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Saturday 3 November 2007

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Scott Wilkinson - The digital switchover

• The change isn’t until 2009
• You will have to get a new digital box from your cable company
• The cable cards will be bi-directional (o.c.a.p)
• All new Tivo boxes have card slots
• The new cable cards will be multi-stream, so it will have picture in picture and record while you watch another channel
• Some new TV’s have card slots
• FCC mandates that cable companies do offer these cards
• The card is about the size of a credit card
• All this will be obsolete in a few years because of new technologies
• Look for a TV that supports the 2.0 card and also bi-direction

Tech News

Walmart for reasons Leo is not sure about has the Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD Player on sale for $99 this weekend. Surely at a loss. There’s alot of HD-DVD Players on the market and this is a good player and a great deal. However you may want to call the store ahead to make sure they have them on sale.

Will there be a Bluray DVD player soon? You might want to rent the HD-DVD’s, not buy them as no one can be sure who’s going to win the war between the formats.

Time Magazine has called the iPhone the invention of the year. Even the writer has apologized for the article and has mentioned the problems with it. He even wrote we’re sick on hearing about it. However Time Magazine said it was the iPhone the best invention of the year. Here’s the reasons:

1. The iPhone is pretty
2. It’s touchy-feely
3. It will make other phones better
4. It’s not a phone, it’s a platform
5. It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come

The best thing about it? It will make other phones better. We’re already seeing other phones with new ideas and technologies. For that reason alone, Leo thinks the iPhone is the best phone of the year. It’s pushing other companies to do something.

There’s a new Mac Trojan in the wild. Theres a lot of talk that Leopard doesn’t handle the firewall very well. If you have Leopard you should absolutely go into the security settings and make sure that you have it set to “block all traffic unless I approve”. You can find some suggestions to make protect yourself better at this site.

The Google Phone (gPhone) is coming. China’s E28 is going to be Google phone manufacturer. The phone is going to be Linux based. In a way, it makes sense for Google to enter the cell market. Google must be looking there at the cell phone business. What other business charges you when you want to stop doing business? If someone did a decent job, the cell phone companies would collapse like a house of cards. If it was free but had ads on it, would you buy it?

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Hour 1

Q Nina in Florida - Convince my dad Dial Up is better than Broadband!

You can still change your IP address with Broadband as well. What you should do is invite your dad over to use your broadband connection and he’ll see that you can actually get to a website in under 30 seconds.

First thing is, he’s not any safer on Dial up than he is on Broadband. All someone has to do is get a Trojan horse on your system. It’s no different on Dial up or high speed. If it’s a Trojan, it still sends the passwords off when he’s online.

Dial up doesn’t protect you in any way. No one cares what his IP address is. Hackers aren’t going for 95.690.73.12, they have software that scans the Internet. When he gets high speed he’ll be safer, you’ll get a router that protects you because it has a firewall. Right now he doesn’t have that hardware firewall, he’s bare metal. Hackers are going after everyone.

This is a common misconception. Dial up is actually slower. You still get a different IP address on a high speed modem frequently. If you open attachments, or clicking on links it doesn’t matter if your on Dial up or Broadband. It’s you. You need to be secure.

If he really wants to be safe while he’s on a broadband connection, when he gets off line, turn off the connection. It’s the same thing.

Q Converting Copy Protected Music

If you go to the Hymn Project site, you can get information on converting the music to non-copy protected music. Try buying music from the Amazon music store, which is unprotected 256kb MP3. In many cases, it’s CHEAPER than iTunes.

iTunes is too convenient, and so people generally put up with the quality. When people get a non Apple MP3 player, and people can’t put their music on it, they will start going to Amazon.

The labels are scared about high quality copies. Ripping the protection, may be illegal.

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Hour 2

Q Ralf from Santa Anna - Getting a Spanish OS

If he wants a Windows machine, let him get it. There’s a site that sells international versions of Windows. It has the Spanish language version on it. However you may want to get it from a vender in another country. He won’t have local support and it may cost a little extra. Call Dell and they should be able to get a Spanish version sent out to you.

Q Linda from California - Getting good pictures of beads

You’ll probably want to get a Macro focus lenes. You’ll have to take a look at the picture on your computer to get good color.

Leo thinks you would get the best results with a digital SLR. Most of the newer Digital SLR cameras come with the ability to add new macro lenses. The Canon comes with one lense but you can get more. If you get the light box, you’ll get 3 point lighting with a great looking picture, and it gives you a seamless backdrop. The SLR will also allow you to increase the aperture so you get more crisp pictures.

Take a look at Etsy.com for selling your photo’s. It’s like eBay, but for artwork.

Q Meridith from California - Copying Vinyl to your computer

You’ll need a USB Turntable. There is an ION Turntable on Amazon for $100. For one that’s a little more expensive, you can get one from Newmark. Stanton ones are the most expensive, they make a USB turntable.

The software these come with is pretty basic. Get Magix Audio Cleaner which is $40. This will record it and also take out pops and hiss from the sound files for you.

Q John from Georgia - Sony format doesn’t work in iMovie

You need to get Visual Hub which is $23, and does a great job. MPEG 1 is a very strange format. It often looks better after the conversion with Visual Hub. Leo often uses it to change the video he downloads into a format that Quicktime and his iPod can use.

Q Ryan in California - Wants to import Video from DV Cam using USB

You really need to use Firewire. Pinnacle has cards that allow you to do Firewall Video in. Pinnacle has a broad product line that allows you to do so much. Look at the Studio/Movie Box. You want a built in hardware DSP to do the video formatting.

Running it in Windows is also going to cause it to have frame loss.

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Hour 3

Q Bob from Virginia - USB drive not working

It is normal for a modern PC to have a power switch for the USB at the front. There may be a setting in the BIOS or there may be a problem with the motherboard. It is true that there is always power on an ATX Motherboard.

Q Joe in Tennessee - Is it possible to add more hard drive space to my DTV?

You should look at Weaknees who do upgrades for almost everything. It’s usually easy to open up the case and put a new hard drive in there. They do sell the HR20 with up to 240 HD Hours. That’s a large hard drive. A 500GB upgrade would be $299. A TB Drive would be $600.

To pull video off it, you need to go to the Deal Database Forums. There is however not really a way to do it digitally from the HR20, however you can do it using Analog. You will need to get an analog video card. Frankly on most things, it’s darned good from analog. .

Q Leslie from San Diego - Can I use my phone as a modem on my Laptop?

Yes, Sprint’s EVDO is a good speed. You shouldn’t need any extra software. You can just plug it in. Otherwise use the software your phone came with, that usually has an internet application on there.

You’ll need to use your phone as a Data device, and use the flat rate data plan. You may need to call Sprint and make sure you can use it as a data device, they may charge you a little extra.

Q Wayne from Texas - Should I partition my drive for a scratch disk?

Yeah it’s not a bad idea at all because Photoshop uses a lot of Memory. The drives will sleep and wake up when they are needed. The most important thing is to turn the Drive off. Just make sure the system doesn’t go to sleep.

Q Chris in California - How do I get video to my Widescreen TV?

Try using Visual Hub to convert it. When iTunes converts it for your Apple TV, it doesn’t convert it to 1080p. Try out Visual Hub, it should convert it just fine for you.

If you re-encode the video at this quality, the Apple TV will handle it. 720p is the max it can handle. 1280×720 @ 24FPS AVG bitrate of 5 mbps = Apple TV spec

Q Kyle in Michigan - Building a home media center

The problem with motherboard based RAID is the fact it’s software based. You want a hardware RAID system, their hard wearing and don’t fail often.

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