Leo Laporte
The Tech Guy
2–5p EDT Sat/Sun

Sponsors

Leo Links

RSS
Colophon





TwitterCounter for @leolaporte

Show Notes > Show 460

Edit | Read | Hist | Prt


For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
TWiT Netcast Network

Sunday 25 May 2008

«Previous Show

Next Show»

Starting with this show we welcome a new member to Team Tech Guy. James DeRuvo will be doing the show notes from now on. Sascha got a job working for O2 - the big cell phone carrier in Britain so he’s moving on.

James was the long time producer for Marc and Mark on KABC and knows computers and talk radio. I’m really glad to have him on the team, and he’ll be an important part of the Tech Guy web site as it evolves.

On today’s show…

Show Audio

Edited Audio

Posted one week after broadcast…

Tech News

Today is TOWEL DAY!

In honor of the great Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Towel Day was created to honor the most useful item to take while you travel!

NASAs Phoenix Probe to land on Mars

Tonight, at 8:39pm ET, the NASA Mars Probe Phoenix will attempt a soft landing at the Martian Poles. There’s alot of concern about the highly choreographed landing which will take the Phoenix from a Max speed of 12,000 miles an hour to a gentle 5 mph soft landing. The first in three decades, since the 1976 Viking landings. They Phoenix will be looking for ice and water as it’s six foot robotic arm digs for any evidence of life on Mars.

Roz Savage begins a solo journey across the Pacific in a rowboat.

Although space is wide open, there’s still adventure here on earth. Leo’s friend Roz Savage began her quest to row across the Pacific, which left underneath the Golden Gate Bridge last night at midnight. This is her second trip, and it’s not an easy go of it. The hardest part is actually rowing away from the Golden Gate Bridge!

Follow her on Twiiter or via her web site. Check out the marine tracker on her blog where you can follow her progress in real time.

We’ll be checking in with her from time to time, as this is a tech story since she’ll be Twittering while she rows her high tech row boat, which is manned with a satellite phone, two mac computers, GPS navigation & tracker, five iPods (with 300 book mp3 courtesy of Leo) and three video cameras which she will use to update everyone on her journey. And all powered by solar panels on her boat. Her trip will take her to the Hawaiian Islands, then to Fiji, then to Australia. If she succeeds, she’ll be the first female rower to cross the pacific with no support craft.

Guests

Dick Debartolo, The Giz Wiz

Dick is aboard the Queen Mary 2

  • The most high tech ship afloat, the Queen Mary 2 is 23 stories high and 1300 feet long. It’s stacked with WiFi, Satellite Internet Access (which is rather slow for things like Skype, Twittr, etc). Cost is about .50 a minute, but packages are available to make that cost a lot cheaper.

The one problem though is limited outlets, so if you bring a lot of gadgets to charge, you need something like Outlets to Go or the Belkin Freedom Plug to make sure all your tech gets the juice.

The Queen also comes with an acoustic canon, which is used to warn off any ship that comes too close. It’s an acoustic weapon that targets any ship and scares them off by barraging it with non lethal, but targeted sound waves.

Leo remembers crossing the Atlantic on the original Queen Mary, as well as the USS United States (which is rusting away in Philadelphia).

Ron Rosberg - Early Adopters

You’ll need a Netflix account for it, however. Fantastic quality. No stuttering, no buffering. Almost like onDemand.

Chris Marquardt, Tips from the Top Floor Podcast, talking Photography tips.

Tips for improving your photography …

  • Read the camera manual. You’ll learn all your camera is capable of.
  • Get CLOSER. Try to walk a few steps close and pick out a detail to focus on. You’ll remove unwanted clutter from the picture. Experiment by taking 10 pictures, each one closer, and you’ll see the difference.
  • Pay attention to the foreground. Joining things up may not be a good idea. Branches growing into someone’s ear, a horizontal line coming into the head, etc. Look for things that stand out and take away from the photo.
  • Learn exposure compensation. Your camera is easily fooled by ambient light. Using exposure compensation will help save a picture by adding a few “f stops” to brighten a picture up when the automatic settings want to stop it up too much because of strong ambient light.
  • Use a lens hood. It will prevent light from bouncing around the lens and take away a picture’s contrast. It also protects the lens elements in inclement weather.
  • Beware of backlighting. If you place your subject with their back to the light, then fill the front with equal light in order to balance it. Other wise the backlight will cause overexposure. You can also use reflected light to take make some beautiful lighting effects.
  • Don’t use the red-eye reduction flash. It will give your subject warning of a photo and you end up with “photo face,” which isn’t too natural.

Two more of Chris’ workshops are in Portland, Mn (Studio Shooting), and in Nashville, TN, Chris will be teaching about Concert Photography. Check out at Discoverthetopfloor.com for more information and how to register for these classes.

Hour 1

Q Carol from Los Angeles - her nephew wants to build a website, but he’s too young for MySpace.

Leo thinks it’s a great idea for a kid to have a website. They learn alot about typing, writing, and it’ll be surprising at the skills they acquire.. Give them a venue and let them go. Try a hosted journal from Live Journal or Blogger.

Another idea is VOX. Easy to upload pictures and movies, blog, you name it. Give him a Flip camera to make his own videos, he’ll love it. And the comments section of VOX is rigorously controlled and limited only to Vox members, and there’s privacy controls (which means he can limit to friends and/or family). Easy to use and the best part is, it’s FREE!

Q Gary in Gary, IN - Got the dreaded “blue screen of death” after unplugging his wife’s Sansa MP3 player.

Chances are, the Sansa’s driver is crashing the system. Reboot into “safe mode” (usually by pressing F8 when starting the computer). It’ll go into a boot menu. Choose Safe Mode and it will load the minimum set of drivers just to get the OS started. Once up, uninstall the Sansa stuff and reboot normally. Then download the latest software and drivers from the Sansa website.

If you can’t get into safe mode, it’s just coincidental and you may have a worse problem like a failing hard drive.

Q Ron from Milpitas, CA - Put a password in the BIOS. Is that safe?

No. Most PCs have back doors in the BIOS. It’s as easy as googling the computer’s manufacturer plus backdoor and find out how to hack it. The BIOS password only protects against the casual hacker, not the serious ones.

There is a hard drive password which can be more secure. But a BIOS password is far from secure. Newer laptops like Lenovo are being sold with better hard drive encryption.

Try TruCrypt which will encrypt your drive every time you log off so no one can get to the data. Great for USB keys as well.

Another option is The Iron Key which will lock up your data by pulling the USB flash drive out.

Hour 2

Q Nate from Minneapolis, MN, on Skype - His stereo system connects to speakers wired all over the house. But the cheap surround sound system isn’t wired for the bottom room. Suggestions?

Chances are, the current configuration is beyond what it was designed for and as such, he’s only getting the front end.Get an AV Receiver. Denon makes a great mid-priced receiver. Look for one with Dolby, DTSs and even THX. That way you can hook your TV audio inputs into the AV receiver for decoding the 5.1 surround audio and send it to the proper speakers. Onkyo is another good brand. But regardless, you’re looking at dropping a good grand on a proper system to handle it.

Check out Ultimate AV Mag and its buyer’s guide for more ideas.

Q Chuck in Mobile, AL - in the market for a 42″ HD TV. Budget $1100

That’s just about right for a 42″ set. Key is where you’re going to put it. In a darkened room or an all purpose room? If Dark, an LCD is best because it’s brighter and gives good display. Vizio is very good, as is Olevia. Both are lower cost but high performance HDTVs. Worth taking a look at.

Q Jason in the Chat Room wants to hear of the latest iPhone release rumors.

Good luck, Steve Jobs is way too good at plugging leaks coming out of Cupertino. Going even so far as to fire whole groups of people that he’s fed disinformation to and then waited to see if anyone spills the beans. And if one does, they all go. So anything coming out is pure speculation.

Look for Steve to announce the iPhone vs. 2.0 at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Rumor is that AT&T may subsidize the iPhone price down $200. And the memo to employees taking no vacations is for June 9–18th. So that’s a clue.

But the big news is that in addition to a newer high speed data network, there may be a MacTablet (this rumor never dies). A few weeks and we’ll know.

Q Mindy in Tustin, CA - Computer’s CD player is hanging up through Windows Media Player.

The CD doesn’t even show up in My Computer. Burned CD. Plays in the car. It’s possible that your PC’s disc drive is aligned slightly differently. Chances are it’s broken or, more likely, the cable isn’t properly “seated” or fallen from the drive or motherboard. The good news is, it’s an easy fix. Turn off the PC and unplug it. Open the computer and check the connections. If they’re fine, replace the CD drive. Take it back to the maker of the computer and ask for a replacement drive. But you can do it yourself. Drives are cheap.

Q Max from Palos Verdes, CA - His 3rd Generation iPod was geared for PC. Can’t synch it with his new mac without wiping his iPod completely.

There are programs out there that can read the iPod, copy the stuff off. SciFi HiFi makes one called PodWorks. Best for copying your iPod’s data off before you reinitialize it for the Mac.

Hour 3

Q Dillon in the Chat Room is wondering if $239 is a good price for a 22″ Widescreen monitor.

YOU BET! Dell offers one for around there as well. It’s a good size. Take a good look, verify the quality and go for it!

Q David from Venice, CA - Wants to know about burning a DVD-RW in Adobe Premiere Pro, but the image is really poor.

Wow. David’s going high end with Premiere Pro. He’s tried using AVI, MPEG and so far not happy with it. Using NERO to burn. Just like the days of CD, you can burn either a “data” disc or a real DVD, which works with a specific format that stores information in VOB (video object) files. So make sure you’re not burning a Data disk. Encode your video files in MPEG2 at the proper frame rate and aspect ratio. Your best results is to encode in MPEG2 through Premiere. Then Nero will just accept it and burn it, bypassing it’s own encoding utility. In fact, Premiere will burn the DVD and that may be the best way to go.

Also, make sure it’s deinterlaced. Interlacing really screws up in a progressive scan DVD. It was invented in the 60s when color was just coming out but we had small bandwidth available for broadcast.

Q Dan from Chesapeake, VA - His secondary HP PC is running XP. He had to use the recovery disks. His second drive can’t be accessed!

You don’t have the rights since you restored the PC. You need to “Take Ownership> of the files on your secondary drive.

Go to support.microsoft.com and look for tech note #308421. Follow the steps, and you will re-own your files again.

Q Sandy, in the Chat Room - wants an affordable podcasting microphone. Sub $100.

There’s a company called BLUE which makes very fancy professional microphones. But they also got into the affordable USB microphone’s early on. Blue’s Snowball is about $120, but Leo isn’t too thrilled with it. Doesn’t have “alot of headroom.” Breaks up alot.

But Leo really likes their Blue Snowflake. Very cute with a pro-like mesh screen that can either sit on a stand of hang from the laptop. Cost is $60.

Another option is from [http://www.rodemic.com/ | RODE]], they make a great mic called the Podcaster.

M-Audio makes a good one for about $150.

Q Danny from Raleigh, NC - wants to create a teleprompter using a monitor.

Computers don’t output to the hardware. Best bet is an ATI All in Wonder card. It has both VGA and RCA so you can output to both computer and TV set. There are probably VGA to RCA converters, but they’re not cheap - about $100. They will allow you to split the output.

His website is called SKYLINE TIMES. He’s doing news programming on the net. This is the future of broadcasting.

Q Ryan from Malibu - General Electric is coming out with a holographic DVD recorder that will fit 100 movies on a single disc!

Leo thinks this is very interesting, but he’s skeptical. G.E. has a habit of announcing things for the press coverage. Even though holographic discs would be 3D discs and the capacity potential is amazing, it’ll also be VERY expensive. The technology is in it’s infancy. So the chances are that this won’t happen for a long time, if at all.

Q Dave in Los Angeles - lookin’ to get a MAC Book and wants to know about how to have both OSs run.

There are two ways. Use a “dual boot,” which is built into Apple’s Leopard OS that let’s you install both OS’s and you get a boot menu that let’s you choose. Downside is you have to reboot to move to the other O.S.

The other way is virtual machine. VMWare and Parallels are the best for this. Leo uses Parallels. And as long as you aren’t doing gaming, today’s computers are powerful enough to run both OSs virtually. The negative is that you need a LOT of RAM, at least 2 GB, but 4GB is preferred. And you’ll need to use FAT32 if you want both OS read the files.

That’s it for this week!

«Previous Show

Back to TOC

Next Show»


Creative Commons License

This work is released under a Creative Commons License.
Built with pmwiki-2.2.0-beta19