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Saturday, March 20, 2004

Show 23

Home again. I’m back in the Leoville labs. That means I’ll be back in chat and we’ll have actual show notes. I’m still working on getting the past two weeks transcribed, too.

Happy Spring - today’s the vernal equinox!

Scott in DeVore is sending DVDs to his son stationed in South Korea. There’s a problem, though. His son’s Korean DVD player can’t play US discs because of region locking. Region locking keeps DVDs from being distributed worldwide so that they don’t undermine theatrical releases overseas. The regions are:

• 0 No Region Coding
• 1 USA, Canada
• 2 Europe, including France, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia, Japan and South Africa
• 3 Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Borneo and Indonesia
• 4 Australia and New Zealand, Mexico, the Carribean, and South America
• 5 India, Africa, Russia and former USSR countries
• 6 Peoples Republic of China
• 7 Unused
• 8 Airlines/Cruise Ships

If he has a Region 3 DVD player it can only play region 3 discs. The DVDs his folks buy in the US are region 1 discs and cannot be used. The easiest solution would be to buy a DVD player here and mail it to him. That way he’ll be able to play region 1 discs. You might also check the Internet to see if his player has a backdoor. A surprising number do. The backdoor will let you play discs from any region.

Attach:25214_180.jpg Δ Laurel in Ontario takes pictures of barns and wants to do a coffee table book. She’s wondering about a floppy based Sony Mavica. Noooo! It’s cheap because it’s old and bad. The quality is terrible, and it’s slow to write the images. My current favorite high-end digital is the Nikon D70. It’s a superb digital SLR, supports interchangeable lenses, and the body is only $1000. This is the best bang for your buck for commercial work. If you want a consumer grade camera with a very high megapixel count, try the Olympus 8080 - its wide angle lens would be perfect for barn photography.

TB in Fullerton is a graphics design student looking for a laptop and wonders if the Fujitsu Lifebook is good? You bet - I like them a lot and they have the among the best screens of any laptop. Make sure to get as much RAM as you can afford for Photoshop.

Rich in San Marcos got the Bagle virus. It seems to be blocking his access to anti-virus sites. I’m guessing it’s using the Windows HOSTS file to do that. You’ll find HOSTS in the “c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc” folder. Open it in Notepad and check for lines with the URLs of the anti-virus sites. Comment out those lines by placing a # in front, save the file, then re-boot.

Steve in Riverside wants to network two computers using Firewire. Windows XP and Me both support Firewire networking. Use the Windows XP new network connection wizard to automatically configure your connection.

Jeff in Mission Viejo is running Windows ME. It freezes up after a while due to low resources. Something running on his system is “leaking” memory. That is, it’s allocating memory then failing to release it. As the program runs it eats more and more memory until your system just crashes. This problem was very common before Windows 2000 and XP. There’s no real fix. Rebooting will cure the problem temporarily, but you’ll need to figure out which program is leaking to fix the problem permanently. Since Jeff says this happens even when no programs are running, it must be something that starts up automatically. He can use MSConfig to disable these start up programs. Click Start, Run… and enter “msconfig” then click OK. Click the Startup tab for a list of processes that start when you log into Windows. You can uncheck these until you find the culprit. And stay away from memory managers that purport to fix this problem - they can’t.

Attach:ss_01_MovieBoxDV_07.gif Δ Don in Idlewild wants to know the best way to convert VHS tapes to DVD. He bought a USB Dazzle and isn’t happy with the quality. I’m not surprised. USB isn’t fast enough to carry high quality video. The Dazzle has to compress the heck out of the signal just to get it to the computer. And more compression equals lower quality. I recommend a Firewire breakout box like Pinnacle System’s Studio Moviebox DV. It works with analog inputs like VCRs and camcorders and produces excellent results.

Tom in Santa Clarita bought one of those DIVX DVD players that Circuit City was foisting on people a few years ago. The idea was that you’d get a DVD for just a few bucks but you could only watch it once. Or you could buy it. Either way you never needed to return the disc.

Here’s the problem though, in order to watch a DIVX DVD you need a special player and every time you wanted to watch the DVD the player would call the home office to find out what rights you had to the disc. But DIVX went out of business in 1999 and there’s no home office to call any more. Tom owns 150 coasters. He wanted to know if there’s a way to get them to work again. Not that I know of. Maybe some hacker will work on the problem - but there’s no way to crack them that I know of.

Incidentally, don’t confuse Circuit City’s DIVX with DivX, the popular video compression utility.

Jeff in San Diego’s two year old likes Elmosworld.com but is impatient with the download times of the Java pages. He wanted to know if there’s any way to cache the programs on his hard drive. After looking at the site it seems to me that many of the games are in Flash not Java. In either event, probably the easiest way to save the site to his hard drive is to use Internet Explorer’s offline browsing feature. Surf to the site then select Add to Favorites… from the IE Favorites menu. Check the box that says “Make available offline” then press the Customize… button. You may want to save pages several layers deep but remember the deeper you go the more space the files will take up on your hard drive and the longer it will take to save the site. Once the site is stored on disk you can open it from the bookmark without being online. It should load a LOT faster.

Robert in Los Angeles is looking at tablet PCs and wonders whether I prefer Acer, Fujitsu, or Toshiba tablets. All three are very good. I know people who prefer the Acer and Fujitsu, but I think the Toshiba is my favorite. It has great battery life and I like the capability of using a keyboard when handwriting is not enough. I have to say I’m not a big fan of tablet PCs in general, although there are some good uses for them. I guess I’m just a keyboard guy.

Attach:TH-42PHD5UY.jpg Δ Larry in Riverside wants to buy a 42-inch Panasonic plasma TV. He wonders, is it ok to buy by mail order? Sure as long as the retailer has a good return policy. Make sure your savings aren’t eaten up by shipping costs, though. Anyone have any recommendations for good mail-order TV retailers?

Mike in Fullerton needs to backup his Outlook Express email. You can use OE’s built-in Export function to export all the mail into a single file which you can then backup, or purchase an OE backup program. There are many on the market. Try the Outlook Express Backup Wizard. It’s $40 but there’s a free trial.

Tamar in LAis battling Internet Explorer - it just won’t let her clear her autocomplete form info. Normally you’d press the Clear button in the Internet Options→Tools dialog, but IE crashes every time she tries. Information for autocomplete forms is stored encrypted in the Windows registry. Try a program like TracksEraser to clear the form info.

Deborah in Claremont can’t email using MSN Explorer. She’s also running Norton Internet Security. Bingo. Uninstall Norton then purchase an inexpensive hardware router like the Linksys BEFSR41. It provides better security and causes far fewer problems.