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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday 15 December 2007
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Scott Wilkinson - Audio
Audio is important. People are spending $2000 to $4000 on their HDTV, so it’s not unreasonable to spend a few hundred on Audio.
You use this to hook up all the equipment into it, and then have a HDMI going to the TV. It has 100w per channel. It only has two HDMI in, and one out. It does however have 3 component In’s.
It’s less than a thousand bucks, and Onkyo products are very good.
For $2000 and $1000 on your Amp, your going to be spending $3000. The Klipsch RX52 and Quad sell the Quad L-ite and their very good quality. You get 2 front left and right speakers, 2 rear speakers, a center speaker and a sub woofer.
The best bargain speakers were the Mirage Nanosat Prestige for $4500
If you can afford a 7.1 Surround sound system, then you should get one.
You can read more from the Editors choice at AVGuide.com
Tech News
The prices on GPS’ have dropped so this may be a GPS Christmas. Only a few years ago it was a few thousand bucks, now they’ve dropped down to $100. TomTom’s are very popular, and they’ll be very popular for the husband, or kids in your live.
You want to make sure they come with maps. In the old days, you’d have to load all the maps in. Leo had a review unit 6 years ago, and he could never get it working. Sometimes they’ll talk about how many points of interest (PoI) they have, which can be helpful for stuff like Hotels, Train Stations, Post Offices, Starbucks…etc.
The GPS units have to be out in the open, so borrow a friends, and use it to do a really tricky trail around your town that you know, and see if you can use it. You have to make sure you can trust it. Some of the newer ones also have traffic updates and alternate routes.
Most of them have touch screens, but most of the time you’ll want to listen to the device, not look at the screen. Some of them can plug into your car stereo of have FM transmitters built in.
Webkins has started putting ads up on the site, as they have 8 Million unique views per month. Maybe they should just charge a little more for the Doll.
Hour 1
Q Jim from California - Music from iTunes
The easiest way is to actually use your iPod as a transportation device. There is a program from Little App Factory called iPod rip which does exactly what you want it to. You bring the songs onto the iPod, and it will copy the songs, all the meta data like ratings and it also does Sync. It even copies the play lists.
Q Joanne in California - Getting rid of Virtual Sandbox
Virtual Sandbox virtualizes all your activity on the net. There is a link on their website on how to remove it.
Sandboxie does the same sort of thing. It’s free, and Leo likes it.
Q Glen in California - GPS in Reverse
The ETX Premier Edition is a very slick device. They start at about $200 or $400. Glen has the $700 one. Meade’s new ETX-Premier Edition automatically levels your telescope, points it to North and sets the time. You just enter your location or zip code. After your ETX completes its patented Level North automatic alignment procedure it will point to the first alignment star. Use the new wide-field SmartFinder to center the red dot over the alignment stars for ultra-precise pointing accuracy.
Hour 2
Q Brian in New Jersey - Good Zoom Camera
Make sure it’s Optical Zoom not Digital. Lots of Cameras go 12x Optical Zoom. Make sure alot of them have good image stabilization too. Go to DigitalCameraInfo.com. They have ethical reviews and good spec info.
Q TJ from Los Angeles - Vista Problems
A Mac would be fine for general home use. It’s more secure, very usable. There will be a whole change on how you use it. You can do spreadsheets, use the Internet, play some games, edit photo’s, watch videos, listen to music…etc.
Vista Service Pack 1 is going to be out in February. People had the same problems when XP first came out. Some software won’t work, some hardware won’t work.
You can get a new computer with XP on it. Lots of people don’t have problems with Vista. Mac and Windows are generally as easy to use. You can get Word on the Mac, but that will cost you a little more. You can however use your old Word on Vista.
Apple has a program called iWork which is just as easy to use and Leo likes that very much. You sound like a good Mac candidate.
Q Mike in Union Town, PA - Nokia N95
It has a 5 Megapixel Camera, has GPS and WiFi built it, and the keyboard slides in one way for the phone, and other way for the MP3 player. It has pretty bad battery unfortunately and doesn’t have 3G.
Next year Verizon is opening up their network, and Nokia will jump on this and start making Verizon compatible phones. Next year with Verizon opening their network and the iPhone pushing everyone to make better phones, we’ll see alot of cool things.
Between the 965 and 975 chipset, you’ll want to go for the 975 due to the features.
Q Kelly in California - High Def Sony Cam?
Sony has very good cameras… but it’s getting to the point where consumer cameras are getting very close to TV cameras.
For what your doing, you’ll want to go with the higher range Sony’s or Panasonic’s. You’ll get a good one for about $2000 or $3000.
Sadly for weddings, you have to have a big camera otherwise customers will think that your unprofessional. The HD XL ones are great, but their $8000, and alot of these consumer grade ones are getting better than professional ones.
Shooting HD is not the same as providing HD. It’s hard to give someone a DVD with High Definition video on it. It is however good to have the 1080p. The resolution is the same but your doing a smaller screen. You can deliver it on a DVD, and it will look good however you’ll want to look at CamcorderInfo.com you’ll find a variety of reviews on there.
The Canon HG10 has a 40gb hard drive in it, but it looks like a consumer camcorder. You may also want to look at A Red Rock adapter for your camera.
Q Mary-Anne in California - Print Spooler Problem
Usually when you have a problem like that, it’s a Printer Driver issue. You should go to the HP Website and see if they have upgraded drivers.
All the spooler does is save the documents to the hard drive and dribbles it to the printer. The printer is slower than the computer. The software that you need for the Computer to talk to the Printer isn’t installing properly.
You should reboot XP into Safe Mode, Reboot the computer and right before it starts loading XP, tap the F8 key and go to Safe Mode. Uninstall that driver completely from there, and then try to reinstall again.
Hour 3
Q Jeff in California - Move everything to new Hard Drive?
If you have a real Windows install disk, no problem, however if you have a Dell Recovery disk, it looks for a secret partition on the Hard Drive. You may not have lost everything permanently. The Hard Drive will be fine, you may just want to use the recovery disks on the existing hard drive.
If it’s still flaky, then is when you’ll want to get a new hard drive. There are ways to take those recovery disks and turn them into real disks, and you can do a Google search to find out how.
Or you can just go to Dell and explain the situation.
Q Jay R in Tennessee - Signal Problems
You can get an external antenna dongle that will hook onto your PCI card. You can then hang that out the window. Another thing you could do is get a wifi access point that can connect to the truck stops and extend it into your truck.
Hyperlink Antenna have a bunch of things or just go to the store where you got your wireless card and see if they have something they can give you.
Radiolabs.com is also a great place to get stuff. You could also get a USB Wifi adapter with a long cable or use a USB Extension cable and have that hang out the window. The Super USB Antenna would be a good choice and it even has little suction cups.
Q Ryan in Minnesota - Backing up iTunes
First thing you’ll want to do is open the My Documents folder and copy the My Music folder to a hard drive, and then get all the destinations of the music to an external hard drive, and just move them both back, after you’ve reformatted your computer.
It could also be helpful to keep everything on a network attached device.
Q Bob in California - HDTV Question
You should be able to get off the air signals. The problem with Digital either works or doesn’t. Analog however can get fuzzy.
Almost all the stations in your area are almost straight in your line of sight. Sounds like there may be something wrong with the TV. You may want to look at the Engadget HD site which may give you some insight into what’s wrong.
You are surrounded by hills so that may be a problem.
Q Ray in Santa Clarita - ID Vault?
ID Vault is a smart chip in a USB Key, that stores passwords to your websites, and you can get Roboform which is great. However the ID Fault also has a database of bank and financial websites, which warns you and won’t give it the password.
Some issues include the fact that Bank’s can change their IP Addresses. It doesn’t prevent some other kinds of attacks. It won’t protect you against your own mistakes. It’s not expensive, and is a good idea. You shouldn’t be clicking links in email if you have this.
It only works in Internet Explorer. IE7 is pretty good.
Q Wendy in Sacramento - What is going on with Palm?
The Treo is failing to newer smartphones, the PDA market is dead and the Palm OS is out-dated. If you want to switch to the iPhone, then it’s going to be alot of work at first, you’ll be fine afterwards.
You should wait til 2008 and see what Verizon and Palm come up with.
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