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Saturday 17 February 2007

Show notes updated 2/19 by Leo.

Our new IRC chat channel is #techguy. We have a new phone number, too. You can now call the show toll-free at:

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Show Audio

](please excuse the poor audio quality - I had some technical problems)

Tech News

Zillow claims to publish the true value of every home in the US. It’s great fun, but how accurate is it? According to a recent study of 1000 Zillow listings by the Wall St. Journal, it’s pretty good. With the exception of some real clunkers, nearly all the listings were within a few percentage points of actual sales prices. Combine that with programs like Pocket Express and its reverse directory, and Zabasearch, which digs through public information for dirt on anyone, and one wonders what privacy means in the Internet age.

The Hyatt hotel chain is now offering Blackberry massages for executives who spend too much time on their handheld email devices. The Sheraton hotel in Chicago will take your Blackberry from you and lock it up if you want. You’ll have to pry mine from my cold, dead, fingers.

A New York senator wants a law banning iPods and portable devices on the streets of New York City. He claims that people have died crossing the street because they weren’t paying attention. But this fellow is known for proposing kooky laws to get attention from the media.

A security expert, Bruce Schneier says that Windows Vista has copy protection features you don’t need. Furthermore, Microsoft is doing it not because Hollywood is making them, as they assert, but because they want to dominate online content distribution just as they have the computer desktop.

The AACS encryption that’s on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs has been cracked for real. That didn’t take long.

Does email drive you crazy? Are you getting too much? Worse, are you addicted to checking your mail. Electronic musician Moby, among others, are trying to give up email cold turkey. I shudder at the thought!

The new Windows Vista no longer allows you to use the Upgrade Version to perform a clean install. Fortunately, our Windws expert, Paul Thurott has a workaround. Looks like Microsoft made a boo-boo.

1. Don’t open email attachments; even if it’s from someone you know. If you do get something from someone you know, make sure that they really sent it to you. Email attachments are the number one way viruses and trojan horses get into your email. You might also want to turn off HTML email in Outlook and other programs. HTML emails are just as dangerous as rogue web sites, and can spread infections just by previewing them.

2. Don’t click links in email. That link could lead you to a phishing site, or the link may lead you to install malicious software. Copy and paste links into your browser, or type them in by hand instead. Another reason to disable HTML email - the HTML hides the real destination of that seemingly innocuous link.

3. Don’t download files from places you aren’t absolutely sure are safe. Stick with the well known sites. Teeneagers who use filesharing software like BitTorrent, Azureus, Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, and Limewire, often unwittingly download spyware and trojans. If you must, quarantine all downloads then scan them a few days later with an updated anti-virus.

4. Update your OS regularly! Turn on automatic updates in OS X and Windows. Apply all critical updates immediately. Criminals often create hacks within 24 hours of Microsoft’s patches (these are called zero day exploits), so you need to protect yourself the day the patches appear.

5. Use a firewall. The best firewall is a hardware router - the kind you use to share an internet connection. Even if they’re not billed as firewalls, they are, and they’re quite effective. I also recommend turning on your operating system’s firewall - even if you have a router - but I don’t recommend third-party software firewalls. They cause more problems than they solve.

6. Never run as an administrator in any operating system. Administrators have way too many priveleges that malicious people/code can take advantage of. Run as a limited user as much as possible. Windows Vista, Linux, and Mac OSX allow you to run a majority of features, but with some additional safety, as a limited user.

Hour 1

Q Sue from Carlsbad - Showbiz slowing down

She’s using a video editing program called Showbiz from Arcsoft to convert tapes to DVD. She has 145 edits in a 15 minute video and the software is beginning to choke. Well no wonder! You need a fast hard drive and a 2Ghz+ CPU for speedy video editing, but good software will help, too. Showbiz is not my first choice. I think you’ll get better results with Adobe’s Premiere Elements.

Q Steve from Agora Hills - LCOS Televisions

He wants to know why Leo likes JVC’s HD-ILA televisions over Sony’s LCoS rear projection units. Both are good. LCoS or liquid crystal on silicon has some advantages over tradition LCD rear projection sets - chiefly the lack of the so-called “screen door effect.” That’s those lines you see around each pixel. LCoS has a much smoother appearance.

The JVC sets are less expensive than the Sony sets, and offer an excellent picture. The D-ILA chip does a great job of upscaling lower resolution video. That’s important to you if you watch a lot of standard definition television (and we all still do). It’s a good idea before you buy an HDTV to check out how normal TV looks on it. Some sets do a surprisingly bad job of upscaling.

Q Cliff from Santa Barbara - Looking for a new smartphone and ultralight notebook

Choosing a smartphone has a lot to do with your carrier and what you want to do with it.

If email is the most important application for your smartphone (after phone calls, that is) the Blackberry is the way to go I like the 8700 and the new 8800 looks great. We’ll have a review from Ron Rosberg, the Gadget Hound, next week.

If you want the best possible interoperability with Windows, try a Windows Mobile-based phone like the T-Mobile Dash and the Motorola Q.

The Blackberry is traditionally not a very good media device. If you want a camera with a Blackberry, there’s the Pearl, but I prefer a QWERTY keyboard to that weird hybrid on the Pearl. The new 8800 doesn’t have a camera, but it does play audio.

As for the notebook, you might want to look at a tablet convertible. Our caller wanted to use the notebook to show screens to clients. The tablet is great for that because you can hide the keyboard and annotate your presentation with the stylus.

Lenovo’s X60 Thinkpad convertible tablets are a good choice. However, if you’re not up to buying from the Chinese, take a look at Toshiba Portege R400. I like Dell notebooks a lot, too. I just bought an XPS M1210 for Vista and it’s very nice.

Q Paul from Laguna Nigel - Online math tutoring

AOL has a great homework helper service, but I don’t have any direct experience with these new online tutor sites from India, etc. Anyone have any input?

Q Pete from Manchester - Buying a Mac Pro

Pete was sitting on the Apple web page, ready to press the BUY button, but before he does he wants to know if he should buy Apple RAM or save money buying third-party RAM. In the past I’ve recommended doing just that because of Apple’s pricing. Apple is getting better, but after checking the most current prices, it still makes sense buying RAM from someone else, especially if you don’t mind installing it yourself.

For example, beefing up the MacPro to 4GB of RAM costs $1099 from Apple. The same RAM from Crucial is $980. From TransIntl it’s $678. I’ve bought lots of Apple memory from TransIntl and can recommend them.

Adding a gig of RAM to the iMac costs $175 from Apple, $100 from TransIntl, but of course you’ll have to install it yourself.

Q Jeff from Temecula - my video file is missing

He’s created a video podcast, but the link is showing up as a 404 when he clicks it. That means that there’s no file there - in all likelihood the link is incorrect. Check it again. I recommend using an RSS feed generator when creating podcast feeds. For Mac users, try Feeder and on Windows, FeedForAll.

Hour 2

Q Alex from San Bernadino - stepping up to HDTV

Alex is ready to step up to HDTV and he has two questions: LCD vs Plasma and BluRay vs HD-DVD.

Plasmas look great, especially in a darkened room. When it comes to plasma remember the two Ps: Pioneer and Panasonic. Prices are down dramatically. I purchased the 50″ Pioneer HD5070 for around $3000 and have been very happy with it. LCD is good for day to day use in brighter rooms. I recommend Sharp Aquos LCDs.

Who’s going to win the HiDef DVD war? These days my money is on HD-DVD. HD-DVD players are much cheaper than Blu-Ray players unless you buy them as part of a gaming system, the Xbox 360 has a $200 HD-DVD add-on. The Playstation 3 comes with a BluRay player. You should consider which format has more of the movies you want.

LG does make a dual-format player for a whopping $1200.

Q Victor from Anaheim - what’s the best cell provider

That depends on what you’re looking for.

• If you’re looking for the best coverage Verizon is tops with Cingular a close second
• High speed data? Verizon and Sprint win there with their EVDO technology. HSDPA is coming soon and that will be even faster.
• If you travel outside of the US, you are going to want a GSM phone. That means T-Mobile or Cingular.
• Looking for the coolest phones? T-Mobile has the edge there, but if there’s a specific phone you want check to see which carriers have it.

Q Enrique from Pomona - How much hardware do I need for Vista

I like Vista a lot. It’s prettier and more secure. It is pretty demanding on hardware, though, especially if you want the cool looking Aero interface. It should run fine on any machine with 512MB of RAM and a 1+ Ghz processor. For best results get 1GB of RAM, a 2+ GHz processor, and a fast video card with at least 128MB of RAM (more video RAM means you can run at higher resolutions).

Q Jeff - looking for a USB camera for Macintosh

OS X will support any Firewire camera, including your DV camcorder, but there aren’t many good USB choices. Ecamm sells a USB driver that should work with most USB cameras. They also sell their own camera.

Jon Kingston writes with a free recommendation: the open source Maccam. He says it works great with his $20 Creative webcam.

Hour 3

Q XP and Linux on the same laptop

Our caller wants to run Ubuntu Linux on her desktop, XP on her laptop, and occasionally connect the laptop to the PC to run Ubuntu on the laptop screen. You could use RealVNC to do this, but the performance is going to be poor. Better to use Ubuntu to insall a dual-boot on the laptop, so you can run both Windows and Linux on the same machine. Ubuntu can automatically partition your laptop hard drive and install itself on the second parition, to create a dual-boot system.

Q Sergio - 32bit vs. 64bit processor

He wants a 64-bit processor. Nearly any processor you can buy today is 64-bit, but that’s not all that important. Unless you need more than 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit system is fine for most uses. Better in most cases, in fact. I do not recommend the 64-bit versions of Windows, XP or Vista. There are just too many hardware and software compatibility issues.

Q Matt from Hemet - My computer is spontaneously waking from hibernation at 1:32am

The fact that it happens at exactly the same time every morning is a little weird. I’d suspect that there’s some program that’s running on a schedule and is waking your system up at 1:32a. Check to see what it’s doing when it wakes up - that might be an indicator of what woke it up. You are probably getting miniscule power outages at 1:32am. This induces a reboot in the system because computers are very susceptible to even the smallest power changes.

Q Storm from Los Angeles - WDS not working with new 802.11n Airport Extreme

He uses the Airport Express units to extend the range of his Airport network. When he replaced his old Airport Extreme with Apple’s new 802.11n Extreme, the WDS stopped working. Apple’s own manuals say the old Express routers should work fine with the new N router, but you will have to recreate your network from scratch. Instructions are available for download (as a PDF) from http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/DesigningAirPortExtreme802.11nNetworks.pdf.

Q Bill from Rancho Cucamonga - Remote Desktop problems

He has a computer at work and a computer at home, but can’t get Remote Desktop working on the Internet. It works when he’s inside the LAN, just not over the Internet. That’s almost always because a router is blocking incoming Remote Desktop traffic. You’ll need to forward TCP port 3389 - you’ll find instructions here. If you still can’t connect, consider putting your systems into the router’s DMZ.