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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday 1 December 2007
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Scott Wilkinson - Editors Choice Awards and Trekkin’ the HD Universe
Last week when we were talking about our favourite HD-DVD’s and forgot to mention the HD-DVD set of Star Trek the Original Series.
The set includes DVD on one side, and HD-DVD on the other side. It’s a surprisingly good quality HD-DVD. Instead of these fuzzy planets which are a shade of fuzzy blue, they’ve redone all the graphics and now they look like planets. They’ve also redone the Enterprise to look much better.
There is however one episode, where they go down to a planet, and there’s a dead woman, and you can tell that it’s a store manikin. Back in those TV days you couldn’t tell it was fake, but now it’s so obvious in High Definition.
Editors Choice Awards:
- Best Plasma is the Pioneer Kuro - there’s no better Plasma
- Panasonic PZ750 Series is cheaper than the Kuro, but also a very good choice
- The Sony XBR4 Series is the best LCD. The Blacks were just great, and the colours were amazing, and the picture was stunning
- The Sony A3000 series is the best Rear-Projection. It’s only $2200 for the 60″.
Tech News
Everyone is awaiting the Amazon Kindle. This is going to be a big Wii month. Nintendo had the biggest record month, selling so many Wii’s and DS’. Some people think that they are trying to keep the numbers down. It’s got to kill you if your a company like Nintendo and your having the biggest month you’ve ever had, but you can’t supply them fast enough. 350,000 Wii systems were sold in the Week of Thanks Giving in the US. People going on eBay will be paying twice the asking price. Nintendo say that they can only do 1.8 million a month.
15 million Wii’s have been sold world wide. No one anticipated that it would beat the PS3 or the XBox 360. Leo recommends, if you have a High Definition TV, you get an XBox 360.
The Writers Strike is continuing in Hollywood. It’s a battle over Internet Rights. Everyone is airing shows over the Internet. If their making money from the Internet, then they should be paid for it, right? Writers are smart. Their using sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to get their points across.
Some writers are beginning to dump the networks and do their own on YouTube. It’s a real stale mate right now. As long as this goes on, people are going to start turning to other forms of media. If you were the networks, you’d be a little worried right now. People are enjoying the content put up on YouTube.
The PS3’s price has dropped to $400, and the problem so far is the fact it hasn’t had any good games. It’s starting to have good games now. The PS3 has overtaken the 360 in Japan. Maybe the Wii has hit saturation in Japan.
Facebook is backing down on their beacon technology, so it’s opt in.
Hour 1
Q Paul in California - Getting newspapers on the Sony eBook Reader
Libprs500 is alternate software, that allows you to turn the RSS feed of stuff like BBC News, and the New York Times into something you can take with you and read.
Question: PayPal dongle code won’t work when coming from eBay.
That’s something they must have recently turned on. Leo’s noticed the same. It may be that they put a cookie on your machine, or something else like that. These dongles generate a one time number every 30 seconds, you enter your username, password and code. It provides an extra layer of security.
Q Stephen in Edinburgh, UK - Recording Stereo Out?
You’ve just kind of Pinpointed why this isn’t in Vista anymore. It’s called the Analog hole. Most people burn the songs to CD and then Rip them back.
The Record Companies have worked with Microsoft to plug this analog hole. You should get Virtual Audio Cable which gives you a try before you buy, and it is compatible with Vista. It’s essentially the same as Audio HiJac Pro on the Mac.
Hour 2
Q Tom in Woodbridge, VA - Comcast changing to Tier Service?
You’ll notice that in the Terms of Service with Comcast, it will say “up to 6mbits” or something similar. It may also be that Comcast hasn’t provided enough bandwidth to your neighbourhood.
Comcast may also say that it’s your fault. They can always palm it off on someone else.
Try SpeedTest.net for a speed test. To go bellow 1mbit is unacceptable. You should warn them you’re going to switch to DSL unless they give you better speeds. You can also go to your City Council.
Also Visit the DSL Reports forum for Comcast.
Q John in Nebraska - Parental Controls
iBoss would probably be the best solution for you. You can control it to the point where you can say “Tom’s computer can do more than Sally’s”.
It does slow a little bit of your bandwidth, and it’s becoming less of an issue.
The newer operating systems have built in Parental Controls. There are also programs like NetNanny or Cyber Patrol that do this as well.
You can also limit the time they can login free with Windows 2000, XP Pro and Vista. You can find a guide on how to do that here.
Q Sharron in California - Can’t login
MySpace can sometimes cause that problem. Try logging into Safe Mode. As the computer boots up, press the F8 key, and it’ll give you a text menu, where you can select Safe Mode. That turns off pretty much everything.
It doesn’t sound like something that Spyware or a Virus would want to do. You’ll probably want to take this into a shop, because they will really need to go through the start up items.
Q Have you heard of Table Top computing?
Yes, Microsoft is developing the Microsoft Surface which is a big table. The product will be $10,000 and will be aimed at Hotels and Casino’s.
Apple announced the iPhone, and Microsoft said “oh damn” and they had this thing they had been working on for years. They rushed out the video. A few Hotel Chains and Casino’s have put an order through for them.
This is a non-existent product. This exists in their Labs some place. These screens are expensive, you have to be careful because their glass.
The closest thing is the iPhone. It expects some locations to have these Surfaces by Spring. It’ll be at earliest May 2008 before you start seeing them everywhere. It’s so easy to make a film.
We do need a new interface, and touch is possibly the next big thing. Apple does not own the Pinch patent. It’s much harder for computers to recognize speech and handwriting. We do things a computer can’t do.
For the next couple decades, Keyboard and Mouse are going to dominate.
Hour 3
Q Mark in California - How can I generate less heat from my computer?
The Pentium 4′s were always very hot. You can get a better cooling system for your computer. The Core 2 Duo’s are doing more, and more efficient. You’ll get a faster computer for the same amount of heat.
The folks in Israel were asked to help them develop a much better processing. These were more like the Pentium 3′s. They were able to double it up and therein came the Core 2.
The chips are hot these days. The best solution may be to go to Core 2 and get a better heat sync system. Today’s Video cards are hotter, as well as Motherboards!
You may want to get an Air Conditioner.
Q Ethan in California - Firefox Crashes
When it asks you if you want to Start a new session or restore old session, just start a new session. People put stuff on MySpace that really crashes your computer.
Your browsers cache this stuff. You need to clear the cache. You should use the Safe Startup mode of Firefox. Stay away from that MySpace site. It’s a bad site.
Q Kirkland in California - New Antivirus?
The first thing that will happen when you install a new Antivirus, it’ll update itself automatically. If there’s a new version, they’ll push it down to you anyway.
Because there’s new viruses all the time, there’s a 12 or 24 hour period before you can be fully safe. Bad guys make viruses, put the virus on the web, the virus then sends itself to everyone and in a few hours it spreads to everyone. Anti-Virus firms become aware of this in about 6 to 10 hours if their lucky. Then by the time they’ve written the signatures, the virus has reached millions already.
Turn Windows Update on automatically.
Q Bob in California - Can you download YouTube to your iPod?
Yes, but you have to convert it. There’s a number of Websites that will automatically do this for you.
Leo and Sascha use Vixy.net which allows you to download it in a multiple of formats. You paste the YouTube URL, and select iPod for the format and after a few minutes, you get a file you can download.
Q Beno in California - HDMI Cables?
Get the cheap ones. Digital Cables either work or dont work. You will want to get the latest HDMI cable, but get the cheap ones.
Ron Rosberg recommends a cheap website - MonoPrice.com.
The TV will also up convert DVD’s to 720p. What that does is get rid of the jags, and helps with the motion processing. An Up Converting DVD player will do that just fine, and it will look better.
To pick between HD-DVD and BluRay, go to Amazon and see which of your favourite studio’s are on which formats. You can get a $200 Toshiba HDA3 Player that also plays standard DVD’s. You should shop around for it.
If you’ve got a good TV, 1080i will be up converted to 1080p and will look great.
