows, or the web sites you use require IE6 you should get a Thinkpad. But if you just use Office and stock web sites Apple could be a good choice. In general, I recommend Windows for business and Macintosh for home.

Jim - You might not have to wait till 2007 for an Intel PowerBook. Many are speculating that Apple will release brand new Intel PowerBooks and iBooks as early as April next year. The PowerBooks are said to be completely revamped - 20–25% thinner with a built-in iSight camera.

Q Peter in Marina del Rey - buying an external hard drive

I like Western Digital, but pretty much all the major brands are fine. I do prefer Firewire or IEEE 1394 for externals if you have it. USB 2.0 is ok. USB 1.1 is barely usable.

Doug in Alaska: There are also HDD enclosures that have BOTH USB and Firewire, which would be more flexible than just USB or Firewire. I’m not sure if there are laptop drive sized enclosures though.

Q James in Amory, Mississippi - Internet Explorer script errors

The error message is meaningless. Turn it off by click Tools→Internet Options, selecting the Advanced Tab, and checking the “Disable Script Debugging” box and unchecking the “Display a notification about every script error” box. You can’t really uninstall IE. I’m glad you’re using Firefox, though. IE is still necessary for Windows Update, etc. The bigger issue is that his friend is still running XP service pack 1. I know Service Pack 2 is scary because it hoses so many systems, but it’s a very important system upgrade.

Q Harold in Santa Barbara - publicizing your podcast

He has a podcast (audio and video) on www.santabarbaralife.com. What directories should he be listed in. These are the important ones:

1. itunes
2. odeo
3. my yahoo
4. podcast alley
5. podnova

But the best advice for publicizing a podcast is the same as for publicizing a web site. Get other quality sites to link to you. Promote your podcast in places where potential listeners congregate: message boards, clubs, chat rooms. Don’t forget “real world” venues: user groups, meetings, mainstream media. And make sure to include an iTunes button on your web site. Getting into the top tier ranks at iTunes is the brass ring and it won’t happen unless people subscribe to your podcast on iTunes.

“WolvenSpectre” Writes :
If you have samples of your content and other things that will keep people coming back. You can include links to interesting related sites and media, schedules and progress reports, access to forums and/or chat rooms, cross promotions with other casters, and any other things you can think up to start to turn your viewers and other content producers into their own little community. If you can start this, keep an archive of your content your rank in regular web search engines, such as Google, will go up. It will also make it easier for people new to podcasting that may have seen it on a freind’s computer, or heard it on their freind’s MP3 player, or maybe recieved one in a circulated E-Mail, to find your homepage.

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1–2p

Q Charles in Arkansas - reading discs created with DirectCD

DirectCD writes discs in UDF format. You can’t read UDF discs in XP without a driver. Read this excellent article for more information.

Whack_Job Writes
Try UDF VOLUME READER 7.1.0.95 This file is for users that do not own a copy of Easy CD Creator or Easy Media Creator and just want to read discs that have been written in UDF.

Q David in Torrance - Photoshop CS2 crashes on startup

He’s using it on the Mac. First thing to try is turning off all extensions by rebooting with the Shift key held down. If that doesn’t work, make sure all the old Photoshop preferences and plug-ins are deleted. One may be incompatible.

bruceb adds:

If deleting all the old preferences and plugins doesn’t do it, try moving the new (that is, the current) preferences and plugins to the Desktop with Photoshop not running. Then re-launch Photoshop and see if it’s fixed. Another thing to try: Create another OSX account. Keep it as “lean and clean” as possible. Log out of your normal account, then log in to the new, test account. See if Photoshop launches. If so, then that narrows down the problem to a file or files somewhere in your normal account. This rules out system files, application files, and anything else that’s common to all users on the system.

On the other hand, if it still doesn’t launch, then you’ve pretty much ruled out all of the files in your Home folder, including preferences files in your account (but your problem still could be caused by preference files and other files elsewhere that are common to all users).

Another thing to try:
I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that a corrupt font file or font cache file might be your problem. If you think your problems might somehow be font-related, you could always try the free font utility “Deep Six” to see if it helps. I haven’t used Deep Six myself, but it appears that it mainly cleans out (possibly corrupt) font _caches,_ not the font files themselves. Still, it shouldn’t hurt to give it a try, on the off-chance it’s a font cache problem.

Too, there are other font utilities, such as the commercial Font Doctor utility that might fix a font problem, if that’s really what’s causing your problem, although Font Doctor isn’t free.

Finally, you could always search Adobe’s support site.

-bruceb

Mike Turner Adds

For David in Torrance - Photoshop CS2 crashes on startup

My Daughter had a similar problem when installing Photoshop CS2. As far as I can tell the symptoms on her machine sound the same as yours. . Her issues were caused by a problem with the main installer script. Have a look on yor disk and you will find a separate installer for just Photoshop (not all the extras) in a dedicated folder. Use this installer instead of the overarching (do everything) installer and you should have success.

Cheers…. Mike Turner – Canberra Australia

I had a similar problem with Photoshop Elements on Mac. I removed everything and installed it several times with no fix. Then I installed it with Administrator rights and it worked fine. I dunno?

—Clay

Q Daniel in Los Angeles - can’t see USB hard drive

His friend’s drive died. Daniel has put it into a USB external drive. He does see a drive in device manager but not in Explorer or Disk Management. That makes sense. You’re seeing the external USB interface and drive ID but not any data from the drive itself. I suggest putting it into your machine on the IDE cable and running Spinrite on it. Spinrite will recover anything that can be recovered. If the drive is physically damaged no software can recover it.

Geek toolkits - what do you bring with you to a house call?

EBCD
Partition Magic
SpinRite

…your ideas?…

Listener_RV adds: If the HD controller (the HD’s circuit board) is bad, it may be repairable by finding another HD of the same exact model number, and swapping out the controller circuit board.

BGeller adds
UBD4Win is best http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm

Doug in Alaska: Some great tools I always carried in Mac OS 9 days were Tech Tool Pro and Norton Utilities CDs. Tech Tool Pro from Micromat http://micromat.com/ is good for hardware tests, and is not tailored to a particular range of Macs like Apple’s hardware diagnostics CDs. It also had HDD maitenence(sp?) features, but Norton seemed better. As far as Norton Utilities went, I DID NOT INSTALL IT ON A HARDDRIVE(it caused as many problems as it solved), but I just ran it off of the CD.

adkinsjm writes
Knoppix is good if you need to access the hard drive to pull data off and it can allow access to the internet if you needs to download something on site http://www.knoppix.com]

QNick in Beaumont - why is my Mac so slow?

He has high speed Verizon FIOS and it seems much faster on his PC. He’s getting 600KB downloads on the Mac. That’s almost 5Mbps - the nominal speed for FIOS - so you just may be seeing the slower rendering on the Mac.

Try some of these speed testers:

www.speakeasy.net/speedtest
www.dslreports.com/speedtest

dryan adds
Also, both Safari and Firefox are set by default to not “paint” or begin displaying the page immediately. This lets them show a more complete page once it is displayed. If you want to change this, and on a hi speed connection you will see a difference, use FasterFox for Firefox (both Win and OS X) or Safari Enhancer for Safari.

starbird adds
I use this for performance testing. Toast.net. Select Shuttle + Text from the left and one of the free servers from the right. I use SpacePort USA (as I’m in Central FL).

brutusfly adds
Try using a G5 optimized Firefox build. http://www.beatnikpad.com/firefoxG5release

A listener adds
I just found this link to a program on apple’s website that fixes your exact problem it’s called Broadband Tuner

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06 November 2005

>>>>>>>

<<<<<<<
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Try http://www.wackyb.co.nz
=======

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Check this out Za:
http://news.com.com/AIM+worm+plays+nasty+new+trick/2100-7349_3-5920403.html
>>>>>>>

<<<<<<<

07 November 2005

08 November 2005