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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday 10 November 2007
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Scott Wilkinson
Scott pays a visit to the Goldmund high-end audio demo home.
Scott got a chance to speak to the guys at Goldman. They’ve started making speakers, which are very expensive. Consumers need to look for the best bang for the buck, but here we’re looking at unlimited bucks.
They had a very interesting home theater system. 10 sub-woofers, and 7 speakers. These speakers rock your chair as you watch. 250w per channel on over 14 channels. This really does the job with speakers surrounding you.
This particular theater will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. They used a projector from a company called Projection Design. The black level wasn’t very high, and there was quite a bit of noise.
When you buy a system like this, someone is going to fly from Europe and install it for you, and tweak it. This isn’t something you get a manual for or call the GeekSquad.
Dick Debartolo - T-Qualizer
The T-Qualizer is a t-shirt with a built in “graphic equalizer” panel that is sound sensitive. As the music beats, the shirt’s equalizer lights up to the beat of the music. Great for concerts, raves, parties or just to impress your mates.
Our T-Qualizer shirt is made from 100% cotton, beware of inferior shirts made with polyester. It has a fully functional EL (Electro Luminescence) panel with a battery pack and sound sensor that snuggles discretely into a pocket inside the shirt.
Steve Gibson - IE Password Remembering
- There is a freeware program called IE Passview which allows you to view all the Internet Explorer Passwords
- IE Passview also allows you to delete all your passwords however
- If someone has physical access to your machine for even a few minutes, they can grab all your passwords
- Turn off your browser’s memorizing features
- Leo recommends RoboForm which is highly secure and is available for your USB Stick
- For the Mac, use OnePassword, which does cost money unlike RoboForm, however is much more secure than Safari and KeyChain
Tech News
Leo just got back from Blog World. It was the first Blog World and was held in Las Vegas. Alot of the people there were interested in podcasting. That’s the main reason Leo was there.
There has been a lot of talk about the Google Phone. They say that Summer next year they will have the first HTC handset. Google wants to get into this market because their business is advertising. Leo does think Google is very interesting and perhaps the most exciting tech company out there at the moment. Google wants to be everywhere you are. They want to be in your hand, in your pocket and in front of you.
One thing that may be on the GPhone is a little button that shows near by stores, shows their opening times and customer reviews. It may even be part of Google Maps. Google makes money of course because it’s advertising based.
Google also announced OpenSocial. The idea is “open widget”. It’s a platform of Widgets that you can put on any of your profiles on many social networking sites. Also the idea is that you have all your info synced between many sites. In time, maybe 10 years from now, everyone will have a website.
Hour 1
Q Belle in Los Angeles - Formatting hard drive and New Computer
You can use a program called “Darik’s Boot n Nuke”. It’ll wipe everything on that hard drive. That’s available from dban.sourceforge.net.
Gigahertz really don’t make that much difference these days. You really want a bigger hard drive and a faster hard drive, bigger screen and more RAM. You’ll want about 2gb of RAM.
Canon Pixma’s line of Inkjet’s are excellent for photo’s on a Mac. Epson’s are for the really high quality photo prints.
Q Rob in California - UTM Devices
A UTM is a Unified Threat Management. The iPhantom is really more for Businesses who don’t have an IT Department. One way to go very cheaply is Astaro. It’s free for home users and is Linux based. It’s not for everyone, as it is pretty hard core but worth it if you have some time to set it up.
Astaro makes high-end software for businesses. However they have a free home version. It’s an anti virus, content filter, it’s a VPN server, it does PGP encryption transparently, antispam, firewall, intrusion protection.
There’s also a VMWare appliance that you can run it on.
Hour 2
Q Peter in Brooklyn, NY - DVD to AVI
Handbrake is a ripper. Most commercial DVD’s have protection, and you need to get around it. Many many programs can do that. The next step is to take the VOB files, and turn them into an AVI. Handbrake does both. Handbrake on the Mac is a little more mature than using the Windows version.
What you’ll do is use the new Handbrake to rip it and it’ll ask you what you want it for. iPod, iPhone, PSP…etc, or your computer. It’ll then work in iTunes.
As per the Trojan for the Mac, you should run as a limited user, and if something you don’t trust asks you for Administrator access, just say no. You can find help on how to get rid of the virus if you have it, at this article.
Q Jason in Kenetikit - In expensive network attached storage
Leo’s favorite is from Infrant. You can buy it with or without drives, it runs Raid5 so you never lose data, and is very robust. A NAS is just like a computer, it has an Operating system on it, but sometimes has extra features such as VPN, and Drive Integrity.
Q Ron - Media Center won’t work as a TV
It sounds like a bad install. Don’t install the programs and just try the base install. If it still doesn’t work, it may be a hardware issue. There could also be a driver or software conflict. You want to try and reinstall the system to be as simple as it can.
Try the updates of Media Producer, and if theres any problems, when you reinstall the software later, then thats where the problem lies.
HP may have also released updated drivers. You should download those drivers, and make sure everything is updated.
Hour 3
Q Noleen in Huntington Beach - Did I go overkill with my system?
You can’t have too big a screen, it improves your productivity. A fast system is great, and lots of storage is great. For lighting you’ll want to get maybe one or two lights from Lowelego. Their inexpensive and very good.
For the Camera, you’ll want to get a tripod, and also a Canon Point and Shoot camera will do you fine.
Q Brian in Thousand Oaks - Can’t export IE bookmarks
6000 is a lot of bookmarks. There may be a limit to the number you can export. You hit a bug is the basic answer. You can export the bookmarks using Firefox because they’ve been imported.
In Firefox go to the Organize Bookmarks menu, and then export them to your desktop as a file. Firefox has one big HTML file that has all the bookmarks in it.
Q Matt from San Diego - Photo’s to Digital
The company you were looking at probably never went public, at $0.02, they wouldn’t make money. You should try Legacy Digital.
Direct TV has now done a deal with TiVo, and hopefully you will be able to use your TiVo again soon.
