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Sunday, May 23, 2004
Show #42
Today, the answer to the life, the universe, and everything. I’ll be taking your calls in the Leoville Labs.
A special welcome to people going through Call for Help withdrawal. You can listen in SoCal on 640 AM or worldwide on the Internet at KFI’s web site (the Liquid Compass live stream works on Mac, Windows, and Linux if you have a Windows Media compatible player). I post MP3 archives of the show (minus commercials, news, and traffic) a week or so after the show.
If you need visuals to go with the show the spycams are up on Leoville starting around 15 minutes before the show. I will also be joining the chat today at irc.dslextreme.com.
Joining us in the 2p hour, digital photography expert Mikkel Aaland. Author of the excellent Shooting Digital. Mikkel will be talking about how to buy a digital camera, and review the latest crop. Call in with your questions, too!
toc | toc
Noon-1p
Bob in Southgate
has a Canon EOS Digital Rebel and is going to Nashville next month for the CMA Music Festival. He wants to know how to save the photos when he fills up the flash cards. I recommend a Photo Wallet - a hard drive with a Compact Flash interface so you can offload the cards. A good choice is the $300 20GB Archos gmini.
Jerry in Altadena
has a CD he can’t read. His friend made it for him, but the files don’t appear on his Windows 98 system. That’s because it’s recorded in the UDF format - a file system Windows 98 can’t read. Have your friend close the disc or install a UDF driver.
Chuck in Long Beach
PC1 - what is it?
Beth in Encinitas
has a pop-up blocker but it doesn’t work very well. I recommend using a browser with built-in blocking. Internet Explorer will when Microsoft ships Service Pack 2 for XP, but until then try Mozilla or Firefox (my favorite). Both are free and better browsers with excellent pop-up blocking. Macintosh users should use Safari - it works great.
Alan in Marina Del Rey
says his PC is too loud. Try Yoshi’s recommendations from his SilentPC. Ultimately a water cooled PC is the quietest, and as processors get faster and hotter I expect we’ll all move to water cooling.
1–2p
Jamie in Palm Springs
says mom has a computer that’s on a light switch. When it’s accidentally switched off it has to be unplugged before it will start up again. That’s typical of ATX cases. The power is always on even when they’re shut off. If you kill the power, you have to reset the case. The best way to solve this problem, and protect her data and PC, is to buy an uninterruptible power supply - a battery - that will keep the PC running if the power is accidentally switched off. I recommend (and use) BackUPS from APC.
Bill in Arizona
has a Mac and wants to use the video chat features of iChat A/V. I don’t recommend the iSight. It’s too expensive and works poorly in low light. Any DV camcorder will work better. Or try Orange Micro’s ibot.
Chris in Ridgecrest
is having trouble running a LAN party on his wireless network. The router shouldn’t get in the way - it might if you were trying to serve a game to the Internet, but not if all the players are inside the router’s perimeter. Try putting the server in the router’s DMZ - that will make it look like the computer is on the net unprotected with all ports open. This is risky, of course, but sometimes required to get servers behind routers working.
Hunter in Grenada Hills
OS X 10.2 - using IE and it’s been very problematic. I recommend downloading Safari Enhancer to move your bookmarks over to Safari and using that instead. It’s much faster and more reliable.
2–3p
Mikkel Aaland joined us to talk digital photography
Read his round-up of high end digital cameras in the June issue of Popular Science.
Diane in San Bernadino
asks how to make pictures smaller for posting on the web. Stick to the highest possible resolution when you take the picture - that way you’ll have the most quality to start with. Then use your image editor to reduce the size and resolution of the photo. Finally compress it as a JPEG using the best quality that gives you a picture size you can live with. No picture on the web should be larger than 100K. If you need a bigger shot, put a small thumbnail on the site that links to a larger image.
Jane in Arcadia
takes animal pictures. She wants to know how to get the sharpest pictures of feathers and fur. Mikkel recommends shooting in RAW mode if your camera supports it. The camera will do no processing to the picture giving you the most information. Then use the unsharp mask in Photoshop to sharpen the picture to the degree you need.
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