Leo Laporte
The Tech Guy
2–5p ET Sat & Sun
- Home
- Saturday Show
- Sunday Show
- Past Shows
- Audio Archives
- Stations
- Chat
- Watch Live
- Forums
- Tips
- FAQ
- Glossary
- Contact Leo
Sponsors
- Angie’s List
- Carbonite
- DSLExtreme
- ESET NOD32 Antivirus
- GoToAssist
- GoToMeeting
- GoToMyPC
- Make It Work
- Stamps.com
Leo Links
 |
For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
|
|
Saturday 08 December 2007
Big text
Guests
Chris Marquardt - Photography Tips of the Week
- It’s important to have a good lens as they will stay with you for years
- Lenses with a good aperture means that you will get good pictures in Low Light
- You can save a lot of money by getting the lens from the camera manufacturer who usually have them on sale
- Use the lens with a wide open aperture and turn off the lens, and you will get a good depth of field
- 1.2 is the extreme, it’s a lot more extreme than 1.4
- If you set your camera for Aperture being the priority you can get great depth of field
- A great Christmas gift is a 50mm Lens
Tech News
CompUSA is closing, following further losses. Is it because every ones buying their stuff online, or just because CompUSA is a bad store? People will come in the store, take a look, ask sales questions and then buy online to get cheap prices or save on Tax.
It’s a shame for new computer users, because sometimes it’s a help to have somewhere to go. Somewhere to get advice, repairs or new accessories. If these stores close, then Leo hopes you see mom and pop stores open up because of the niche.
There is a bill that has been made in Congress that would require anyone with open WiFi to monitor every single image that goes over that WiFi. The House of Representatives have passed it, it’s yet to be passed by Congress.
You are required to report any illegal images to the local authorities, or you will be fined up to $3000. Who at Starbucks is going to sit down and watch everything going on at their open network?
Here is the theory. Maybe the sponsors of this bill, know that in effect, a lot of free and open wifi will go away, and then maybe their paid for service, or cell networks will take up the created niche in the market.
This would leave people who have open wifi networks with the requirement to watch their network. If you provide Internet access, and you find out about some illegal stuff on there, you have to report it.
If your an ISP, or your an Open Access Spot, then your a publisher according to the courts if this Bill is passed. Right now, your just a service provider. Find out who your senator is, and then send them a fax or letter, not an email.
Leo is at Yale today, coming from their Broadcast Studio’s. He’s there for an advisory committee, convincing them to make all their resources available online. MIT is very famously putting all of it’s course work online. Any kid around the world won’t have to put tens of thousands of dollars into going to Yale or MIT, but they can get it free online.
Hour 1
Q Kim in San Diego - Transferring from DVR to Computer
Your currently taking the video from the Analog hole, and burning it to DVD. The truth is you HAVE to do that. They won’t let you transfer the digital video. What you will need is an ATI All in Wonder card, or a Analog to Digital box.
A lot of times the cheap one is the Dazzle. You’ll probably want an internal All in Wonder card, or a Firewire converter. It just depends how much you want to put into this.
If you can get a good Analog signal out of there, then you can make a very close to perfect quality DVD. A great place to look is PinnacleSys.com (Pinnacle Systems). Also take a look at DirectShow Dump.
The movie industry, and record industries hate PC’s as they see them as big piracy devices.
Q Jason in San Diego - Boosting Wireless Signal
One of the things that really messes up Wireless networks in Metal Mesh or Metal walls. If you can get a signal closer to it, then you can extend the signal using a WDS (Wireless Distribution System). You put this in about the middle of the house, and it should extend it far enough. They are pretty cheap at about $100.
Q Gale in Los Angeles - Internet Explorer won’t run
It may be because the Omnipage version you have isn’t compatible with Vista. Omnipage may have installed a plugin for Internet Explorer. You now need to find out where the Omnipage put the plugin.
You can start Internet Explorer in Safe Mode and disable the plugin using that.
Your a little more limited in Canada. Symbian runs on Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson. Windows Mobile 6 is another option and finally you have Palm. You may want to take a look at Blackberry.
Leo has an iPhone yet he uses the Blackberry Curve 8320 as his Primary phone. You can add Third Party apps on it. Things like chat run on it. There’s the 8800 series and the 8100 series. The 81′s and 82′s have GPS and WiFi respectively. It’s nice to have WiFi but kills the battery pretty fast. You can buy a GPS dongle. The WiFi is very handy if your in a place with WiFi.
If your in the States you can even use the WiFi to make free VoIP calls. You want to hold it in your hands, and play with
Hour 2
Q Leroy in California - PC Mighty Max broke Windows
You could try CCleaner. There’s a guide here to remove PC Mighty Max
Q Stephen in Los Angeles - Reinstalling Windows
Leo can’t believe that there are companies, to this day, that still don’t provide Windows Restore Disks.
You might want to go on eBay and buy a copy of XP. If you don’t know anyone who can lend you a copy of Windows, then you may want to get Linux which is free. It’ll take some getting used to, but it will be good for a computer of that age.
If you don’t get a disk, then the easiest and certainly cheapest way to get an image is by using Drive Snapshot. This creates an image and you can put that on an external hard drive, or DVD’s.
You might also want to create an Emergency Boot Disk.
Q Mike in Ohio - Buying an already used Domain?
You might have to track it down. At some point there will be a registra of record. You may want to try Better Whois. They go to the ultimate source registra.
They will be the ones you then want to reserve the domain with.
Q Missy in Los Angeles - Internet on older iMac
Your choice is Wired or Wireless. You can either have an Ethernet cable to run upstairs, or you can do Wireless, which will cost you a little to get that working on your Mac upstairs.
You can also do Networking over Power lines (Power line Networking). You can then plug your router into one of these PN Jacks which plug into the wall, you do the same upstairs and plug it into the other computer and it will then be able to connect to the network.
Q Joyce in California - Cheap laptop for Daughter?
Leo’s experience is that anything under $600 is so under powered, you will eventually have problems with her. You might want to look at the Eee PC which is from ASUS and runs Linux. It has a browser, email, and even has school stuff on it.
She’ll have to be a little clever if she wants to download music becuase it runs Linux. There’s no CD at all however. You’ll probably want to get her a Dell. You’ll probably want to get her a small one.
The Dell 1330′s are a thousand bucks. You spend too little on a computer and you eventually end up spending more.
Hour 3
Q Bob in California - Can see everyones network shares on Public WiFi
Leopard requires you to turn on Sharing. You have to go to the sharing preferences pane and turn on Sharing. Guests have read access to your laptop. Leo went there and turned it so that only people that have the right login.
Leo is at Yale and can see 240 shared computers. You see it at hotels too. Most of them won’t let you get in unless you have the correct login credentials.
Q Lidean from California - Can someone get my data?
You can just take the hard drive apart or as you said, get your husband to go crazy on the hard drive.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is helpful for securely erasing data.
Here’s a video of Leo and Patrick Norton destroying a hard drive.
Q Chuck in Arizona - Getting a new TV
You have to decide if you want to go 1080p or 720p. Usually for a $100 extra, you can get a 1080p TV. If your getting a smaller screen, then 720p would be fine.
Most of what you’ll be watching will eventually be HD, however right now alot of the content is in Standard Definition, so take a look at how they up convert the content.
For $2000, which is a fine budget, you’ll be able to get a Sony. For a 42″ Sony, you’ll be looking at about $2500.
Q Barry in California - Zone Alarm & A Router?
You don’t need Zone Alarm once you have a router as it just slows you down, adds complexity and bothers you all the time. You can just uninstall that.
As soon as people put on a router, your firewall just says “everything’s fine, nothings going on anymore”.
Q Randy in Tennessee - Burning downloaded films to DVD
The problem is, Unbox from Amazon doesn’t let you do this. Leo doesn’t really like these download film services. The quality of DVD’s burned this way isn’t very good. She should just buy the hard copies, and make a copy to her hard drive.
Verizon is doing something very strange, that no other network has done. They are opening their network. Verizon is CDMA, whereas T-Mobile and AT&T are both GSM. You would have to have a CMDA phone to work on the Verizon network. This means that Nokia can now make a phone made for Verizon, but you will still have to go to Verizon and get it activated. It doesn’t mean that Apple couldn’t make an iPhone that’s compatible for Verizon.
Apple can now make a phone that is Verizon compatible. This is why these sim chips are such a good idea. It means that you can just get a SIM from Verizon and pop it in a Nokia phone. It’s a real surprise as Verizon has locked their phones down so much. This would change everything. You could buy a phone and use Bluetooth and use it as a Data Modem.
