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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday 2 February 2008
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Scott Wilkinson - Media Devices
Sony seemed to have dropped out of the race. They still make Laptops and Desktops with Media Center on, but they don’t make devices anymore.
NiveusMedia make great products for Media Centers. All Niveus Media Center are capable of storing, managing and playing television, music, radio, movies, photos and more.
Live|ware also make great systems. They have benchmark internal components and the look and feel of a high-end A/V receiver, Life|media provides from 500GB to 4 Terabytes of storage for digital music, movies, pictures, and recorded TV, plus instant access to Life|ware’s complete home control via your home network.
We’re also starting to have Media Servers like TiVO, Slingbox and the Apple TV. Also NAS servers are starting to become Media Servers and can connect to the TV.
People who build their own generally use MythTV and other Linux distributions that have similar features.
Tech News
Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.
Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
Joshua Green - Super Tuesday
Fund raising on the Internet has been a huge effect towards the elections. $32 Million has been raised by Barrack Obama, and Ron Paul raised over $20 Million a quarter via the Internet.
In the older days, you’d post it, whereas now you can log on, and put your card details in and that’s it, instantly its there. If users want to make a contribution to a candidate, it’s easy enough and quick enough to not have to think about it too much.
Most of the things candidates do to promote themselves are either only on the Internet, or are on the Internet before mainstream media. Ron Paul is seen as a “virus” on the Internet, as his supporters are everywhere, however that isn’t reflected in the votes.
There’s not much offline effect from Ron Paul. He’s certainly used the Internet to promote himself, but he’s not getting more than 10% in any of the polls.
It’s mostly the staff who do the work online on sites like MySpace, Twitter, Digg and other sites.
On Monday, NASA will be broadcasting a Beatles song across the galaxy. Their going to be doing it as it’s the 40th anniversary of the song, and NASA’s Satellite dishes. It’s also the 50th anniversary of NASA itself.
Leo wonders about it, as maybe we don’t want to attract the attention of what is out there?
The photo marketing show is going on in Las Vegas, and this is the first time Leo is really excited about it. Garamond is making a GPS device that has a built in Phone. It’s going to be a beautiful device, with big touch screen.
Sony are making a new SLR with Full Frame Pickup. This is a little chip that receives light and turns it into bits. This Pickup is the heart and the soul of the camera.
Sigma announced a new type of camera with a different type of Pickup. It works differently and gives better results. However it doesn’t have great quality in low light. They’re now putting out a compact camera with their new chip. It will have 14 Mega pixels.
There’s some new underwater cameras, some cameras that can be frozen.
Hour 1
Q Dennis in California - Best media center device
If you want to build it yourself, then you can use a Linux operating system. There’s some great Media Center systems that are designed to look good and they go next to your TV and they don’t look like a computer.
They run Windows Media Center… that means you can run software on it. Windows Media Center is appropriate for a TV, it displays nicely, and runs on top of a normal Windows system.
If you buy an all in one media center, it’s ready to go. It has video outputs and a remote control. Leo doesn’t have a particular recommendation, but Toshiba and Sony used to make great ones.
HP also has their Media Center products. They’re not perfect, but they work.
Q Fie in California - Apple Laptop problems
As notebooks draw more power, the power supplies get hotter and hotter, and they can melt sometimes.
If you need a new power supply you can get a cheap one from other companies, like Belkin. That shouldn’t cost you more than $50. There are still Apple repair stores that don’t work for Apple.
If your not careful, it’s almost like an RCA plug, and there’s room to move, and you can easily break the pin.
Q Marilyn in California - Yellow Light of Death
You need a driver for your video card. The driver that Windows Supplied is wrong. What you need to do is boot into Safe Mode, reinstall the driver and that should fix the problem.
Hour 2
Q Tony in California - iTunes Authorisation
Apple allows you to deauthorize all your computers once a year. That then allows you to them copy you music back.
You can also send them an email, and they will always let you re-download the music. Then you just type the password in the systems you’ve got and they’ll then see the music again.
You might have to login to Apple’s iTunes account page and you can deauthorize. You can only do this once a year.
If they don’t let you do it, give Leo a call back and he’ll give them a hard time. This is exactly what’s wrong with DRM.
Q Brian in Colorado - Cannot see external hard drive
Relax and take a deep breathe. A USB connection isn’t the best way to recover data. You really want to put it inside the computer as a slave. It could just be a formatting issue.
Hard drives really don’t die unless the pin has been shot out of place or the platter is broken.
Bigger hard drive’s are beginning to have a lot of problems because their so big. What most likely happened is some key sectors on your hard drive have been written over or corrupted.
You should run a program like Spinrite. It won’t work on USB however. You should also go into the BIOS and check the BIOS. What happens these days is the fact that the hard drive’s are bigger than the BIOS can understand.
Q Jack in California - HDMI Switcher
Terk is a very good system. It has 3 inputs and 1 output. You could probably find it around cheaply, however it’s over $100 on their own website.
Also, get the cheapest HDMI cables you can find.
Q Chris in California - Cupboard cooling
If you have it on shelves, and it’s high enough, then it should be fine. If you close the cupboard however, it can get very hot. You should probably look at some cooling for that.
You can treat it as a computer case. You can get two fans at the top and blowing out at the bottom. The air is less dusty in the top. That will create a nice flow of air.
Q Erin in Santa Monica - Syncing Mac’s
The easiest way is using .Mac. This gives you 10gb of storage. This allows you to create a local iDisk, and you can automatically sync that with .Mac. You install this iDisk on all the computers, and when you copy files to it, it will sync with all your systems.
It will do your calendar and address book. It won’t do iTunes or iPhoto. If their on the same network, there are free programs you can get.
Hour 3
Q John in California - USB to S-Video or Component Cable
It’s really a question of finding one of these that go both ways. A lot of companies that make these, but you want one that will output from USB.
Most the time, people will find a device that takes it from the VGA output. You can get Projectors that have 2 VGA ports. One to plug the computer into, and one to plus your monitor into.
You can also get a device to split the output of the VGA. The cheapest way is to get a second Video card with VGA out, and then you can get a converter. Matrox makes a box called “Dual head to go”. It’s a couple of hundred bucks for this thing.
Or you could get a second video output. It’s much better than using USB, as the quality will be much better.
You could also make your monitor be a big TV.
Q Gary in Buffalo - Moving Windows around
Usually they put a hidden partition on the computer that is required for you to use the disks.
It might be a regular Windows install disk that’s just Labelled HP or Dell. It’s different from Formatting.
Q Mary in California - Porn Storm
It can happen to the most innocent of people with Spyware. Spam can also be the cause that pushes people towards bad sites.
If you had a virus on your system, it could send itself to everyone in your address book. If he then opened the attachment, he could have gotten infected.
First of all, he shouldn’t be mad at you as your as much a victim as he is. It’s possible that someone forged your address. There’s no way to verify where it came from.
Q Nancy in California - Online Backup
If you use services like Carbonite and Mozy, the encryption is done on your side, so they can’t see anything.
It’s all automatic for peace of mind.
Q Alex in California - Dell Freezing
If a sector on the hard drive is damaged, it will take extra time to read it. Otherwise, it could just be a bad install, so reinstall the operating system.
Usually if there’s going to be a problem, it’ll be in the first few months.
Q Mike in Washington - Programming Games
One way to go is Squeak eToys and another is Alice.
