Leo Laporte
The Tech Guy
2–5p EDT Sat/Sun
- Home
- Saturday Show
- Sunday Show
- Past Shows
- Audio Archives
- Stations
- Chat
- Watch Live
- Forums
- Listener Map
- User Groups
- Tips
- FAQ
- Glossary
- Contact Leo
Sponsors
Leo Links
 |
For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
|
|
Sunday 14 September 2008
Show Audio
|
Edited Audio | |
Tech News
The New Nanos are out.
Snooze. Are these gadgets so advanced in their technology that it’s all about adding “chrome and fins” to make them prettier and get people to buy them even when there’s no reason to? It’s what Detroit has been doing for years!
No higher capacity, no price drop. Sure, they widened the screen (same screen as before only turned on it’s edge) and added the accelerometer with a silly “shake it to shuffle” option. YAWN. But hardly worth trading in your own model for the new colorful one.
Hadron Collider is now active. The World hasn’t ended.
The Large Hadron Collider promises to to give us answers to the universe - if it doesn’t blow up the earth first. Course, they’ve only been sending particles one way and haven’t collided them yet. And when they do, some say this will be the end of the world as we know it. Cue R.E.M.
Video Game Sales down for August
Could it be because game users are getting tired of first person shooters? Maybe SPORE will give a breath of fresh air to the industry. Sale of Spore could be as high as two MILLION this month.
Spammer convicted to 9 yrs. in prison - freed!
He says he has a first amendment right to send SPAM. And it worked! Good luck with that. Unsolicited commercial email is a violation of the Federal Can Spam Act. But it was enacted after he was convicted, so he lives to spam another day.
SMS Text messaging exploding
2.5 BILLION SMS Text messages a day! Three times more than a year before. Average cost is .20 per message (that’s $1,497 a MB). What a rip off. That’s hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars a month that the cellphone companies are raking in. Congress is getting involved as Democrat Senator Herb Kohl is asking cellphone companies to justify doubling their text message fees and why these price hikes appeared across all cellphone carriers simultaneously.
Guests
Professor Amanda Peet
Fellow TWIT and particle physics professor Amanda Peet from the University of Toronto is our guest to talk about the Large Hadron Collider. It cost 36 BILLION Euros to build! 85 countries, including the US, chipped in to build it. It takes about 90 microseconds for a particle to make the loop around the ring. With all the lasers that collect the data, researchers can glean many PETAbytes of data in one collision!
The Large Hadron Collider will tell scientists why an electron has mass, but a photon does not. They’ll also find out what the Higgs Boson particle truly is and what it does. And will we see if there’s different dimensions of space? Multiple universes? The Unified Theory? Dark matter? String Theory? There’s a lot of theories the LHC could either confirm or kill off. Either way it’s good science! If it doesn’t kill us first.
Colleen and the Ultimate Gaming Machine
8GB of Corsair DDR3 1600 RAM. A $1500 Intel QX97703.2Ghz Quad Core processor overclocked to 4.6 gigs. That’s liquid cooled (the radiator is HUGE). Three Video Cards that are SLI (multiple cards displaying on one screen, sharing the load). Liquid cooled Asus Striker II Extreme motherboard. In addition, it has two Velociraptors in RAID 0, a 1200 watt PC Power and Cooling PSU, a Blu Ray ROM drive and a Blu Ray burner, a Scythe fan controller, a Razer Lycosa keyboard, a Microsoft Razer mouse, and a Dell 30” display.
Alsapaint.com painted it a killer chrome. Clocked at 29,000 out of 30k according to 3dmark vantage. WOW!
Roz Savage
Roz Savage is in studio! used her Tom Tom to navigate when her marine GPS receiver failed!
She’s in studio today, back on dry land. All is good. She’s seeking to be the first woman to row across the Pacific. Her desire is to raise awareness of environmental issues affecting the oceans. Particularly plastic pollution.
To learn more about Roz’s adventures, you can listen to the podcast she did on the water with Leo called ROZ ROWS, part of the TWIT podcasting network.
Hour 1
Q Richard, Redondo Beach, CA - Mobile web access recommendation
Richard needs mobile access to the internet. Leo says the iPhone is the best thing out there, even though there are a few things where Apple drops the ball (Like flash). The iPod Touch is also another great wifi option for internet if you don’t care about the phone.
But if you want a dedicated keyboard, the Blackberry is the way to go. And the Bold is coming out in two weeks. That should shake things up a bit.
Q Gary, Hawthorne, CA - Third party toners
Gary has found very affordable third party toners and is concerned about reliability and quality. Leo says it’s a mixed bag when you try to save money and go with a cheaper quality cartridge. When that cartridge explodes, it could ruin your printer. Leo suggests that even though they’re ripping us off in ink charges ($5,000 a gallon if you do the math), it’s best to stick with the original manufacturer’s ink or toner.
Q Mark, Granada Hills, CA - Internet connectivity problems
Mark gets a “server not found” error when he connects. But if he does IPConfig release or IPConfig renew and then he can use it. Leo says it’s hard to tell why this happens. It could be a faulty network interface on the motherboard, or a bad driver. Update the drivers for your motherboard. In fact, do all your drivers. Also, try a router. The settings for your ISP could be inconsistent and your router can straighten that out. You’ll also have a more secure connection, guarding you from some viruses like Sasser.
Hour 2
Q Jonathan, Palo Alto, CA - Updating his computer
John is looking to get an Alienware computer for game design. Leo says that Alienware is a custom gaming computer. Dell owns them now, but Alienware runs the show. And if you want high performance, it ain’t cheap. The first $1,000 gets you about 80% there. The next 2–4K gets your the rest of the way. So the key is, where’s the sweet spot of bang vs. buck? As such, Leo doesn’t think the premium that Alienware charges is worth it. You’re paying for the name and case. Way too expensive. But check out the mid-range Area 51 and then take similar specs and see the price difference. But don’t buy the “special RAM” pitch. RAM is RAM. Nowadays, you should be able to get a solid gaming machine for under $2K.
Q Jonathan, Murrieta, GA - Reviews on Spore
Jonathan has noticed that user reviews on Amazon for Spore are trending very low. Leo says there’s a movement afoot by users to post low reviews in protest to EAs decision to use copy protection on the game. They hate it. And while Leo is sympathetic, he doesn’t find the copy protection all that restrictive. So it’s somewhat an overreaction. You read the reviews themselves, and they’re all panning the DRM, not the game. Leo loves the game. And it’s important to tell the manufacturers that this kind of innovation will save the industry.
Another game Leo is looking forward to is Little Big Planet. Physics, puzzles, mechanisms. A learning game that everyone will love.
An interesting questions from the chat room - does DRM cost more than it saves? Well, Leo says that companies like EA have determined that it’s worth it to sacrifice good will in order to protect sales.
Copy protection treats honest users like criminals and doesn’t slow down criminals at all.
Q Eric, Camarillo, CA - Buying music online for Zune
Is Amazon the best place to buy music? Well, the great thing about Amazon is it’s DRM free. You can use them on the Zune or the iPod. Zune store is subscription - all you can eat for one low monthly fee. But once you cancel, you lose the capability to play your music.
Had the Zune come out before the iPod, it may have been a better mp3 player. But it didn’t. As such, the iPod is the king. Period. Better interface, too.
Q Drake, Westminster, CA - Spore installation trouble
Drake can’t install it on his XP machine. Gets a function fail error message.
Leo says this sounds like a DRM issue that may be causing you problems in XP. But since Drake can install it on his Vista machine, that’s the mystery. You may need to call EA to troubleshoot it. And look for “patches” over the next few weeks.
Q John, Torrance, CA - Electrical Cars
Leo says the big issue is battery technology that’s holding back cars. There’s an expo on electric cars coming to Santa Monica in a few weeks. Check out PlugInAmerica.com
Hour 3
Q George, Gloster, VA - Computer freezes when idle.
George says his computer “freezes” when it gets idle and he has to do a hard boot. Leo says it could be that the computer’s IO has become unresponsive. The clock may still work. Things on the screen move. That means the computer isn’t accepting input. It’s ignoring you. Doing a hard boot could ruin your hard drive in this situation. What happens is that a process can take over the entire system for a time, and you can’t do anything until it’s done. Why is it doing this?
It could also be overheating. Getting a laptop desk with fans that plug into your laptop can force air along the laptop and cool it down. Check what’s running in the background. Strip down the uses to the bare minimum. If that doesn’t help, a full Windows re-install may be needed. And if that doesn’t work, it’s a hardware problem.
Q Jeff, Rancho Santa Margarita, CA - Apple TV problems
Jeff is trying to use Handbrake to rip DVDs and place them on his AppleTV to watch. He gets starts and stops. Leo says it’s probably settings, but the windows version of Handbrake is very buggy and it could be causing the problems. All you really need for your AppleTV to read it is to convert to MPEG4. Leo likes AnyDVD by SlySoft for this. But it is a commercial product.
Q Michael, Valley Village, CA - Moving data from old to new computer
Going from Windows 98 to XP. It’s a good idea to start from scratch. Wipe the drive and reinstall Windows. The easy way is to remove the hard drive from one and attach it to the other. You can do this by installing the drive or, using a PCI adapter which can plug it in directly. Then, since hard drives are so cheap, you can then get a new hard drive for the computer.
Also, there’s the Tornado USB Direct Transfer Kit, which can link the two computers together and it’s on board software will move your files from one computer to another.
Q Paul, Tustin, CA - iMovie importing problems
When Paul imports movies, iMovie seems to be upscaling the video. Is it really? Leo has a hunch that the video quality isn’t that great to begin with. But for the web, that’s more than fine.
The newer cameras record in AVCHD which is better quality, has higher frame rates, etc.
Q Chris, Monrovia, CA - Network hard drive recommendations
Chris wants a central hard drive that all his computers can connect to. That’s what a NAST drive is. There are a lot of choices and some are expensive. Leo is a fan of having a RAID 5 setup. But the MIMEBOOK is a good choice. But Leo also got the READYNAS by Netgear. It has a lot of great features.
