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Sunday 25 November 2007

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Guests

Chris Marquardt - Tips From The Top Floor

Chris is coming back to the US for more workshops in August, 2008. Get on the waiting list: DiscoverTheTopFloor.com

Snow pictures: Why do they turn out gray? The exposure meter expects the snow to be 18% gray so you’ll need to adjust the exposure using “exposure compensation.” Let your camera meter automatically, but then compensate up 1 or 2 f stops. (Check your manual to figure out how.)

Ron Rosberg - Gadgets of the Week

Tornado File Transfer Tool at Tiger Direct
Retail price $59.95

Tiger Direct donating a portion of each sale to the Susan G. Koman “For The Cure” Breast Cancer Fund.

Adobe Photo Shop Elements Version 6
Retail $69.99
Rebate $20.00
Price After Rebate $49.99

Cali Lewis - Amazon Kindle

• It’s extremely fast getting books and newspapers.
• It has a few issues with the buttons, and accidentally pressing them
• It’s a niche product, but Amazon wants to make the market grow
• It’s easy to read on
• The only thing that’s missing is a light
• It’s easy to email files to yourself (for $0.10), or you can hookup via USB
• The keyboard takes some getting used to, and punctuation is a little hard to get used to
• This isn’t designed for chatting, writing a book or web browsing
• You can change the text size on books, and it goes pretty large
• This is in effect, the iPod of books

Tech News

The Amazon Kindle came out this week. It’s their first product. They’ve been a retailer for so long, and now they’ve made their own e-book reader. This is a “book” you have to turn off for take off and landing. When you turn a page, the screen gets charged and attracts ink, the ink then stays there until the next time it’s charged.

Instead of saying how much battery life you get, they say how many page turns you get. Their great in sunlight, but if your reading in bed, you’ll need a bright lamp. Amazon got a lot of attention for this. They got 7 or 8 pages written about it in Newsweek. You can also download a whole book in a minute using the Sprint cell phone network. You can subscribe to news papers, magazines, and RSS feeds. Leo will be canceling all his newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and signing up on the Kindle.

A girl committed suicide after being “cyber bullied” via MySpace. A neighbour who had fallen out with her own daughter, pretended to be a 16 year old boy named Josh. They became friends using MySpace, and after a month, “Josh” ended it by telling her that “[she] is not a nice person”.

Over the course of the friendship, Megan developed A.D.D, and when “Josh” ended their friendship, she hung herself the same night.

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Hour 1

Q Jason in California - Mouse not working anymore

You’ll want to go to the System Control Panel, and then you want to go to the Hardware Tab, and go down to the entry for Mice, and delete everything that has to do with the mouse. Then you’ll want to restart the computer.

You might also want to try plugging the mouse into a different USB port. You may also want to download the mouse software from Logitech. There may also be a little control in the system tray. You might want to uninstall the Logitech software and the mouse should be just fine with the built in Generic Drivers from Microsoft that are in Windows.

Q Denice in California - Difference between Install types?

Archive and Install takes your System Folder, not your applications or documents, and just renamed it, and then installs a new System Folder. This means, if something goes wrong, you can just replace it with the old System Folder.

Clean Install erases the drive and installs a fresh install. This does however mean you will lose everything. Make sure you backup everything.

Q Phillipe in California - Should I get the Kindle for my Wife?

You should get her to look at the Sony E-Book reader, and just see if she can get used to reading on it… It’ll certainly be helpful for getting rid of those stacks of newspapers you get.

They won’t be available until December 17th, so the race is on if your planning to get one. Leo won’t be getting his until December 6th, so he’ll try and give a review then. You should also look at the site and see if they have the papers you want.

Q Catiline in California - Mail Station

Earth Link is the company providing it. You may have to contact them. Sadly what’s happened is, there’s not enough people using it, so it was discontinued.

Because you have a computer, you can setup a free email account. Go to Google Mail and setup a free email account. Make something obscure like catiline9374@gmail.com. Only give that address to friends. If you get spam on GMail, then mark it as Spam.

Don’t click on links in emails.

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Hour 2

Q Nathan in North Hills, CA - MP3 Player with AM Radio

The hard part is getting an AM Radio in it. Take a look at RadioYourWay.com which has an AM / FM Radio and it also plays MP3’s. It’s a little pricey.

As far as Leo knows, that’s the only one available.

Q Andrew in California - Norton 360 or McAfee Internet Security

Leo doesn’t recommend Norton 360 or Norton Internet Security, but the new Norton Anti virus 2008 is supposedly pretty good. These days, no software can protect you against yourself.

Leo doesn’t recommend any McAfee products anymore. Nod32 is the fastest, and they have a new Security Suite solution, which should be a lot faster than any McAfee or Norton product.

Most importantly, you have to change what you do. The key to keeping yourself free of any viruses or spyware, is change your behavior. Don’t open any email attachments. Do not click links in Email. These will often lead you to pages that will infect your system or ask you for passwords. Make sure you run Windows Update Automatically, in the background, and install them as soon as they come out.

Q Al in Studio City - Slow computer

The best thing to do once the computer starts to slow down is to just Reinstall Windows. You should certainly start by looking at stuff that runs in the background. Uninstall any software you don’t want. The device may be defragmented, so every few months you might want to defrag the hard drive.

Ultimately, you should backup everything and reinstall it. It’ll run just as fast as it did when you first got it.

Q Rick - Can’t get past Safe mode Choice screen

It sound like everything on the disk is safe, but Windows is damaged. The easiest way to get the data off there is to just get a USB adapter for that Hard Drive, plug it into a different computer and then grab the files off it.

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Hour 3

Q Tim from Upland, CA - Writing to Hard Drive too slow

Capturing to a Firewire 800 drive should be fast enough, however it may be the fact that your doing it on a 400 port, may be the problem with the Bandwidth. You could print to the drive in Final Cut just fine. If you got a Firewire 800 express card may use the same data transfer bus and may still not be fast enough.

Leo will try and get an answer for you ASAP.

Q Fernando in California - Applied updates and now Windows is broken

If you call HP you really should try and get them to give you recovery disks. You need to get the Updates to install, but ask you first, and you can change the settings in the Control Panel.

In order to upgrade to more RAM you’ll have to go to Windows Vista 64bit.

Q Jackie in Paola Alto - Router kicks us off

You should be using WPA if you can, but if it’s a really old router then WEP might be the only choice. It may also solve this problem, as WEP is as good as nothing.

If you go to the router setup, there is a firmware update. You should load that in, and that may fix a problem like this. There’s really no reason this should happen, but changing to WPA should fix this, and the firmware update should also fix it.

Q Peter in Atlanta - Should I get a Macbook for my daughter?

There’s no doubt that you should get her a Macbook. For an 11 year old, it’s an excellent machine, and easy to use. She won’t break it either, and anything she does break is easy to fix.

You can get one online at the Apple.com Online Store or go to a physical Apple store. You may also want to get the Apple Care, so that if she drops it, then they’ll replace it.

She won’t have to worry about security like viruses…etc. It has excellent Parental controls, you can say what she can access, and you can say what times she’s able to access the system.

If she’s going to take it to school, then she’ll have to be very responsible.

Q John in California - How does Low Jack work?

If thieves have physical access to the laptop, then they can do anything they want. If their really determined to get into it, then they’ll get into it.

Having Low Jack isn’t really worth the money.

Q Alex in California - Program having read problems

It’s likely that the program is on a flaky part of the hard drive, and you might try reinstalling the program. If the scan disk and defrag is fixing it, then you should start backing up the drive now, because that drive could die.

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