Leo Laporte
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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday 30 March 2008
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Guests
Ron Rosberg - Gadgets of the Week
Electronic Dog Training Aids
Dogtra for up to 2 dogs
MSRP for 1 Dog $224.99
MSRP for 2 Dogs $334.99
Tri-Tronics for up to 3 dogs
MSRP for 1 Dog $266.00
Internet Price $239.00
Internet Price for 2 Dogs $369.00
Internet Price for 3 Dogs $499.00
Venturi Mini Bluetooth through your car radio for your MP3 and Wireless Phone
Internet Price at J & R Music $99.99
Tekkeon MyPower for your Notebook #3450
Amazon Price $119.95
Tech News
The TSA (the people in charge of airport security) have a blog. They post on issues such as several people not getting through airport security when they had their Macbook Air notebooks with them, as the TSA didn’t realise what they were.
Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.
The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.
The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.
Hour 1
Q Doug in Los Angeles - Internet Explorer on Mac?
There used to be a Mac Internet Explorer, (version 5.5 was the latest). An excellent way to do it is to run Windows on your Mac using a tool such as Parallels.
It costs $80, and when you install it, it’ll ask you for an install disk. You pop in your Windows disk, install Windows, and you can then run them side by side.
In order to do this, you will be running two operating systems at the same time. You should get as much RAM as you can for your Mac notebook. You’ll want at least 2gb. XP in Parallels runs almost full speed.
Bootcamp splits your hard drive and you can decide if you want to run Windows or Mac OSX. It’s practically a Windows machine. A benchmark was done between Parallels, Bootcamp and VMWare Fusion. Parallels was faster in some cases than Bootcamp, and much faster than VMWare Fusion.
iWeb creates pages that other editors such as Microsoft Expression and Adobe Dreamweaver can’t edit. Apple uses all sorts of tricks in iWeb. Use Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver.
An iWeb website is not standards compliant. You can edit it through iWeb, but your stuck using iWeb. Sandvox is a great alternative. It’s Mac only, and is very standards compliant.
Q Mary in California - Safari Crashed
An EXE file cannot run on a Mac, unless Parallels is installed running Windows. The site you went to is a Malware site. We don’t know what the hackers did on the “Pwn2Own” competition, as they’re not allowed to release it to anyone except for the manufacturer.
The site tried to give you a Trojan horse written for Windows. Your fine. All it did was run a Javascript program, attempting to take advantage of a flaw in Windows. You don’t have that flaw as your on a Mac.
Almost all websites use Javascript, but security experts like Steve Gibson don’t like Javascript. Not all Javascript is bad. There are some exploits out there that use Javascript to take advantage of Windows machines.
Make sure you patch your system whenever updates come out. Don’t run as an Administrator on Unix, OSX, or Windows Vista. Run as a limited user, as it stops these kinds of attacks.
If something pops up saying you have a virus, or spyware…etc, don’t click on it. Clicking on those links and opening that Window can infect your system. Good Antivirus software like Kaspersky and Nod32 have features to try and stop these attacks, but no antivirus can stop 100% of viruses.
Install Microsoft Windows Defender. You can also turn of scripting in Websites using Firefox and the NoScript Add-on. Internet Explorer’s Protected Mode helps alot.
Steve Gibson recommends turning your security level on Windows to the highest, and then you can make exceptions to sites you trust.
Hour 2
Q AJ in Florida - Better Google Rankings
Getting other sites such as Wikipedia, or Digg does help get your status higher in Google results. Ultimately your goal is to get to number one on the Google results.
Getting other similar sites to link to you that are highly ranked will also help. So long as your not selling anything, then Google shouldn’t have any problems with you.
Google doesn’t like any sites trying to sell you anything if they look like editorial sites. They also don’t like link farms. Make sure the title of your page has the kind of things you want people to find you by.
The content of the page should be much higher up than the source code.
LDLHDL.info is AJ’s site.
Q Adam in California - Thumbnails?
Even if you don’t still have the origionals, then the Thumbnails may remain. You should check where the JPEG image is. This happens a lot.
Leo would start by searching Windows for .JPG or .JPEG files, and see if you can find the files that way. The album file is just an index of the files. You need to figure out where they went.
You can use Screen captures of the thumbnails to use as a backup. Although not great, they are at least there. Hoversnap is one way of doing that.
Q Helen in California - Photo’s automatically open in email
You can’t control how they do it on their end. If you right click on the JPEG and compress it, you can then send them that ZIP file. If you send them a JPEG, it’s going to display unless they turn off “display JPEG” in their email settings.
You can change the settings in the Preferences of Apple Mail. They have to do it. You can’t control what they do with their email.
Q Ben in California - EVDO Card burned out
The Cradlepoint Personal Hotspot allows you to plug the EVDO card into a router, and you can then connect to the hotspot via WiFi and it works great. It works just as though you had a broadband router.
Q Greg in California - .mac Mail
The cheapest way to get .Mac is via Amazon, as it’s cheaper there. You get 10gb of storage for backup. It gives you a .Mac email account, and it allows you to sync your calendar and contacts between the Macs.
You don’t have to have a .Mac account to use Apple Mail. Go to .Mac and setup the DSL Extreme account. You also need to put in your server addresses.
POP3 Incoming is: mail.dslextreme.com
Outgoing is: smtp.dslextreme.com
You can also keep your AOL address. They now allow you to do mail through the Internet, instead of using their App.
Q David in Los Angeles - Tag iPhone Contacts
You could run an Apple script that runs through your address book, and puts an asteriks next to it. That will let you go to the AT&T site and find out if their AT&T Numbers.
Apple script is an easy language to learn, and it can be fun. The AT&T Website is the hardest part of getting the script to work. It’s not impossible to do. You could also ask a programmer on Craigslist to do it.
The Mac is designed for small little programs like that. Perl, Python and Ruby are all great for this, and Leo would use Perl for this.
If your listening and would like to do this, then email leo@techguylabs.com and you’ll get credit on the show.
Hour 3
Q Tom in Arizona - Video Formats
Video formats aren’t the compression methods, their just the format they’re stored in. For example, WMV is Microsoft’s format for Windows Media Player Video.
Players like Quicktime and Windows Media Player can play non-native formats through codecs and plugins.
Q Frank in Thousand Oaks - Screen very dark
It sounds like the screen has died. The LCD has a light behind the screen. Sometimes the cable can break in the hindge, or maybe the light has burnt out.
It’s nothing you can really fix, you could hook up an external screen to the laptop, but you should really call Dell to get it fixed.
Q Earl in Granada Hills - Dell M1530
The M1530 is a great laptop. You’ll be very happy with them. The new widescreens are great. Both the M1330 and the M1530 are very thin, and they are among the best notebook laptops.
Lenovo Notebooks are great as well. Dell has recommended both those notebooks. Dell claims about 5 hours of battery life. Leo always cuts it in half from the manufacturers claim. You might want to buy an extra battery and charge that up if your going away for a few extra hours.
The biggest difference between the two is the bigger screen. Leo recommends you go with the M1530 Widescreen. The price is comparable.
Q Frank in California - Wireless Extender
You really shouldn’t be using other people’s Internet access. Technically it’s illegal. If you could figure out what neighbour it is, you could go to them and tell them they have an open access point.
Ask them if you can continue to use it, and see if you can give them $5 or $10 a month if you can share it. You’re doing them a favor. The most important thing to do is turn on WPA Encryption.
That’ll keep people from using it unless they have the password. He should also change the login password, and universal plug and play. UPnP opens up the router to attacks.
