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Saturday 26 July 2008

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Edited Audio

Posted one week after broadcast…

Tech News

AOL to phase out XDrive, AOL Pictures and Blue String.

These services are to be sunsetted because they aren’t popular enough.

Great Britain coming down on illegal piracy

The government and the music industry are working with Britain’s 6 biggest ISPs to clamp down on illegal downloading.

Yahoo music goes out of business

On September 30th, Yahoo will shut down all music services which will in essence strand their customers who have purchased music with D.R.M. Better start burning your music to CD NOW.

Leo says that users should think twice about buying DRM protected music and look towards services that sell music without it, like Amazon.

Leo’s TriCaster is sick.

The hard drive died yesterday. So we’re back to the “old days” of single camera video at TwitLive.tv.

Although the TriCaster is rather pricey for the “regular guy,” Leo recommends trying the Vid Blaster, which does it all in software.

Guests

Scott Wilkinson, Ultimate AV Magazine

The Blu-ray DVD recording saga from last week continues! Scott has done some research and it turns out that it’s a lot easier to burn Blu-ray on regular DVDs than anyone thought.

Scott got a letter from one of the Twit Army down under who says you can do it with NERO. Leo says Toast, on the Mac, also does it. Nero 8, using Nero Vision will burn it to a DVD-R. Nice and easy 104. Needs to be 1080i. But you will still need a Blu-Ray player/Playstation 3 Blu-ray player to play it back and it’s only about 20 minutes worth on regular DVDs.

Speaking of PS3s, the Blu-Ray that the PS3 has will not deinterlace the video as it plays. Meaning, it won’t knit the two together so you’ll need to rely on your HDTV display to deinterlace it. Scott says it isn’t to worry, it’s just annoying as most video cameras shoot in 1080i.

Leo recommends a tip by Alex Lindsay when it comes to home video editing. Importing your video at 540p. It will reduce the quality very little, but the file size is reduced dramatically. So you get the best of both worlds.

Next week, Scott will be in studio for an entire hour! So get your home theater questions ready.

Grammar Girl!

We love her podcast. Now, Mignon Fogarty has a new book! She started with a science podcast, but as she saw more and more errors in scientific texts she edited, she decided the world needed a podcast about Grammar.

She records using Audacity to her laptop. Uses Levelator to clean it up. Got a pop filter to prevent “p’s.” She starts her show with a listener question. She launched her podcast and the timing was right. Word of mouth. CNN picked it up and next thing she knows, she was #1 on iTunes. She has other shows including Mighty Mommy, Make it Green Girl, Money Girl and more. Quite the success story.

Look at the business side of your passion. You can go on your own because advertising is getting easier online. Get an ad agency. If it’s attractive to advertisers will find you. Podtrac, Wizard and BlueBerry.

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Hour 1

Q Tim, Upland, CA - Putting podcast on iTunes.

All you need to do is create an “RSS” feed and submit it to iTunes. It takes a few days to approve, but once it is, you’re up and running. But you need to be careful about the RSS feed as iTunes requires some special tags.

Using WordPress, there’s a great plugin called PodPress which will handle it all, the RSS feed, sending it to iTunes, and even putting a player on the Wordpress blog.

Also, Check out Feedburner.com - it will take the standard Wordpress feed and convert it to a podcast feed automatically.

Libsyn is a great place to store your podcasts. $10 a month, unlimited bandwidth.

Q Terry, Marysville, OH - Universal remote for PS3

Most of the universal remotes she’s seen, like the Harmony 1, aren’t supporting the PS3 since it uses Bluetooth. She’s heard of Bluetooth conversion kits but is leery.

The AVS forum is where Leo found it. You get the Playstation 2 to USB adapter and a PS2 to DVD remote adapter. Hook em together with a Radio Shack adapter and you can use your PS2 remote to change your PS3. As such, you can program the Harmony 1 to accept PS2 codes.

Q Gary, Culver City, CA - Monitor problems with his G5.

He can’t use his larger 24″ monitor as his main monitor for his G5. The OS won’t let him switch it. He can drive it. But Leo suspects that the higher resolution monitor may be gumming up the works. Leo says check out LowEndMac.com. You may be able to solve it by upgrading the video card with more video RAM.

From the ChatRoom - Try dragging the menu bar. Go to the display system preference pane, detect monitor’s pane and drag the menu bar to reorder the monitor.

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Hour 2

Q Phil, Nashville, TV - PC security

Should he use Eset’s Security Center? He has a router, Windows firewall and nod32. Leo says you don’t have to have the Security center. Just practice Leo’s Six Rules of Safe Computing and keep your updates up.

Q Dennis, Pasadena, CA - Password locked out in Vista.

His wife created a password but performed an update while making her password and as such, the computer locked her out. Try logging in as an Administrator with a blank password. That doesn’t work, you can also get the Ultimate Boot CD and make a boot CD (you can also put it on a thumb drive). Then, you can use it’s password reset tool to clear the password. The reason it can do this is that the UBCD runs on a portable version of Linux which can see into the Windows OS and clear the password.

This is one of must have tools you should have in your computer utility arsenal.

Q Margaret, Ithaca, NY - The upcoming DTV conversion.

She has DIRECTTV and an analog antenna for local channels. She’s concerned she’ll lose local stations and can’t get her converter to work with it. In theory, the original antenna should work, but if you’re in a marginal area, you may need to get a more powerful digital antenna to pick up the digital signal.

Q Dave, Rock Springs, Wyoming - Solution for Yahoo Music snafu.

Dave burns CDs from those downloaded songs and the re-rips the CD to strip the copy protection. It’s called the “analog hole.” You degrade the quality slightly, but most can’t really tell the difference.

Dave also wants to why he suddenly has a ton of new channels. Leo says that as more channels make the switch to HiDef, they are creating “dot” channels which you can scan for that are HiDef. But some are live previews of TV channels that stations use for production purposes. If you have a HiDef TV, rescan every once in awhile and look what pops up.

Q Exin, Apple Valley, CA - Changing DSL Providers

Which should he choose, a static IP or dynamic IP? Get whatever is cheaper. Static IPs should be more expensive and only need to be chosen if you’re planning to be running your own servers. Dynamic is cheaper and provides IP access on demand.

Q Jason, Toronto, CA - Hard drive speeds. Do they make a difference?

Getting a Dell XPS1530 and wants to know if a faster 7200 rpm drive is important. Faster hard drive speeds can be seen at mostly bootup and program opening. But only a few seconds.

Hard drive space is more important. But at sizes above 500GB, they become less reliable.

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Hour 3

Q Jim, Lake Forest, CA - Changing cell phone providers?

He isn’t sure he wants to upgrade his plan or go pay as you go. Will he run into issues on his SIM if he changes systems? AT&T/TMobile uses GSM, while Verizon/Sprint use CDMA. So you may run into problems there. Problem is that cellphone companies lock their phones. So you need an unlocked phone. Most can be sold unlocked but are more expensive since there’s now subsidizing from the Cell provider.

Another way you can go is to make friends with an independent cellphone store. Do your homework here to find a legitimate one. They almost always can unlock just about any phone.

Jim’s other question is that he’s getting the Blue Screen of Death consistently with about 4 of his computers running inDesign. Restoring to factory install doesn’t help. Leo’s pretty convinced that there’s some serious hardware issues here. But if it works fine in say, Administrator, then you have a driver issue. Check to see if it runs steadily without inDesign. If it does, then you have issues with inDesign. Or, could also be hardware issues overtaxing faulty RAM.

Q Vance, Los Angeles, CA - HD Channel Scan doesn’t show up.

His Dish Network receiver is split with an antenna with a splitter and doesn’t pick up the channels because of his splitter. The signal is probably degrading enough that the receiver can’t pick up the Dish Network receiver for HiDef channels. Separate the two lines seems to be your only choice.

Q Marco, Otterbourne Park, Ontario Canada - Secure WebForms.

His trial certificate is expiring soon. Is there a free option? Leo says there used to be several free options. Thawte.com may offer it, but Verisign swallowed them and as such, it’s probably not free anymore. But that isn’t a bad thing. Freebies don’t guarantee your valid identity and as such, people may be suspicious and tend to avoid it due to phishing exploits.

Leo recommends using the higher quality extended certificates. But if you’re solely giving the webform addresses to clients, you can use Thawte or even CAcert to create your own.

Q Vance, Los Angeles, CA - IRC.DSLEXTREME Chat room not working on his G5.

Download XChat Aqua. It’s free and it will work better than Mibbit which is heavy on Java. Also, check your Safari security settings.

Q Aaron, Ontario, CA - Laptop recommendation

Looking at the XPS1530, but isn’t thrilled it only comes with Vista. Leo says it’s fine, it’s been out for over 18 months now. Vista’s issues were overblown and persistent. Compatibility issues did crop up with older PCs, but with older PCs, why would you upgrade from something that worked? Vista is great on new machines. There were no real compatibility issues.

The fact though, is that Vista is much safer and secure than XP. It’ more useful (and prettier). Vista Home Premium is what you want. You don’t really need the Ultimate version.

Q Patty, Alexandria, VA - Handheld TV sets. Will they work?

Nope. When the DTV transition happens, all those handheld TVs and radios that have TV bands will STOP working. And nobody is working on a portable digital converter.

Cya tomorrow!

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