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Sunday 30 September 2007

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Dr Rick Web Alber - Google Sky View

• In the new Google Earth you can click View and click “Switch to Sky”
• What you get is a way to view the stars and planets
• It’s very easy to use
• Allows you to explore the universe. When you first view it, it’s kind of bland, but you can zoom in and put layers on it
• Lots of information embedded into it and you can view deeper and deeper
• Has lots of pictures from the Hubble telescope

Ron Rosberg - This weeks gadgets

Canon “All in one” printer Pixma MP970

Retail $299
Check Web for best price

Kodak EasyShare12.4 Megapixels HD 16 x 9 Digital Camera V1253
Available in Black or White

Retail $299
On Web as low as $235

High Quality MaHa Powerex AA & AAA Rechargeable Batteries
Distributor has them on sale

Maha Advanced Rechargeable Battery Charger MH-C9000
Distributor has it on Sale for the Retail Price of $69.95

Tech News

No one believed Apple when they said “No 3rd Party applications on the iPhone! Don’t try to unlock it, it’s a 2 year contract with AT&T” yet we did. Now Apple did the unthinkable happened. Apple bricked them.

People in places that couldn’t get the iPhone (including Vermont) and international countries unlocked their iPhones using a free program. So Apple sent a patch down and broke the phone. They made it unusable. It’s bricked.

Leo thinks breaking someones personal property is wrong. When people were stealing DirectTV, the people at DirectTV sent down an update that broke the phoney cards, but you could go back to DirectTV and you could apologize and subscribe.

The guys however at the iPhone Dev Team have found a way to unbrick the iPhone. Steve Jobs himself said it was a Cat and Mouse game while in the London Apple conference.

Should a company have the right to delete and destroy your property? No, they have the right to go out and sue you, but not destroy your personal property. When a company attempts to criminalize it’s users for doing things, it’s a slippery slope. You make deals with AT&T and your partners, and your forced to do things with your customers, and their wrong. Not illegal, but immoral.

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Hour 1

Q Matthew in Alberta - Can I log into my PC from my Mac and get files?

Yes, it may be a little slow, but you can share folders on the Windows machine, and then you can type the address into the Mac which is given to you when you setup the folder on Windows.

If you only want to do it now and again, then use a USB thumb drive, that does take a little work. Leo has a Mac pro, a Gateway XP machine, a HP Tablet PC all on the same gigabit network using Cat6 cables, and then he shares it all out.

Depending on how much desk space you have you can use Synergy, and you can use the same mouse on all three. With the three screens and the one keyboard and mouse it means it feels like one desktop.

Synergy is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Q Denise in California - Circle with a slash on computer

Computer can’t find the operating system. It may mean the hard drive is getting a little flaky.

It’s definitely a problem in the boot up. It’s basically a kernel panic. The operating system crashed. It’s really nothing to worry about.

It’s very rare to have kernel panics in modern operating systems, including OSX, XP, Vista and most Linux OS’s, in order to get a kernel panic you have to have something really serious to go on. It could be any number of things like a driver, or a voltage flux.

You can find an article from Apple here.

Q Bob - How can I find out if a company really exists?

Leo would be very very sceptical about websites. There is a BBB online (Better Business Beuro).

You could also use Whois to find out their registrar information. Some people do hide their information. But you can still find out their registrar and you can contact them and they will forward the information.

If it is however a business, don’t give them any money unless they have publicly visible information.

If their asking for a credit or debit card, then you should be able to look at the certificate and that will tell you who they are.

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Hour 2

Q Rochell in Orange County, CA - Problems with Outlook & Word 2003 in Vista

Stop using Word as your editor in Outlook, use Outlook’s editor and see if that fixes it. Another thing you could try is try pressing Ctrl + V to see if it’s on the clipboard.

It may also be a driver refresh error. So make sure you have the latest Video drivers for your card. You might want to get one of your local computer guru’s in. Leo thinks it’s probably a video driver issue as it’s not real text, just a ghost image. Tell them to check if eMachines has released an update for that model or video card.

You could also try disabling Video acceleration, which is actually Overlay Video.

Q Paul in Ohio - Lots of dropout with the KFI stream

It may be a problem with their bandwidth issue. What your doing when you reset your cable modem, it refreshing it. Telling it to get all the settings again. A stream is just a big download to the cable company. Unfortunately are doing alot of interesting things behind the scene to your signal.

One way to diagnose this is to just reboot your modem, and if that works then it’s your cable company. Also try just rebooting the router.

Q Norm in San Fransisco - Desktop having error messages

All of the symptoms you have said are symptoms your hard drive is about to die. Your hard drive is slowly failing and this is a good time to see if you can get a program like Spinrite to check the drive and see if you can get more life out of it.

Otherwise, you should take this chance to go out and go and buy a new hard drive.

You’ve made the right choice by getting a new system.

Q Chris from San Diago - Drive won’t read game

Sims 2 has copy protection on it. Most drives can handle that protection, but hers can’t. The copy protection is non-standard and so alot of drives can’t read it.

If the store won’t take it back, then go to Maxis or EA and say “your crappy copy protection won’t work… I want my money back or a disk that works in my drive”.

Also make sure your using a DVD drive.

Q Tony in Santa Monica - Wants to edit PDF brochures

PDF’s are designed to stop people from editing it. The idea is, it’s an unmodifiable documents and that’s exactly what PDF’s are designed to do.

One thing you might want to try it copying the text and images into a word processor or DTP. Try out FoxIT PDF Editor which is actually better than Adobe’s own software.

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Hour 3

Q DC - Error with email on Craigslist

Make sure you have a properly typed address. It’s the error you would get from
Outlook if there’s a malformed email address, so make sure you have the right address.

Also the person your trying to send it to may have put a typo in their own address. There’s really nothing you can do about it, if they have typed the wrong email address.

Q James in Richmond, VA - DVD’s to AVI’s for company Intranet

Leo suggests using a piece of software called Handbrake which is free and does a great job. It takes that VOB format and converts it to an AVI file. What it does is rips the DVD.

You might want to try Nero or AVI-2-DVD.

Q Nicole in Texas - Problem with Joomla CMS

It sounds like a problem with the Joomla template your using. You should ask with the Joomla support forums.

You could also try Wordpress which is very easy to work with and also Drupal.

Q Sandy - Should I dump Ad-Aware and Norton?

First of all, yes you should have Antispyware and Antivirus on your system. Microsoft Defender is free and is very good, and a good free antivirus is AVG.

The most important thing is to change your behaviour. It takes 24 hours for antivirus companies to release a fix after I virus has started. Alot of security experts don’t use any security software. They may use a router, but no antivirus or spyware software.

If you get a link in an email, don’t click it. Don’t open attachments. Turn on Automatic Updates because a minute an update goes out, hackers know what the problem is. If your on Windows XP then use Firefox. If your on Vista, then use IE7 with protection turned on.

Make sure you backup regularly. Don’t download files off the internet or P2P programs such as Kazaa or Limewire which teenagers tend to do alot.

No Antivirus will protect you against bad behaviour.

Q Garheart in California - XP won’t install program

Make sure you have enough space free on the hard drive. The next thing to do is go to the Virtual Memory settings. You can do this by right clicking on My Computer, clicking Properties and click on Advanced, then click settings under Performace and set the virtual memory to automatic. Make sure you have Windows automatically manage the memory. Don’t tell it what drive, and don’t set a max or a minumum.

Q Brian in Los Angeles - Computer not accessible to the network

Check all your firewalls to allow the other systems to access it. Temporarily disable them, and if it works then make sure that you set them to allow Windows file sharing.

Take a look at Practically Networked which is a networking support site.

Q Virginia - Permissions change when moving folder.

The operating system has a default permissions setting that it will set. For some reason this default permissions setting is being a little tight.

Leo doesn’t know why this is doing it in XP, and it seems very odd. There is an article you can find at the Microsoft site that shows you how to change the settings. Follow the instructions carefully.

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