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Saturday, June 5, 2004

Show #45

Time to talk tech.

State Senator Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach joins us briefly in the 1p hour to talk about fighting spam and protecting privacy in the workplace.

Tomorrow: Former Screen Saver, Megan Morrone, co-hosts with me!

 toc | toc 

Noon-1p

David in Studio City

wants to know if it’s worth upgrading his Sony Hi-8 camcorder to a digital video camera. Absolutely. The DV camcorders are much higher quality than the old analog cameras, even the Hi- 8 camcorders. For best low light performance I recommend the inexpensive Panasonic PVDV-53. For higher quality (but worse low light performance) try the 3 CCD Panasonic PVGS120.

Jim in Fullerton

is getting a laptop for his college bound daughter. He wants to know if a Macintosh is ok. It is as long as the college isn’t going to require applications that are Windows only. Check with the school. No matter what kind of laptop you get, make sure to get lock for it, too. Laptop theft is endemic in colleges.

Kim in Hawthorne

needed instructions for turning on the Windows XP firewall. Open the Network Connections control panel, right click on your Internet connection, select Properties from the pop-up menu, then click the Advanced tab. Check the box for the Windows Internet Connection Firewall to turn it on. She also wanted to turn off some icons that load when her system boots up. The best way to do this is program by program, using the program’s preferences. Right click on the little icon on the right hand side of the Windows Taskbar - check the pop-up menu for a disable, preferences, or setting command. If you can’t figure out how to turn the program off any other way, use the Microsoft System Configuration Utility to do it: Click Start→Run… and enter “msconfig.” Click the Startup tab then uncheck items you don’t want to start on boot.

1–2p

State Senator Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach

Joining us this hour, State Senator Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach. Senator Bowen sponsored the best anti-spam law in the nation, and is the author of SB 1841, which would prohibit employers from engaging in electronic monitoring of employees without first providing notice and SB 1834 that limits how retailers can use RFID tags to monitor you.

T in San Diego

needs a Macintosh compatible smart phone. First place to look is the Apple iSync site to make sure the phone you’re considering is compatible. I use aSony-Ericsson P900 with T-Mobile service. It will work with any GSM compatible carrier, but it’s awfully pricey. The Treo 600 is Mac compatible, but it doesn’t support Bluetooth wireless synching.

Frank in Culver City

says his mom has Earthlink dial-up. She doesn’t want to miss calls. Earthlink offers a call forwarding service called Internet Call Waiting for $3.95–6.95 per month with a 30-day free trial. Incoming calls are automatically forwarded to a different number when you’re online. You’ll get a pop-up notification when calls come in with the option to pick up or take a message. Earthlink uses CallWave. If you don’t use Earthlink you can also subscribe to CallWave directly. A competitor, BuzMe offers a similar service that I like a lot. AOL does the same thing for its subscribers.

2–3p

Mark in Ft. Wayne

lost his desktop wallpaper and now he wants to find it. If you change your wallpaper by right-clicking on pretty pictures you see in Internet Explorer and selecting Set as Wallpaper… from the pop-up menu, the files are saved as “Explorer Wallpaper.bmp” Problem is, if you do that again, you’re going to replace the previous wallpaper - and it will be lost forever. I recommend renaming the files before you save the next one. Any .bmp file in the Windows directory will show up as a wallpaper choice in the Appearance control panel. You can also search for other wallpaper choices by pressing F3 and searching for all *.bmp files.

George in Palos Verdes

wants laptop buying advice for his college-bound daughter. Unlike Jim in the first hour he’s looking at Windows notebooks. I recommend:

• A Pentium M processor for better battery life
• Wi-Fi for wireless networking
• 512 MB RAM
• 40GB or better hard drive
• Combo drive with CD burner for backup and DVD player for movies
• Good speakers - this is her stereo too
• LAN connector (check to see if the dorm network has printers - otherwise you’ll have to buy one)
• IEEE 1394/Firewire/iLink connector for connecting external devices, including DV camcorders and netcams
• Try the keyboard, screen, and pointing device before you buy to make sure she likes them
• Don’t forget a laptop lock

Mark in Upland

needs OCR software. That’s the program that turns the picture that comes out of the scanner into text that can be edited. I recommend Omnipage Pro, $120 from Scansoft.com.

Lucky in Torrance

wants to shoot pictures with his Nikon CoolPix and see them on the Mac screen as he does so. The Image Capture application that comes with OS X does not do that (I was wrong), but he can get a Formac Studio TVR or El Gato’s EyeTV and connect it to the analog output of the camera.

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