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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday 3 February 2008
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Ron Rosberg - Demo 2008 Wrap Up
See all of the 77 Companies Demonstration Videos at the Demo.com Website
Here are just a few that I felt offer some very good solutions.
Iterasi : How do you bookmark a link to a dynamic page? How do you bookmark dynamic content? Iterasi demo’d their application using housingmaps.com as an example. The demo was impressive because it even saves your dynamic web content. Iterasi can seem to do a lot lot more. Makes going back to a dynamic page simple.
SkyFire : Skyfire claims to be a fully PC-like web browser on your mobile device. They demo’d ESPN.com and RockYou’s SlideShow facebook app running rather well on a PocketPC device. They also compared it to PocketIE, OperaMini and the iPhone. SkyFire supports JS, AJAX and Flash. They showed me a personal demo in their booth. Skyfire if it works looks promising!
StepLabs : Bluetooth noise-cancellation headset and they claim it will even work in the WIND! Can’t wait to try this out in my convertible or when biking. Will let you know if it works.
SpeakLike : SpeakLike tries to get language barriers out of the way in chat. The chat tool includes real-time translation and can also facilitate multi-person chat in different languages.
Leapfrog Tag Reading System
Tag looks to be a bit like the popular LeapPad in that it involves a pen-like device which, when you use it with special books, lets you touch the pen to the page to hear words spoken out loud and otherwise interact with the book’s text and images. But while LeapPad involved a pen tethered to a notebook-like plasticky case you put books in, Tag puts all the intelligence in the pen itself. It looks educational—and, more important, fun. LeapPad will release original books, and ones featuring known properties such as Olivia and Pixar’s cars. Tag will cost $50 and is due this Summer.
Thirsty Light “Know when to water your plants” - Retail: $9.95
The Thirsty Light™ is an intuitive digital plant moisture sensor designed to be unobtrusive when left in the soil of a plant where it continuously monitors conditions, testing the moisture level once per second. The Thirsty Light blinks a LED light to alert the user when its time to water.
Dr. Rick Web Alber - Dynamic Travel Time Maps
Produced by MySociety (London) and Stamen Design (SF, Exploratorium Cabspotting.org site)
Noted in O’Reilly Radar blog (Where 2.0 Conference 5/12–14)
Essentially a mashup of geographic and time data (
Examples are London and Cambridge commute time maps which display commute time to city centers in a creative way
- Contour lines (isobar-like) and colors mark the boundaries of regions that are 15/30/45 etc. commute to downtown
- Interactive maps with sliders
- Enable you to grow the commute areas and overlay housing prices
- Can visually compare car and public transport choices
- Data came from public website with bus, train schedules
- Some maps incorporate bicycle commuting times
- Mashed Up with Open Street Map data and walking times, etc.
Usefulness:
- Where would you like to work/work/vacation?
- Where should your company locate its next retail shop?
Future direction:
- Real time generation showing commute/driving time to any destination
We have this to limited extent for driving times, taking into consideration traffic conditions
- More with DASH-like devices
- Geo and travel data is cheaper or free in U.S., expensive in England
Tech News
Microsoft said Friday that it would offer $44.6 billion for Yahoo, the ailing search giant. The surprise offer of $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium to Thursday’s closing share price. Yahoo shareholders could elect to receive either cash or stock.
The proposed acquisition, the largest ever by Microsoft, would give some relief to Yahoo’s long-suffering shareholders, who have seen the company’s stock slide nearly 32 percent this year. It would also create the most formidable competitor yet for Google, the search engine giant.
Everything Microsoft does is in response to Google. Google is scaring Microsoft. Microsoft knows that the online ad business is a bigger business than the software business.
The EU might try to stop it, because the European Union hate Microsoft. Would this turn Microsoft into an online ad giant? If Microsoft did take over Yahoo!, what would happen to Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail? Would they eventually be combined?
A company called Intelius has a service they want to go public, and they can sell your information for $15. According to them, Leo is an intern at G4 Media.
Hour 1
Q Randy in S. Minnesota - Search Engine Redirects
It sounds like you have Spyware or a Virus. Make sure first that you are on Yahoo.com and using Web Search, not something like Image Search or Shopping Search.
It sounds like you are going to have to reformat the drive. It could be Cool Web Search. You can use a tool called Cool Web Search Shredder to remove it, and that’s free.
You’ll also want to get Microsoft Windows Defender, which is free. You might also want to try Firefox Web Browser instead of Internet Explorer 7. Also make sure you update whenever there’s critical updates from Microsoft.
Q Heather in California - Best USB Flash Drive
There are U3 Drives that install software as soon as you plug them in. That’s a huge security problem. Hackers can plug a U3 drive into a public computer, wait 20 minutes and walk away, come back 2 weeks later, plug it back in and they’ll have a bunch of private data.
Sandisk is good, Crucial is good, and Kingston is also very good. You should buy by price as their all the same. Then just format the drive and copy the files as you go along.
The problem with U3 is the fact that you have to go to their website and remove it using their tool.
Q Max in California - Lost sound
Most of the time, the drivers come with the drivers for the motherboard as the sound is built into the motherboard. It might just be that the drivers are broken.
Go to the Dell.com website, and you’ll find updated drivers. They might say motherboard drivers. If your headphones work however, it could be the speakers.
Hour 2
Q Ross in San Francisco - CMOS Battery Failure?
It sounds like the power supply has died. That’s a cheap $40 part, and something you can easily replace. It’s easy to install.
Go to PC Power & Cooling. They make great power supplies and there’s a calculator on that site. There’s a peak demand from the hard drives and they need to spin up.
Get a silencer from PC Power, and get a 500W Supply.
Q Kevin in Lake Arrowhead, CA - Starting a blog
All a blog is really is a type of software called “Content Management System”. There’s three really good platforms.
Vox.com is the easiest, and you can upload video’s, music and photos. The same company that does Vox also do Typepad. That’s not free, but it’s very powerful. That lets you to point your name servers towards their server.
Another great one is Wordpress.com. That has all the power of Wordpress, and it’s hosted by them. It’s free and it has most of the features of the Wordpress site.
Q Spencer in California - Leaving AT&T
There are two kinds of VoIP. One is using your broadband connection, but you plug a real phone into it, and it gives you 911. You can get that from Vonage or AT&T itself.
There’s another class, like Skype. Skype is free for Skype to Skype calls. But if you want to call a phone, you have to pay for it. You can buy a phone system from Skype that eliminates the computer and you can pay $20 a year for unlimited calls to the US and Canada.
This would cut your phone bill back by a huge amount. The quality varies with the bandwidth, and if your Internet or Power goes out, you lose your connection.
Hour 3
Q Joel in Los Angeles - Noisy Phone line
There’s all sorts of reasons you can get a noisy phone line. It may be that you have phone cables that are exposed. The owner of your building may have cut lines, and taped them together.
You should really go to your Landlord. You should unplug everything, and plug in one device at a time. If that doesn’t fix it, there’s a problem inside the walls.
Q Robert in California - Drive Failed
The best thing to do if you want to recover that drive is to take it out of the enclosure, and put it into the computer itself.
It might be the Enclosure itself that’s the problem. The disk head might be broken, and in that case you’ll have to take it to someone with a clean room to open the drive up and move the platters to a new case.
If it’s just the file system, all the data will still be there. You could try Norton Disk Doctor or Spinrite.
Q Cali in California - YouTube not working
All you really need is Flash and Javascript needs to be enabled. You really can’t use YouTube on Dial Up. It’s just too slow.
It’s not the speed of your computer, it’s the connection speed of your Internet. Go to DSLExtreme, enter your phone number and they’ll tell you if you can get DSL.
You’ll want to get rid of AOL, but you can use all your AOL stuff for free via the Internet. DSLExtreme’s High Speed is cheaper than AOL’s Dial Up!
Q Marie in California - Mouse stops responding
It might be that the Logitech software has broken and is interfering. What you’ll want to do is uninstall that and see if everything works again.
You might want to get a second opinion as well. It’s a little suspicious that their saying your motherboard, hard drive and CMOS is failing.
Q Marilyn in California - IT Support?
MakeItWork is one company that would help you along the way. They usually come over, but they’ve started doing support over the Internet.
Q John in California - Mac Screen Sharing
Leopard has “Back to my mac” which is built in, and if your on the same network, it works great, however it’s not as good over the Internet. There’s a program called Timbuktu from Netopia and you can get a trial there.
LogMeIn provides a free service for Mac remote control, and they also support Windows.
Q Paul in California - Trojan Horse over Cookie
The issue with cookies is purely a third party cookie which causes privacy issues. The cookie didn’t do it.
