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Sunday, June 20, 2004

Show #50

My 50th show since taking over for Jeff Levy at the beginning of the year. Thanks for your support and Happy Father’s Day!

Starting today, I’m making my own high quality recordings of the show direct from the board. I’ll be posting the edited version one week after it airs.

 toc | toc 

Noon-1p

Don in Santa Ana

is ready to buy a phone with PDA functions. He also wants voice recording capabilities. If you plan to use it as a voice recorder make sure the phone supports removable memory otherwise you won’t be able to record much. I use a Sony-Ericsson P900. It does all that and is a great phone but at around $800 it’s way too expensive. Take a look at Nokia’s System 60 phones, the 3650, N-Gage, etc. They have similar features. And I like the Samsung i-600 with the new Microsoft SmartPhone OS.

Mark in Ft Wayne

wants to stop pop-ups. There are three kinds, and you’ll need to do three separate things to block them.

• Pop up windows created by web pages can be easily blocked by a third-party pop up blocker like the free Google Toolbar. However, the best way to block popups (and other nasties like browser hijackers) is not to use Internet Explorer at all. I recommend Mozilla or Firefox. Both have built-in pop-up blocking but you must turn it on in the preferences.
• Pop-ups can also be created by spyware. These programs run in the background and can appear any time, even if you’re not online. I recommend Spybot Search & Destroy to clean out spyware and block it in future. If you’re going to continue to use Internet Explorer also get Spyware Blaster.
• Finally, there’s a really annoying kind of pop-up that’s, in my opinion, a security flaw in Windows NT/2000/XP. These versions of Windows have a function called netsend that’s designed for system administrators. They can use it to communicate with all the computers on the network. Unfortunately, it can also be used by a spammer who can send a pop-up to ANY computer on the Internet. To block this form of Messenger spam you can turn off the Messenger service, or turn on a firewall. Enabling the built-in Windows XP firewall will block this spam forever.

He also was having trouble finding desktop wallpaper. Use Windows search and look for files ending in .BMP.

Jeff on the 405

is confused about HDTV tuners. No surprise. It’s confusing. The tuner isn’t built-into the TV because you need a different digital decoder for different HD sources. If you get HDTV from your cable or satellite company they’ll provide a decoder that takes the digital signal and outputs HDTV. If you want to pickup broadcast signal you’ll need an HDTV tuner like the Samsung T351. These cost around $300.

Laurie in Costa Mesa is looking for a business card scanner. I recommend the IRIS Business Card Reader II. It’s a USB device designed exclusively for standard sized business cards. It’s powered by the USB bus and does a great job of character recognition. The resulting address book can be imported into Outlook and other programs.

Eugene in Calera, OK

uses the excellent Firefox browser, but can’t get his bookmarks to sort alphabetically. Trillback in the chat room recommends installing the Sort Bookmark Extension. You can add a variety of extensions to Firefox by opening the Options… dialog and clicking the Extensions icon. Click the “Get New Extensions” link.

1–2p

Dave in Sunland

has older laptop that runs Windows 98 SE. He has the install disc and is wondering how to clean his system by resinstalling. It should be pretty easy, just boot from the SE disc and format the drive before installing.

Karen in Highland Park

is visually impaired and looking for a talking VCR called the SpeakEZ by Zenith. The chat room suggests Ebay, and indeed I did find some interesting devices including a talking Betamax! There is also a SpeakEZ for sale for the next 42 minutes!

The Braille Institute has a list of SoCal centers for blind people who are looking for adaptive technology help.

Randy in Shelby, NC

wants to turn off the System Task Scheduler on his Windows 98 machine but it keeps coming back. That’s because he has Critical Update Notification installed. If you promise to update every week Randy, I’ll tell you how to disable the Task Scheduler permanently. First, uninstall Critical Update Notification using the Add/Remove Programs control panel. Then delete the Update Windows item from the task scheduler. Finally, under the Scheduler’s Advanced menu click Stop Using Task Scheduler. Microsoft has the instructions here.

Mark in Upland

Hotmail blocks his email attachments. Not sure why. Do make sure you’re not trying to send files that are too big. After the show I got an email from Vic who says:

 Hotmail’s free email storage is limited to 2 MB.  This is extremely limiting.
It appears to count inbox, sentmail, or anything except junk or trash.
If only a little available space is remaining, Hotmail will reject anything 
except small messages which are within that remaining space.  Anything 
as large as the smallest photo will be rejected.  The subscriber may not be 
able even to send messages! 
Vic

Anthony wrote in with further clarification:

 As a former military photojournalist, I’ve had to email stories with photos 
through other email accounts before the advent of Army Knowledge Online.  
I tried to use hotmail, but ran into the same problem.  Not only does hotmail
limit the size of the attatchment, they also limit the number of attatchments 
to just 3 the last time I tried.

An option for Mark in Upland is to get a free email account with www.mail.com.
They allow much larger attatchments, and there I’ve been able to send everything
that I needed to send.  I’ve sent files that came from cameras in the 2, to 6 megapixel 
range, and worked over with Adobe Photoshop 6.0 with no problems.  The only 
problem with mail.com are those pesky little pop-ups.  If you have a blocker, use it, 
otherwise it’s a great little free email account when you have to send some large files.

Fortunately, this week Microsoft announced that it was increasing the free storage on Hotmail to 200 megs and attachment sizes have jumped to 10 megs. That alone should solve the problem.

Matt in Charlotte, NC

is trying to teach his dad how to use computers, but it’s frustrating both of them. I recommend the Absolute Beginner’s Guides - they’re designed for seniors and very user friendly with big type and lots of pictures. I also love Larry Magid’s The Little PC Book.

2–3p

Ed in Silverado

wants to edit TV shows he’s recorded on DVD. DVD video is recorded in MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio, then it’s mushed together (or mux’ed) into a single Video Object, or .VOB file. Before you can edit the DVD you need to demux the VOB. Videohelp.com has great tutorials for Windows users. For Mac OS X try Export2QT. The resulting Quicktime file can be edited in iMovie and reburned with iDVD.

Anthony in San Diego

is worried that his company will snoop on him if he stores his personal calendar on the company provided PocketPC device. He’s right to worry. Even if you mark some appointments private they’re not protected from company snooping if the company owns the device. He was looking for a way to store his personal calendar on a memory card which he could pop out for privacy. I don’t think PocketPC Outlook will do that, but a third-party calendar program might. Visit Handango to look for one. I also like Dale Coffing’s PocketPC Passion. I’ll ask Dale what he recommends.

John from Missouri

is a meterologist for KFVS TV in Cape Girardo. He wants to put his weathercasts on his personal web site. Easiest way to do this would be to use his computer to record the show. He’ll need a card with TV-in like the WinTV from Hauppauge, Movie Box DV from Pinnacle Systems, or ATI’s All-In-Wonder card. Once he captures the video as an AVI I recommend he re-encode it in MPEG-4 and save it as a Quicktime file.

Chat Logs and Show Audio