Leo Laporte
The Tech Guy
2–5p EDT Sat/Sun
- Home
- Saturday Show
- Sunday Show
- Past Shows
- Audio Archives
- Stations
- Chat
- Watch Live
- Forums
- Listener Map
- User Groups
- Tips
- FAQ
- Glossary
- Contact Leo
Sponsors
Leo Links
 |
For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
|
|
Sunday 20 January 2008
Show Audio
|
Edited Audio | |
Guests
Chris Marquardt - Tips From The Top Floor
This week we review submissions for the assignment: “down”…
Astro Twilight’s submission
SteveOntario’s submission
iStevious’s submission
Leo’s submission
Our new assignment: “line” - take a picture illustrating the word “line” and upload it to Flickr.com (free account required) - then add it to the Tech Guy group.
Ron Rosberg - CES Wrap up
Sling Media’s Sling Catcher
Price $249
Availability 2nd Quarter 2008
Cnet’s Video Describing the Sling Catcher with Molly Wood
ION LP 2 CD USB Turntable with Direct-to-CD Recording
Available May 2008
Price $449
ION VCR with USB Connection toYour PC VCR 2-PC
Available May 2008
No pricing set yet
Sony 11″ OLED Available Now at Sony Style Stores
Price $2,500
Sony 27″ OLED (3 Credit Cards Thick)
Available: Unknown
Price: Unknown
Click here to watch a YouTube Video of the Sony 27″
Tech News
Toyota and Ford are showing off Hybrid cars, and plug in cars. They just added batteries, and it increased the speed as well.
Leo’s been waiting for this. It’s nice to have a gas engine for a longer trip, but for a shorter trip, it’s nice to have a plug in car. Scrabulous is an online game of scrabble. The folks who own Scrabble, Hasbro, sued Scrabulous.
Hasbro stood up and took note when it became a very popular Facebook app. It was just a couple of brothers from India who looked for an official version from Hasbro, and when they didn’t find it, they made one themselves.
mySQL has been bought by Sun Microsystems. mySQL is open source, but it’s also a business. They charge for the sales to businesses, and the support. They say that they made $60m to $70m a year. Sun Microsystems just paid a billion dollars to buy it.
Hour 1
Q Dianne from California - Power supply issues
It’s very easy to replace, you just take out the screws. If you go to PC Power & Cooling’s website, you can calculate how much power you need.
Their not too expensive, and their very easy to install. You can look at what your power supply was, you can just duplicate that. PC Power and Cooling’s power supplies are quieter, and they test each one.
If it’s a Dell or HP machine, you may need to get a special one.
Q Bob from California - Music wars victim
Unfortunately the Zune’s won’t play AAC. What you will need to do, is convert them in iTunes to MP3. You can do this easily. Go into iTunes Preferences, and change the importing mode back to the MP3 mode you like
Now select the tracks that you want to change back, and go to the Advanced menu. There is an item called “convert selection to MP3”.
The original Zune may have had issues with things like this. It could have done something strange with your audio. You can now update your Zune 1 to handle things like this.
Thanks to Sascha and Dan from the Chat room for those solutions.
Q Kirt in New Jersey - Sync Outlook to iCal
The easiest way is to use Google Calendar as it can sync the both. If you don’t want to put it on the net, then you could use a device like an iPhone or Smartphone / PDA to sync the two.
Google Calendar is completely private. Plaxo is also very good. It also becomes your address book and calendar. You can also setup rules like “do not copy certain tags”. Leo is very happy with Plaxo 3.
Question 2: SMS Forwarding
You should enquire to Verizon, and they should be able to set that up for you. There probably are Web 2.0 services that do this, but Verizon will probably be the easiest.
Q Michael from Chicago - Podcasting Kit
PODCASTUDIO comes with a studio-grade FireWire audio interface which includes the BEHRINGER Edition of Ableton Live Lite 4 music production software for PC and Mac computers. The package also features a professional 8-input mixer, high-quality headphones and a studio microphone plus cable, letting you go on air right away.
Sending audio from Skype back into the system:
Mix Minus is everything but the speaker. You’ll get everything except yourself back to you and into the recording. So what you do, is send the caller everything except themselves. You can use the effect bus for this. You’ll turn up everything except Skype for this.
Hour 2
Q Grandma Dolly from California - Easy to use portable computer?
Leo would recommend a Mac laptop. The reason Leo asked what they use is the fact that their going to be your support.
Mac’s are a little more expensive, but their easier to use and their more secure. The Mac comes with iPhoto, iMail and Safari Browser, so it does everything you want out of the box.
The Macbook’s start off at $1100. Leo recommends you go to an Apple store near you, and try them out. See if you like the keyboard and if you can handle the screen size. Leo thinks that the 13″ Macbook will be fine for you.
Leo loves Dell laptops if your looking for a Windows laptop.
Q Carol from California - Ultra Portable Laptop
Apple just announced their Ultra Portable and Thin Macbook Air. It fits into a Manila Envelope. It’s a little pricey at $1799, and it will be available a week from now.
Leo’s afraid he would sit on it and break it. With the Macbook Air, you can’t replace the battery easily, you have to send it away for $129. It does last 5 hours however.
Dell and Sony also make very thin laptops, and the ASUS Eee PC is very light weight. There’s a lot of great choices out there.
Q Pam in San Diego - Speech Phone
Their using digital technology now. He uses it to check his email, and they also have a virtual assistant. You can say someones name and it will try and call them. Voice recognition isn’t the best technology available.
Some carriers provide this service as well. You should ask T-Mobile if they can do this for you. Speech Phone isn’t too expensive and it has other great features as well.
Q Sascha in the UK - Building an In-Car Computer
You’d need an operating system that can handle shutting down easily and has big buttons. A laptop would solve the problem of it needing it’s own power source. You’d just have to look around for a touch screen, there’s no real “big brand”.
It sounds like a great project, and Leo would love to hear more.
Q Leslie - Film to Digital Camera
The better the digital camera, and the more you spend, the faster it is. You press the button half way down and the camera knows to get it all ready and then you hold it all the way down to take the picture.
You can get a Digital SLR. The Canon Rebel XDI is great, it has interchangeable camera lens’. The Powershot your looking at is also a very good choice. You should go to a store and give them a try to see if they do what you want it to, and see if it’s fast enough.
You should take a look at the Canon Powershot G9.
Hour 3
Q Scott from California - Gaming on a Macbook Pro
If you install Windows on that, it will run very well. It will certainly run fast enough to play WoW or most other online games.
What you need to see is the RAM, Processor and Graphics on the laptop. See the specs for the games. You need to get a high-spec Mac. The Mac will run fine off your current Wireless setup.
Windows will run as the full operating system via Boot Camp. Parallels runs faster than VMWare Fusion. But using Parallels for most programs on Windows, it will run as fast as it would on a Windows machine most of the time.
Q Sean in Santa Clarita - Sound has gone
You may not see separate sound drivers, you may just get the motherboard sound. On most motherboards these days, the sound is built into the motherboard.
You can go to Gateway or e-Machines and either will give you the right drivers.
Q George in Arizona - Wireless Network Card?
You can pickup a cheap wireless networking card from a lot of places. What you’ll need to do is look at the manual for it and find the modem config address (sometimes 192.168.1.1).
Considering the modem has Ethernet, you could get a wireless router and that would be a lot easier.
Q Anne from Ocean Side, CA - Going online
The first thing you want to do when you go online is to get all the Windows Updates. After that Nod32 is a great Antivirus.
Once you have your ISP and Internet all set up, the first site you’ll see is MSN which is safe. Then you go to Windows Update and update everything.
Then once your all set up, if there’s anything you have a strange feeling about, just don’t go there, or don’t do it. Your router will have a built in Firewall, and you won’t need another firewall.
You should leave the Windows Firewall running as well. You should do everything the Security Center in Windows tells you to do. Internet Explorer 7 is now very safe.
Be careful what sites you go to.
Q Alex from Woodland Hills, CA - Getting a Macbook
Leo got a 17″ Macbook Pro for the power, but he can barely use it because it’s more like a desktop! You can always get a Macbook 13″ and hook it up to an external monitor.
Final Cut Express and Studio would do just fine on a Macbook. The 15″ would be helpful.
Q Steve from California - Getting Internet in an RV
If you travel mostly in the US, you can get an EVDO card from Sprint or Verizon. They use the high speed cell network, and it’s plenty fast for most internet access.
It’s about $60 a month, it gives you up to 4mbits downstream and up to 400kbits upstream. Look at which ever provider gives you the best coverage.
