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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday 9 December 2007
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Ron Rosberg - Gadgets of the Week
Sprint/Novatel Wireless Ovation U727 USB EVDO Rev. A Broadband Modem.
Price with 2 Year $79.95
Chief Architect’s Better Home and Garden Home Designer Suite Version 7
Price $99.99 to $109.99
Scott Wilkinson - Home Theater
The Sony A3000 Rear Projection set is a beautiful RP Set.
The Optima HD70 which is only $1000, and it’s gorgeous. The only problem is, you have to place the projector very carefully, and you need to buy a screen for it. Your talking about the same price as the Sony A3000, but you can go up to 100″ without too much trouble at all. It’s only 720p but it still paints a great picture.
They don’t take up the room in the same way, it’s a very small unit which is also great to take away on your vacation. There’s also the Epson 1080p Home Cinema projector, it’s brighter than the Optima, and it has lens alignment. It also does excellent blacks.
Luminance isn’t a great thing to look at. Contrast Ratio isn’t something to look at. It’s a completely useless specification. It really has nothing to do with real world performance.
However Luminance means that it can fill a larger screen. The JVC DLA HD1 which is about $5500, but has the best black around. This is their LCOS projector.
Tech News
Flesh Chickens, also known as Zombies. A Zombie is a computer that has been taken over by a bad guy that is used to do malicious things. Back in the day, kids did it for bragging rights. These days however, it’s possible to make a lot of money from it.
Flesh Chickens is a Chinese term, which means Zombie Machine. The going rate for a Flesh Chicken is about 1 to 10 of the Chinese currency. That means per computer it can be anything from 50c to $1.50.
You open an attachment or download and you never know it’s there… it then infects your computer. They like to get it on your system without you ever having any idea.
Leo’s going to call them Flesh Chickens instead of Zombies. The father of the Internet thinks there’s 1 million of them. Once they have control of your system, they can do terrible things with it, from Spam to capturing passwords and user names for online gaming worlds.
They then get your items, virtual money or character and then sell it for big profits. This was really big earlier this year because of the Chinese version of the American Idol / Pop Idol. The going rate on the Internet for the Internet coins was actually worth real currency and that’s when the hackers are going to jump to it.
It’s a problem in China, because even though the Government has high control over it, about 1.5% of the most popular sites visited are infected. You could go to a website and without your notice you could instantly be infected and ‘zombified’.
Hour 1
Q Daniel from Los Angeles - Should I return my Dell with Vista?
HP’s are good, but you will need to remove all the crap that comes with it. There’s a program to remove all this available from PCDecrapifier.com.
Vista running on a new machine, with new hardware shouldn’t have any problems, and Vista is much safer than XP is. You can get a system from Dell or HP with XP installed on when you get it, but you’ll want to make sure you’re always downloading the updates and your really locking it down.
Windows XP is also faster than Vista. Vista is 50 to 100% slower than XP is, and XP Service Pack 3 is going to add an extra 5% to Windows XP. You’ll want to train your kids to not open email attachments, not open links, not go on websites you don’t know, be careful where you get files from the Internet and be-careful what comes in from the outside world. You’ll want a router.
Q Davood in Chicago - Computer crashes when using TV Software
Moving the card to a different slot can still help in modern PC’s. Reinstalling the operating system may have changed something, and maybe moving the card to a different slot may help.
You might also want to go back to older drivers. It may be that the new Video Card drivers are bad. It may be a bad interaction between the Video Card driver and TV Tuner card driver.
Update: Davood found that turning off Hardware Acceleration (Video Overlay) fixes this problem.
Q Franie in New Jersey - Buying a Mac?
The best thing about a Mac is, you buy the one you can afford. If there’s an Apple Store near you, then go there. You can try 30 day trials of software such as iWorks, and VMWare to run Windows on the Mac when you need it.
PC World said that the best Windows machine is an iMac. Get at least 2gb of RAM and the biggest screen you can get. Firefox and Safari are both available for the Mac and Apple Mail is very good.
David Pogue’s book for Windows users switching to Mac called “Switching to Mac” is a great book.
You might get a better deal on a Mac from CompUSA on Wednesday because their closing their stores so their trying to liquidate their stock. They start with 5% off on the first day and keep going down 5% a day. Once they close you’ll be wanting to get Apple Care.
Q Carter from San Jose - Someone is using my address to send spam
Spam never comes from a legitimate return. They also move on. Leo gets it too. There’s really nothing you can do, but it will go away eventually. A spammer has an email list. On that list, he takes one name and address as random, and then uses that as his return address.
The good news is, no one believes that it’s you. Don’t go for a real easy to guess address like for example ‘joe@aol.com’. You want something that’s hard to guess.
The best way to protect yourself is to follow the 5 golden rules.
Hour 2
Q Mike in Los Angeles - Good VPN service?
When you use Open Wireless Access, everything that your sending is in the clear. The real concern in email. If you login to your ISP email and it’s not secure, then he can grab your password and go into your email whenever he wants.
If your office has a VPN, then you can login using that. There’s also a service for about $5 a month called V For VPN. Once it leaves his server, it’s in the clear but the wifi is secure.
Find out if your ISP uses secure mail, if not you can use https://gmail.com it’s always encrypted.
VPN’s will be a little slower in different countries, as it adds an extra hop.
Q Julie in California - Satellite DirecTV
It’s a little heavy but it’s great to take to the beach or in your RV. It’s called SatGo. It worked and was pretty impressive. It weights 27 lbs, but it’s a TV as well.
It absolutely works. DirecTV is selling it directly as well.
Q Jeff in California - Can’t mount drive in Windows
If Windows can’t read a disk or a drive, then it asks if you want to Format it. If she doesn’t have another copy, then you want to save it.
Try PC Inspector which may be able to help you.
Q Daniel in Bellflower, CA - Digital Notepads?
It’s a gimmick. It won’t just store it in a Pen, but with this you can hook it up to the PC and it will transfer what it thinks you wrote. Computers aren’t living up to their sci-fi promise. They really fail at what a 3 year old can do. Voice and Handwriting recognition is where computers have trouble.
Sadly we’re a long way off from stuff like that.
Q Dave in California - Can’t Defrag Hard Drive
The best way to do it really is to go into Safe Mode. That way it’s not being used while your trying to defrag it. Defrag reorganizes the drive.
Modern operating systems are less prone to it than older operating systems. Use a third party tool to check the disk. It’s what they call a “stuck dirty bit” when Disk Check launches at every boot. If you try doing it in Safe Mode, and launching Command Prompt, then type CHKNTFS/X C:
There is a good article to look at on this issue at the Data Clinic site.
Hour 3
Q Kyle from Chino Hills, CA - Hooking up an LCD screen to my XBox 360
1080p is a physical feature the screen has to have. You will need to look at it’s native resolution. It will connect via HDMI or Component. You won’t notice much difference between 1080i and 1080p on a 22″ Screen.
On the Dell 24″ Monitors for about the same price, it has Dual in, so both VGA and HDMI. CRT and Plasma monitors can handle the speed. You’ll want a response time of 10 milliseconds or less.
The response time is 5 milliseconds. It’s 1050p not 1080p and you won’t run into problems with the 360.
HDMI carries Audio as well as Video, a DVI can be patched to HDMI.
Q Karen in California - Will the iPhone be upgraded soon?
Leo would be pretty surprised if they don’t release a 16gb version. Whatever they announce in January, they still have to go through the FCC to approve. That means it won’t be available until June.
If he gets his company to forward the mail to Yahoo! Mail, you can use IMAP on there. What you do is call him and get him to forward mail from his system to Yahoo! Mail or GMail.
This has to do with a Windows File Format. You’ll have to run Disk Utility and it should see the drive and you want to format it to HFS+ which is the native Mac file format.
Sony won’t help you format the drive for a Mac. If she does that, it should solve the problem. She may just want to buy a 120gb External Hard drive. That’ll be plenty for her, Hard Drive’s last longer than Flash drives and you get more bang for your buck.
Q Michael in Santa Clarita - Is 64 Bit faster?
Actually in some cases, it can be slower. On a 32 bit Processor, Vista is limited to 3gb. On Vista x64, you can use up that 4gb.
Vista has more overhead than XP, and XP had more overhead than Windows 98. If you sit down with a Vista machine, and an XP machine, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
Another issue with 64 bit is the fact that drivers aren’t available for hardware and some software doesn’t work.
You can order the One Laptop Per Child online via LaptopGiving.org, you get one and a child in a developing nation gets one for $400 total. It’s aimed at education, an kids. It has wireless, big buttons. It’s not going to be usable to the degree that you could really do much with it.
The screen is small, but it’s a higher resolution. It’s running a special operating system writen just for it in Python. Leo can’t give you any more info yet as he hasn’t used it yet.
