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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday 2 March 2008
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Mikkel Aaland - PMA 2008
- Journalists and Photographers gather in the press room to see what’s new
- Sony have announced a Digital SLR with 28.4 Mega pixels
- You’ll have a true wide angle lens with these new ones
- Sony are very aggressive marketing wise
- Nikon Announced a D300 as a follow up to the D200 which has been a popular Digital SLR
- In point and shoots now, we’re beginning to see other features like Video features with good quality
- It’s a really exciting time for digital photography
- For what we’re getting at a price point these days, you really can’t go wrong
- Buy something that feels right, and you feel comfortable taking with you everywhere
Ron Rosberg - Gadgets of the Week
Revo Pico Portable WiFi Internet Radio at C.Crane
Price $349.95
Portable USB RE25U300J 300GB Hard Drive by Fujitsu
Retail $229
Price at NewEgg.com $159.95 with FREE SHIPPING!!
Convert your handwritten notes to digital and to text by the EPOS Digital Pen and 1Gig Flash Drive Partners with Dane-Elec
Video demonstration available here
Price: $133.30 at Amazon.com
Chris Marquardt - Capturing a detailed experience
- We sometimes have to use tricks to capture the experience
- For a sunset for example, we could use filters to try and warm it up
- The camera is not 3D, it only has one eye and it looks very different
- We can recreate texture
- For example, if you see a picture of sand you can almost feel it
The assignment this week is to capture the concept of “Call”.
Tech News
Digital Boxes are going on sale this week. In a few years, all the analogue channels are going digital. Unless you have a digital box, you won’t get anything.
The good news is, the boxes are going on sale this week. The government is offering a $40 rebate at their website - DTV.gov. There is a government voucher program at their website and it’ll give you a $40 voucher. These things are going to cost more than $40, but not much more.
The Grammy Awards are tonight and YouTube is going to play a big role. YouTube has arranged to allow the site viewers to vote on their favourite string rendition of The Pretender and the top 15 are going to be on stage at the grammy’s.
You can see that at YouTube’s “My Grammy Moment” Channel. MySpace was originally the site that independent musicians would go to.
One of the largest groups on MySpace got hacked. The “Atheist and Agnostics” group was hacked and the name was changed to “Jesus is Love”. They petitioned MySpace for a month and MySpace eventually changed it back.
Disk Encryption can now be broken. It takes a lot of work, but the fact is, it can be broken. It needs to have the encryption key in the memory of the computer. This isn’t a brute force attack to break your password, but the key is stored in the memory.
If they can get to the key before it is lost from the memory, they can break the encryption.
Hour 1
Q John in California - Importing Music with iTunes
Turn Error Correction in iTunes when reading Audio CD’s. When importing, it spins really fast, because it does it much faster than Real Time.
Error Correction may slow it down a little. They may have jammed a little more on that CD, and as you get to the last tracks, it spins faster. There are lots of ways to import on the PC.
If you could keep it spinning a little slower, then it might import a little better.
You might want to take a look at this website. You can use Max for OS X to rip audio files.
Q Dan in California - Vista 32 or 64 for Gaming Machine
There’s very little advantage on Vista x64. All that really means is the fact it can operate with bigger chunks of data, and it can handle more RAM. The disadvantage is the hardware compatibility. You need Signed x64 Drivers.
It’s for heavy duty users who need more RAM, usually servers. For Gaming, you probably wouldn’t get much more improvement. Leo doesn’t know any games that say better with 64 Bit yet.
Hour 2
Q Trever in California - Automatically Backup Website
You can do it server side or client side. You’ll have to run whats known as CRON Job. Linux and Unix has CRON running in the back end.
You set up a CRON Job, and that will run a script and it will automatically back up for you. Most hosting companies have network attached storage available.
That way, even if your machine is off, it still runs on the server. You could easily Apple script.
Fugu is a really good free FTP client that you can easily Apple Script. The only problem is the fact that you will have to download all the folders individually, uncompressed.
If you only want to backup the newest files, then you can Google “RSync”, and that will only backup changed files. You could even use Amazon S3, which is very inexpensive storage, and it will be in Amazon’s Datacenter.
This is basically what your Internet Hosting company is already doing. They usually backup everything for you. You could try Jungle Disk which is a nice interface for S3 and will back it all up for you.
It may even be able to run on a server.
Q Tim in Oregon - Jumping Hard Drive
You shouldn’t have to Jump the drive at all. Sata should auto-configure the drive for you. It sounds like a faulty hard drive.
Q Sean in Wisconsin - Getting Ubuntu Working
Some things are written in the Make Command, Bash Shell, Perl and Python. When moving into the Ubuntu community, your moving into the community of hardcore geeks.
By using Ubuntu, you do learn how to use a computer and learn how the computer works more. Ubuntu and a number of other Linux distributions are trying to appeal to more simple users.
You’ll start to pick up stuff as you go along. The hardcore Linux users do everything in the command line. What you want to learn first is how to use the command line. The Shell and the Command Line are interchangable terms.
You want a book that describes Unix commands. The MAN command is “Mannual”. If you want to know what something (such as SUDO) does, just type “MAN SUDO”. It’s really up to you how geeky you want to get.
The O’Reily books are great. The Dummy series and the Quick Start Guides , make it easier. You can also Google commands.
Hour 3
Q Michael in St Louis - Cable on Media Center?
Your tuner and your computer are not descramblers. Your Charter Box will allow you to get the digital stations, but your only getting the analog stations through the tuner.
It’s probably a setting on the HD-TV Tuner. What you really want is just what the cable box is doing. Whatever you put out to the TV, is what you’ll want to do to the cable box. You don’t want to use the Tuner as a Tuner, you just want it to pick up the output of the cable box.
You should probably take to Composite out. Play with different outputs from the cable box. You want the output of the cable box as a single stream.
You need to change the channels on the cable box. You could get a Cable Card compatible Video Card for your media center, and that will eliminate the cable box.
Q Ileene in California - Photo to Digital Converter
It sounds like a scanner. It takes a picture of the photo, and then via USB puts it out to the computer. This would be easier, and it’s certainly quicker than using a Scanner.
It’s taking a picture of the picture. This might be a good solution. Leo is going to try and get one and try it out.
You can find the device at Hammacher.com.
Q Ron in Missouri - Upgrading and Backing Up my Mac
The first thing every Mac owner should own is Super Duper. That allows you to make a full disk image and boot from it. Use Super Duper to make a full backup to an external hard drive, and you can then just boot to the external backup and you can just run as you were before.
Q Craig in California - Converting Projector Film?
In the olden days, they use to shoot the television tube with video. If it’s 30 frames a second, that will be fine. But you may have sync issues.
You could do a frame by frame scan, and your scanning 16 images a second of video which is a lot to scan. You can go to Legacy Digital and they do it for you.
Q CJ - Should I have more than 1 URL?
A lot of people have several domains, and domains are cheap. People who haven’t had a chance to get on mainstream media can have their own podcast, and have a chance to have a voice.
The new media is where it’s at. Having a foot in the future is the way it is these days.
Q Steve from Colorado Spings - Internet Error?
Whenever you get a popup that says “I can fix errors”, that’s spyware. What you should do is ignore them. Go into your Internet Settings and tell it not to warn you of debug errors.
