Saturday, November 11, 2006
Tech News
Office 2007 has gone “gold master” or “Ready to Manufacture” (RTM).
Windows Vista has also gone RTM.
Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin has told a reporter that he thinks Vista is good enough for his 7-year old son to use it without an antivirus!
David Ewalt has given reasons as to why Microsoft’s Zune stinks.
11a-Noon
Q Marty from Sherman Oaks - Utility to recover glitched files from SD cards
All flash is basically the same as an IDE hard drive. What I would do is get the data off and then try to repair it. If a card begins to get flaky on you, it’s going to die. PCInspector.de has a tool to recover files.
Q Jerome from San Diego - 2 Antiviruses on one computer
He is having conflicts between the two programs. When you download virus definitions, you’re downloading virus signatures. AVG is seeing NOD32’s signatures and attempting to modifty them. When NOD32 sees AVG trying to change the files, it things AVG is a virus. Now, you have a huge conflict. You have one choice and one choice only: reinstall Windows.
Q Don from Capistrano Beach - Looking for a new digital camera
I love the Canon digital cameras and Canon Pixma printers. The price you’re getting is very, very low. It probably is a good deal. I just don’t know what model you’re talking about.
Q Micah from Iowa - How to put audiobooks into the iTunes Audiobooks section
I think audiobooks purchased from Audible go into the audiobooks section. Change the genre to Audiobook and make sure it is an AAC file. Also, make sure you make it bookmarkable.
Q Penny from Costa Mesa - Looking for a low-end camcorder/Getting a Nintendo Wii
Her budget is $250. Look at camcorderinfo.com. They talk about the Panasonic PV-GS19. Also, look at the Canon ZR Series.
Try the Wii locator
tool which will tell you how many units
Noon-1p
Q John - Learning about computers
Look at the Dummy or the Missing Manual books. Also look at the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Windows XP. I don’t think you’ll have too much a problem. You can go out and buy a cheap USB mouse.
Q Ron from Sherman Oaks - Keep the PowerMac G5?
His lease is almost over on his PowerMac. You should keep it because Photoshop is not a universal binary yet. However, the Intel Macs are much faster.
Q Chris from Santa Clarita - Prey to phishing
eBay never sends out emails saying that your account has been hijacked. Now the hijackers have all your information that you entered on the phony website. I’d suggest putting a fraud alert on your credit cards.
Q Mike from Pasadena - RAW formats/High def camcorders
There are multitudes of RAW formats. I think you just have to update the RAW plugin for Photoshop.
Canon and
Sony both make $1200 HD camcorders. Low light performance is not that great however.
Q Frank from Valencia - Can’t get rid of icons on the desktop
It seems like the computer thinks that the files are still in use. I’m going to recommend Moveonboot which will delete the files before Windows even starts.
1–2p
Q Eric from Ontario - Enterprise level VOiP Switch
I have no idea because I’m not an expert on the topic.
Q Cindy from Ridando Beach - Can’t read SD card
She’s only getting her horizontally oriented pictures and no longer can read the SD card. It sounds like the card got messed up. You could probably format and recover it. A good free program can be found at PCInspector.de.
Q Lloyd from San Diego - Spyware
Spyware is very close to “virus-ware”. It seems that you don’t have an antivirus program on your computer. The people who create these programs are very clever. Their main goal is to prevent you from removing this software and they have succeeded. In the future, be very very careful. You’re smart to use Firefox. At this point, my best advice would be to back up and reinstall Windows.
Q Jeff from Torrence - Handhelds getting infected with spyware?
His current computer is infested with spyware and he has bought a new computer. He wants to know if any of the spyware may be carried along on his Palm device to the new computer. I doubt anybody is spending the effort to implement a system like that. On the topic of Dell vs. Gateway, I’d recommend Dell. However, I have to disclaim that Dell is a sponsor of my podcast network.
Q Mike from West Los Angeles - How to keep Num Lock off at boot
Do a search in the registory for “initial keyboard indicators”. If it is set at 0, your problem will not occur.
Q Carl from Ohio - Review of the Sony
You can put almost any kind of text-type file, but you can also put pictures and audio files on there. It only uses the battery when changing pages. Moreover, the screen is just as good as reading a real book. Also, you are able to change various aspects of the text.
Q Caesar from Chula Vista - Antivirus
I’m not a fan of Norton of McAfee. The free ones are okay. I have to say, though, that paid ones work better. Our sponsor NOD32 is a great solution. Another great solution is Microsoft’s own Windows Live Onecare.
Chat Logs and Show Audio
11 November 2006
In Leo’s Distortion Field World: Those who “criticize” Leo = Spammers. Clearly, Leo must be a “Dem”
13:14 by anonymous.
hello
Darned spammers ruin everything
John is probably unknowingly dragging a second finger on his track pad causing his cursor to jump around as he described.
In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, most often in the form of posting inflammatory, off-topic, or otherwise inappropriate messages
Leo..
CompuPic s/w from Photodex has a lossless rotate capability. It’s great s/w by the way - many image manipulation capabilities. Even creates web pages fitting many different themes. I’ve been using it for years.
In reference to the PoE VoIP switches, look at the HP ProCurve 5300xl series switches. They’re expandable, allow for PoE, highly configurable, firmware updates are free and come with a lifetime hardware warranty. Cisco offers similar switches, but they cost much more, dont offer the same hardware warranty & firmware updates without a valid maintenance agreement, which will cost you money every year.
Frank from Valencia - Can’t get rid of icons on the desktop
Another freeware program that works great and integrates into the Windows shell, plus it will try ad unlock the handle or program that is using the item you are wanting to get rid of.
UNLOCKER
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
—Steve
www.marintech.net
13:42 by anonymous.
I noticed that nothing much has been said about Aplle but so much has been going on this week. For example, the core 2 duo being installed in the regular consumer Macbooks soon after the Macbook Pros. Wonder if today is a PC day versus a Mac day?
Leo, yes Spyware is very difficult to get rid of, however, I’ve had great success with the following programs which works great, and as a last resort I will format (but rarely have to)
SuperAntiSpware = www.superantispyware.com
(Free and paid versions)
Public AV - You will have to search the net to get this and update it.
Microsoft Defender
SpyBot.
HiJack This
—Steve
www.marintech.net
13:44 by anonymous.
I know he knows. Talked about Nitendos WII, Sony playstation 3, the Microsoft’s XBox 360 whatever but not too much Apple
Also the Sony Reader can play back unprotected AAC { iTune/iPod ).
No. You can play off off the card…
Its the easy to read a book on!
Leo you got to get one!
Switches - what NOT to buy. We replaced our dead Cisco switches with mail order SMC switches. We had nothing but trouble. Support was not stellar. We finally detemined that the WRONG switches had been packed in the boxes at the factory! We knew they didnt match the pic but thought they were a new verson.
Have Ubuntu disc, do I have to format drive to make it load and run? I have Win.98 SE,lots of gigs,Mems, and followed directions for installing, everything is go, but it never finishes the installation, just loads many files and a beautiful brown window with a narrow logo, then nothing! help!
Leo! I offer advice on a good photo recover program that I have used and you REMOVE it! Why? If you don’t want us to name programs, what’s the point? I am in no way affiliated with the vendor.
Sony Reader - one flaw that I noticed with the demo at the bookstore is that there is a noticable delay when turning pages - annoying when you are reading and have to stop longer than with a printed book. I know it sounds picky but try it for yourself!
15:54 by .
Hey MD Girl, Don’t you realize that by posting your comments about the troll you are only encouraging it to show up again?? Let’s leave well enough alone and hopefully it will not come around again..
When will the last several podcasts (oh, okay, NETcasts) be posted?
20:05 by dt?.
all i asked was a simple question.is to set a dos command to print a list of my mp3 files.and everybody calls me a mule.cuz i don’t want to download any software from the net.gee whats this world coming to????all people do is call them names…now i know why this world in deep*****.ps i am not a download junkie
23:31 by anonymous.
About that SD card. I had a similar problem with a CompactFlash card many years ago. This is going to sound really strange.
I have an old, old Polaroid digital camera that came with an 8MB CompactFlash card. Since I can never find the funky cable (as well as the AC power brick) to hook the thing up to the computer, I always just yank the CompactFlash from the camera and put it in a memory card reader.
One day, I had the memory card reader hooked up a Macintosh, downloaded all the pictures, then re-initialized the card with the Macintosh. This was either OS 8.5ish or very early OS 9. As soon as I initialized the flash card with the Mac, neither the camera nor the Windows 98 PC would touch it again. I got the same error from the camera that she reported. I don’t recall how Windows 98 behaved. I put the thing on the shelf, because I was doing something else with the Mac and no longer had MacOS installed on it (I’ve fiddled with both Linux and NetBSD on the thing). I had told the Mac to initialize it as a PC disk, so I knew it wasn’t something like using the MacOS filesystem instead of FAT.
A couple of months later, I once again had MacOS on the Mac and decided to take a look at the memory card. The Mac had no trouble manipulating the card; I could put files on it and read them back just fine.
I noticed that the card was mounted with a volume name like “New Disk”. The light bulb went on, and I renamed the volume, taking the space out.
As soon as I took the space out of the volume name, both the camera and Windows 98 were happy again.
Like I said, it sounds strange, but it’s something to look into.
12 November 2006
00:35 by Mike.
dt,
I’m more comfortable with Unix, where the command would be ls, but I know there’s a DOS equivalent. It’s dir.
All you need to do is change to the relevant directory and use that command, together with an option to include subdirectories. I guess you’d want to send the output to a text-file, too. All the relevant syntax for “dir” is here - took me 30 seconds tops to find it in Google:
http://www.computerhope.com/dirhlp.htm
As for “downloads”, that depends on the source. It’s certainly a bad idea to download and install software from untrusted sources. But it is possible to download software that’ll produce you a listing of an audio library from Microsoft itself. And if you can’t trust Microsoft why would you be using Microsoft software at all?
00:53 by Mike.
MD girl,
Yeah, but over at the twit site, Leo’s Windows Weekly post with Paul Thurrott managed to attract a Linux fanboy. These darn fanboys are everywhere. Among the other choice comments was that open source software was “better engineered”. One can’t help reflecting that this must be why Open Office is more bloated and significantly slower and less stable than Office - not to mention that security researchers have suggested that its macros are an accident waiting to happen. And Open Office is the exception in that it has had large numbers of full-time employees from Sun and other companies working on it over a period of years. To be sure it is a very credible effort, and it has the advantage that it can save into an open format. But, of course, it is not as well-engineered as Office, which has had considerably more professional man-hours put into it.
The idea that a couple of guys, who may be rank amateurs, putting in a couple of hours in the evening (and maybe occasionally getting sent a patch or two from a third-party) - which is what most open-source projects (and *most* don’t last very long) amount to - are writing “better engineered” code than professionals working full-time is frankly insulting to said professionals. More to the point, it’s not true.
I use a variety of OSes myself. What I think is that people should be aware of both the advantages and the drawbacks of different choices and use what suits their purposes and what they like. This is, in effect, the approach Leo takes. Such a choice is no-one else’s business, and the fanboys, whether they be Mac fanboys, Windows fanboys, or Linux fanboys, should put a sock in it - and learn to be more truthful.
