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Sunday 11 January 2009

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Tech News

MacWorld goes over like a lead balloon

Steve Jobs pulls out of Apple’s last MacWorld Expo citing health and family. Phil Schiller pinch hits and has little to say. Sure, new versions of iLife and iWork, and the 17″ Macbook unibody. But not much else.

Ballmer era begins at CES with a bang … Windows 7 Beta

Steve Ballmer announces that the beta of Windows 7 will be available to 2.5 million. Servers slammed on Friday, so Redmond pulls it down until Saturday after adding more servers (Leo thinks they went to Bill’s house to add servers. LOL). The beta will expire August 1st, so we now know about when Windows 7 will ship.

Leo says it looks just like VISTA, but will be faster and more reliable.

The Pre is Palm’s Hail Mary, wins best in show

Leo admits that Palm is back, and in a mighty way with the new Palm Pre. The Pre will be available through Sprint and will be available first half of 2009.

Leo’s looking forward to trying it. Real keyboard. MMS. Cut and paste! You’ll be able to buy music and add applications. Looks sweet. But Leo’s been disappointed by iPhone killers before, so we’ll have to wait and see.

The CES Rumor of the year … Apple’s coming next year

Rumors are running rampant that Apple will attend CES next year. Well, with the iPod and iPhone, it is now an electronics company … but come on. really? Bye Bye, MacWorld. We hardly knew ye!

Nine Inch Nails HD Concert for Download

Nine Inch Nails concert, recording in 1080p is available for download for free! It’s 400GB which you can download over bittorrent.

Guests

Dick Debartolo, The Giz Wiz

The Giz Wiz is back to talk about the crazy gadgets he saw at CES. Dick likes to look at small time vendors who are rather out of touch with their strange gadgetry.

CellMate got his attention. Promises that you don’t have to pair your cell or sync it. Just clip it against your ear with a giant metal clip! About $40.

iCap - A $150 baseball cap with radio tuner and speakers! But hey, it saves lives!

No PoPo. - AA batteries that are water (or, well, something else) activated.

EyeFi - winner of the “CES Last Gadget Standing” for the second year running! New feature - upload instantly to YouTube. A new special 4 GB card is out for $89 exclusively through Costco.

NPowerPeg - charge your cellphone or mp3 player while you walk.

My Email Buddy - Worse then “you’ve got mail” the email buddy goes berserk when you get an email.

Mead ETXLS Light Switch Telescope - GPS magnetic compass. Finds where it is located and what you can see clearly. Shows what finds best or you can manually insert a location in the sky to find.

Follow Dick at Twitter!

Steve Greenberg, Gadget Guy and author of Gadget Nation

Gadget Guru Steve Greenberg was also at CES. Steve thought that even though it was a smaller show this year, he felt that attendance was good considering the economy. And there’s some great, innovative stuff that he say. Here’s what he found …

The Minoru 3D Webcam - it attaches to your monitor or lapop and has two lenses. You have to wear the silly glasses, but an affordable 3D webcam (about $80) is pretty cool.

3D TV - Westinghouse had a 3D Television that you didn’t really need glasses for. But you did need to stand in an exact spot to see the effect.

Steve also saw a bunch of “green” stuff. Motorola has the MOTO W233-Renu, a cellphone coming out made entirely of recycled bottles. That’s cool.

Another company has the “eco button” which will place your laptop to sleep at the touch of a button. $24

TriSpecs Bluetooth Sunglasses.

Twitter Steve at Gadget Nation and at SteveTV. And, of course his blog at GadgetNation.net.

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Hour 1

Q Steve, Barstow, CA - restoring his iPhoto library

Steve moved his iPhoto library to a new MAC, but then copied his iPhoto library to the wrong location. What does he do? Leo says that if you lose your iPhoto library, you’re probably out of luck. Using iPhoto `08 it stores the photos in your pictures photo, but in one main folder called the iPhoto Library (even though it looks like a single file). R/C and select “show package contents.”

The easiest is to back up the entire iPhoto library. But Leo also says that if you want to save space, just save the “originals” photos. The rest is cache/thumbnail information. And backup your library. As Alex Lindsay says, “if you don’t have more than one copy of something, it doesn’t exist.” So make backup copies and even more so for your photos which are by far the most important thing on your computer.

Don’t freak out if you deleted your library, but don’t write to your disk either. There are dozens of applications which can “unerase” what you’ve deleted. Google is your friend.

Q Joan, Garden Grove, CA - her PC is running slowwwwwww.

Leo says this happens with Windows very often. Sometimes it’s due to installing new things that run in the background, but mostly it’s due to “bit rot.” Leo recommends backing up your data and format the drive and reinstall Windows. Think of it as spring cleaning. Then, you’ll want to get online and get the new Windows updates to lock down your PC. Then reinstall applications. Lastly, restore your data.

One thing you need to be certain of is that you get ALL your documents. Some programs save files in it’s program folder, rather then the mydocuments folder. And the pictures, music and video, of course. Backing up iTunes - you want the iTunes Music folder. VERY important.

And if you’ve used Windows encryption backing up your data, you’ll need to be certain you back up the certificates. Ask an expert because this is not an easy task.

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Hour 2

Q Howard, Mission Viejo, CA - digitizing analog audio

Howard wants to essentially rip his old analog collection without using a computer. Leo says there’s a few out. The Neuros OSD does stand alone recording of video. You could record the audio with it directly and then you have something to rip your video collection as well. Crossley has the Rock N Recorder, it has a cassette and turntable which you can rip your collection and burn directly to CD.

Samson H4 is $224.00. The Zune H2 will also do it.

Belkin makes a minJack plug in for the iPod.

Q Don, Los Osos, CA - His hard drive has died

Don has a usb external hard drive that has died. Leo says you could get an internal IDE connector and hook it up to your computer and use SpinRite to recover it. But it’s probably dead. Aanother option is ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery). $50.

Leo says you could get the data off using Drive Savers. They take apart the drive in a clean room and get your data. But it isn’t cheap. We’re talking thousands.

Q Jim, Alta Loma, CA - Voice activated software

Jim is using Dragon Naturally Speaking (formerly Dictate) to access a closed corporate system from home. He’s worried that he may infect it. Leo says that connecting to a network from the outside does come with a risk, but corporates have policies, procedures and software which guard against it. Leo suggests talking to the IT guys to familiarize yourself with their policies, keep your AVS up to date and practice Leo’s Rules of Safe Computing.

Q Robert, Palo Alto, CA - Using Win 7 Beta

Robert hasn’t been able to download the Win7 beta. To Download, Leo says you need to select the Akami Download manager, then Win 7 will download. Check Internet Explorer’s activeX controller (the yellow bar) to see if it’s blocking it. Leo also suggests installing it in VMWare so it doesn’t overwrite your current Windows configuration.

Q Andrew, Conway, AR - Getting an HD camcorder

Andrew is a film student looking for a camera. Leo says there’s a new JVC camcorder which records in Final Cut format. How cool is that? What about the HV21? Leo uses the HV20 and loves it. He says the HV21 would be a great camera for the budget Andrew has. Records in 1080i. 1080p is coming, but most computers will choke on the data of 1080p. Then, when you import, import at 540p. It’ll make it a lot easier to edit.

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Hour 3

Q Catherine, Los Angeles, CA - data recovery

Catherine’s computer went belly up. She put in the recovery disk and can’t get the data back. Leo says that you can still recover some of it, but because she already overwrote some of the data with the recovery disk, all of the data won’t be recoverable, just some of it. Catherine took it to a pro to recover and Leo says for a few hundred dollars, it’s worth it. Get Carbonite, Catherine. Easy to use. It isn’t enough to backup to a hard drive, you have to have an off site backup as well.

Rules of backup are simple - there’s got to be two copies of everything with a third copy offsite. Francis Ford Copolla had all his scripts, his laptop and his backups stolen! You need an off site option as well.

Q Eric, Chevy Chase, MD (Eriar, chatroom) - Replacing PDA

Eric’s mom wants a new PDA separate from her phone. Eric thinks the iPod Touch would be the best. Thoughts? Leo agrees. It’s the best PDA out there. It’s basically the iPhone without the phone. Thin. Lightweight. But don’t forget this new Palm Pre. When it’s out, it could be a good contender.

Eric also says that a good photo backup solution is Windows Live Photo Gallery. Direct upload to Skydrive (25GB free storage, wow!) with no degradation.

Q Paul, Chicago, IL - Laptop adapter replacement

Paul needs an adapter replacement for a PA12 Adapter. Prices are wack. Leo says the dirty little secret is that electronics are cheap to make and markups are obscene. Leo believes you should avoid a 3rd party adapter as a bad one could brick your laptop or even cause it to explode or catch fire. You have to ask yourself, do you want to risk bricking a $2000 laptop to save $50 on an adapter? Stick with a Dell brand adapter.

Q Abraham, Los Angeles, CA - testing RAM

Abraham used a dockram adapter to test his RAM, but the he’s having memory write errors in Internet Explorer. Leo says error messages are stupid and inaccurate. It’s not the memory. It’s more likely a driver issue. Don’t assume an hardware error is accurate. Try booting from a CD and see if you get an error message. If you can boot from a known good boot disk, you’ve eliminated the hardware.

Q Dale, Palmdale, CA - Computer slowing down

Leo says that copy protection is useless and if Hollywood would just give us the best possible value and highest quality, 99% of people won’t deal with it (especially with Blu-ray blanks at $25 ea) and would just buy what they want. That’s the key.

Dale got his SlingBox and LOVES it. But his PC is slowing down. Leo says it’s a bit rot issue and the fix is just to backup data, reformat and reinstall.

Q Sandy, Hemett, CA - How do you back up in Windows?

Sandy doesn’t know how to backup. Here’s what Leo suggests. Pick up a pair of external hard drives - they’re cheap. Drag the contents of the documents and settings folders to both EHDs. Then, take one and bring it somewhere else (work, mom’s house, etc). Then, every few weeks is rotate the drives. This is the easy way. Another option is to drag to a CD or DVD and burn them. Put the CD in the drive, drag it to CD and then tell Windows to eject it. It’ll ask to finalize, you say yes, and you’ll be done.

Q Sergio, Los Angeles, CA - Virus Alert Popups

Sergio got the AVS2009 popup and closed it and the download was triggered! Crafty badguys are using javascript to keep the windows open. You close one and another pops up. As long as you haven’t download AND run the program, you’re alright. If you got the file, delete it. You can block popups with Internet Explorer 7. And beware of AntiVirus 2010 as well.

See you next week! Backup!

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