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Sunday, December 24, 2006

11a-Noon

Q Don from Santa Monica - Memory card speed for cameras

What they’ve done is that they’ve upgraded compact flash cards so fast that they are faster than hard drives. Cameras have built in memory for a buffer, and then they save into the flash card. The speed of which the camera writes to the card is correlated to your camera’s buffer. The speed of which the camera writes to the card depends on the buffer and shutter speed, not entirely the speed of the flash card.

Q Paul from West LA - iSight on the PC

He wants to know about using the iSight on the Mac to talk to someone using a PC. Don’t even bother with anything. Use Skype. There is no close second. Another advantage Skype has is that it has no problems with routers. If your upstream bandwidth is good, you will be amazed.

Q Rick from Washington - SATA drive problems

He wants to know of Norton Ghost 2003 will recognize his SATA drives. Leo’s not entirely sure if it will work because that is a relatively old version. Check out Drive Snapshot. Look at Symantec’s website. Leo’s bet would be that you would have to upgrade.

Q Richard from Fullerton - Computer not working correctly after Windows Update

You want to scan with Windows Defender. All your errors are related to corrupt files or spyware infestation. You can also do a system repair. Stick in and boot off of your Windows XP installation. Once it sees your installation, you can select the repair feature.

Noon-1p

Q Larry - Creating a new website

He wants to create a new website for his synagogue that can be easily updated. Nowadays, dynamic pages are the big thing. Content management systems are programs that run on the web server. If you go to Leo’s web page, you are looking at pages that are created as you look at them. Dynamic pages separate the content from the data. When Leo did the redesign for TWiT.TV, he hired designers, then programmers who adapted the design to the site, and then the keys were handed to him. Drupal is an incredibly powerful CMS. These CMS engines have forms for you to enter in content. THe hard thing to do is try to portray what you want to the designer. Leo would look at other temples and nonprofits and how their sites are designed.

Q Mike from Sherman Oaks - Portion of television not being filled

Every television has a native resolution. You have to go to your computer and set it to output the native resolution of the TV. You’re getting black bars because the computer is outputting at a 4:3 aspect ratio. There may be a driver for the television. So long as you can get a 16:9 resolution out of the computer, you should be fine.

Q Gus - Encrypted Skype chats and calls

Skype says that all chats and calls are encrypted. However, you should know that Skype itself has a backdoor probably for law enforcement. If you’re worried about bad guys eavesdropping on calls, Leo believes it is completely secure.

Q Keith from Kansas - Creating a podcast

He wants to create a podcast about epilepsy. Leo would suggest doing something related to the podcast, like a website. If somebody prefers to receive their information by listening to it, they can. However, they should be able to read up on the information. To set up your website, look at Wordpress. It is free and easy to use. If you’re willing to spend some money, try out TypePad. Then, take the RSS feed and put it into Feedburner. Finally, put the Feedburner RSS on the blog for people to subscribe to. For USB microphones, a great choice would be a Rode or Plantronics headset.

Q Sean from Venice - Creating an all digital business

He wants to find an open source project that will help him with his project. Sugar is openly developed.

1–2p

Q Cynthia - Clearing out a computer

She wants to give away her computer, but wants to erase all data. Search for DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke). That will write over everything on the hard drive with 0s. Should you choose to be a kind and generous donor, you can reinstall the operating system or give the receiving person the discs.

Q Roger from Woodland Hills - Computer slowing down to a crawl

It seems like AOL is sucking up your process cycles. The system idle process isn’t anything. It may be a legitimate AOL process, but it is probably spyware. If the hard drive is flaky, your computer could be slowing down because of that. Also, try uninstalling AOL and then run a spyware and virus scan.

Q Michael from West Virginia - How to stop autocomplete

You go to the Internet Options, click content, and then clear all the autocomplete history.

Q Cannot listen to KFI stream in Firefox

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows Media Player.

Q Don from Rancho Santa Margarita - Getting a new Mac or PC

The question is if the emulation of Windows is good enough on the Mac. The answer is yes. You will probably be running Parallels which runs a very generic environment.

Q Lanny from Simi Valley - Mac Pro vs. PC w/ Core 2 Quadro/Apple Cinema Display calibration

The Mac Pro has two dual Xeons. In fact it is cheaper than a server from Dell or HP. Only buy the Mac if you’re going to use OSX. Buffered memory doesn’t improve performance, but you’ll want interleaved RAM.

Q Randy from Sherman Oaks - Tools to restore hard drives

It would be better to put the hard drive in a machine instead of an external box. Spinrite might chug for 48 hours, but it will reformat the drive underneath the data. It will try to move the data on bad sectors to new ones.

Show Audio

24 December 2006

26 December 2006