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Saturday 5 April 2008

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Leo is live today from Hobart, Tasmania in Australia thanks to Sea FM! Read about his travels on his blog, follow him on Twitter, and look at his pictures on SmugMug.

Show Audio

Edited Audio
64kbps MP3	16kbps MP3

Guests

Scott Wilkinson - DLP

DLP is now the only way you can go rear projection. Some people are using Lasers to illuminate the TV’s. The red color on the laser rear projection TV’s are tremendous.

The colors are pretty great. The light it shining off the mirrors in the DLP. They have a Red, Green and Blue laser on the TV’s and so there’s really no rainbow effect. You can turn the lasers on and off much more quickly.

The blacks are excellent. The black levels are very similar to the Pioneer Kuro. Dolby is getting into the TV game with LCD TV’s. Dolby are more known for sound.

Tech News

Leo can really do the show from anywhere in the world. Using an ISDN line, you can get a 128kbps constant speed. It’s very expensive, but it’s plenty fast enough to send good audio. 128kbps MP3’s are great quality.

It’s plenty of bandwidth to get voice, and send voice back. Using DSL, sure you can get 5mbps, but there’s an unpredictable delay. If there was a delay while Leo is doing the show, there would be dropouts and it wouldn’t be able to keep up.

It’s very important that the bits of packet come in order and are decoded in order. Leo imagines that the ISDN is going via satellite, but it could be going via under sea cables.

You need to use a box on either end to uncompress it. Level 2 Compression is being used (MPEG 1). The box can send, receive and encode audio in real time.

If you want to see the photo’s that Leo has taken, you can see them by going to his blog.

Bill Gates has said that Windows 7 will be coming out next year. He supposedly told investors that. Some people have been waiting til Service Pack 1 to begin using Windows Vista. Maybe you should wait a little longer for Windows 7.

Apple Inc. filed a federal challenge to New York’s trademark application for a new `Big Apple’‘ logo, saying it’s too similar to the stylized emblem found on iPhones, iPods and iMac computers.

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Hour 1

Q Suzie in Los Angeles - International Cell Usage

When your out in the water, forget it. You’ll have satellite phone capability on the cruise, but it’ll be very expensive. The internet usage is slow.

Sprint use CDMA for their signal. You need a GSM phone as everywhere in Europe uses GSM. You should call Sprint and ask them if they do a World phone, which does both GSM and CDMA.

T-Mobile is not horribly expensive as it’s a European company. When you get to that country, you can buy a SIM card. However for that to work you’ll need an unlocked phone.

If your going to be doing this more than once, it’s probably a good idea to get a carrier like AT&T or T-Mobile. These calls are more expensive when your roaming.

A Skype phone is a great idea. It won’t work on the ship, but any time you can get a decent internet connection, you can use Skype and you can even have your regular number forward to Skype.

If you want to use Skype to call a normal phone, then you can buy credit, and you can even have people call your Skype number and leave voicemail. Got VMail allows you to put all your numbers in and it’ll track you down on all those numbers when someone calls, or they can leave you a voicemail.

Orange, and some other European providers such as Vodafone allow you to have a single sim and number for all European countries, and calls are much cheaper.

Q Corey from Montanna - Blocking Websites

Internet Explorer lets you add websites to the blocked zone. You can get fancy if you want and modify your hosts file.

You can get programs that let you modify the hosts file. HostsMan for example.

You can interrupt use OpenDNS which replaces the DNS from your ISP, and routes it through their server. It’s free and allows you to block certain websites and even setup a block on websites like adult websites.

Unless your kids are clever enough to know how to change the DNS locally, then they won’t be able to get around it. Leo does it on the router, and then those computer you don’t want blocked. You can lock the computers down using a limited user account.

If you use a router, you can just clear the domain name servers from your computers, and set them in your router. From then on, it’ll ask OpenDNS where the website is.

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Hour 2

Q Gary in Santa Claurita - Flash Editor for Mac

Flash is available from Adobe for both Windows and Mac.

Flash player allows you to play Flash video. If you want to create it, you’ll want to get Flash CS3. Most of the commands and tools are the same, so your getting the basic stuff.

However it’s quite expensive. You can get a student and educational discount. There are less expensive ways to get Flash video like Swish video. Flash CS3 by itself it $700.

You can download a free trial. If you own a copy of MX, you can upgrade for $200.

Second Question: Mac Viruses?

There are several known viruses for the Mac’s but they are concepts. None of them are in the Wild. You can’t yet get hacked on a Mac.

Q Chris is North Dekota - Running Windows on a Mac

You can use Parallels to use the iMac Screen be Mac, and get Parallels go to the external monitor for Windows. It usually remembers the settings. You just drag the Window open.

You can also get Parallels to open in spaces and set one of the spaces to use the big monitor in OSX Leopard.

It should be more than fast enough to do what you want it to do. You should stick with XP. You’ll want about 4gb of RAM on that Mac to run Windows. You’ll want to set 2gb to Windows and 2gb to OSX.

Q Fred in California - Fast Internet Connection

The cable and phone companies are trying to beat each other with fast Internet connection speeds. FiOS allows you to get speeds of 50mbits sometimes. Downstream is always faster than upstream.

It depends on how far you are from the central office and how many other people are using it. DSL is usually a little slower than cable.

Business Class DSL Extreme gives Leo 5mbits down, and 800kbits up.

Most providers in Australia only give you about 500 Megabytes of download a month, however, like the UK they use ADSL 2, which allows up to 21mbits.

Q Kevin in California - Mouse stops working when burning CD’s

The CPU isn’t doing a good job of splitting it’s time. The program that’s burning the CD or DVD has set it’s priority to ignore everything else.

You can tell the process to be nice, which means it’ll allow other processes to also use the CPU. You could probably look at the program and see if it allows you to set the priority lower.

There’s a cheap program from GRC.com that allows you to reboot the computer automatically.

CafeTimePro allows you to set the computer to automatically reboot, turn off and log off at the times you set.

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Hour 3

Q Linda in Tasmania - Surge broke DVR?

DVD Recorders are basically computers. They are venerable to frequent brown outs and spikes. There are surge protectors, but it’s better to use a UPS.

Those TV’s are very sensitive, and so home theatre systems usually come with a pretty heavy duty UPS. APC is a good brand.

You don’t need to get a big fancy one that’s going to keep running for hours, you just need one to keep it going through brown outs and suppress any spikes.

Q Lisa in California - Clip Art Public Domain?

You can use it and put it on business cards free. You couldn’t put it on a clip art collection for example.

You should be allowed to put it on business cards that you sell, but you should check the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) from Microsoft.

Q Tim in California - Mac or PC?

It’s very easy to get into a Mac vs Windows war. Hammers aren’t better than screwdrivers, their just better for banging in nails.

Mac’s are usually better for music than Windows, but if you were doing presentations on a Mac, you should use Keynote. It looks different enough that people don’t recognise it.

If you buy Microsoft Office for the Mac and make a presentation for it, they will be practically the same and they are file format compatible.

Since your a Windows guy, it sounds like you should just get another Windows machine.

Q Mark in California - Digital Boxes

You need to get a Digital Converter Box that turns it into analog. You need a Digital Tuner (DTV). You only really need one box if all your TV’s are hooking through to one antenna.

Question 2:

You can get a Point and Shoot or SLR that records high definition video all the way down. It’s a very high quality, high speed camera. One of the uses is to make super slow motion video.

All Digital SLR’s use remote triggers.

Question 3: Turning off User Account Control

Click on the Start Orb, type in MSCONFIG and press Enter, then click on “Tools” and scroll to the bottom of the list. Click on “Disable UAC” and click OK and Allow.

Leo doesn’t recommend you turn off UAC. You can reduce it being so aggressive a however.

Q Kev in California - Magic Jack cutting off on Wireless

You can improve this by disabling Wireless Zero Config as it’ll search constantly for a better signal. Going Wired would help you a little.

If the Internet goes out, you have no phone. If the power goes out, you’ll have no phone.

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