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Sunday 18 January 2009
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Tech News
Circuit City goes bankrupt…
With Circuit City closing all doors and liquidating their inventory, now’s the time to make a great deal on HDTVs, camcorders, the works. But don’t wait too long, because the good stuff always go first. The Internet is really having an impact on brick and mortar establishments. Electronics stores, Bookstores, Record stores, even newspapers are losing the race as more people shop online. Everything is changing as the economy goes global.
Barack Obama to be inaugurated Tuesday
With the 44th President being sworn in on Tuesday, change is here. And not just with the government. Technologically, Twitter, citizen journalism, YouTube, all have had and will have an impact. In fact, CNN is doing a thing where they will ask people to email their pictures of the inauguration and then they will use Photosynth to create a 360 degree master image of this historic moment where the US inaugurates the first black President in our history.
But what about his BlackBerry? News is that his transition team has figured out a way to let the new President continue to use his B’Berry. Leo suspects there will be an intermediary – like an aide’s – to act as a buffer for the President’s online security. What about his Twitter account? It hasn’t been used since election night and perhaps the dignity of the office won’t allow for it. But certainly they can create a new account that’s for the White House to disseminate information to the electorate.
One issue with the Obama BlackBerry issue is that RIM is a Canadian country and all the traffic is routed through Canadian servers. So that could be the real sticking point in letting the President Elect work his BlackBerry in the traditional manner.
Follow the Inauguration on Twitter
Leo’s a Man with a Mission on Windows 7
Leo thinks that Windows 7 is done. Lighter, faster, cleaner. Works better. Do everyone a favor, Microsoft, and release the hounds already!
Steve Jobs steps down … temporarily
Steve’s taking 6 months off to focus on his health. Nuff said. Get well soon, Steve and Godspeed.
Guests
Chris Marquardt - Tips from the Top Floor
Chris has been hiking in the Swiss Alps and taking some great winter shots in the snow. Chris has some tips for winter photography - if you know how your meter works, you can compensate for the middle range choices your camera makes. Use exposure compensation to go into the plus range to keep the snow from going gray. Otherwise, the camera will over compensate for the bright reflection off the white snow.
What about metering? Matrix or average metering is best for snow photography, and compensate 1–2 stops. You want to keep it just below being “blown out.” Use the Histogram to keep and idea on it. If it’s cut off on the right, then you have over exposure.
Lastly, bring extra batteries. In the cold, batteries tend to lose capacity. Keep your extra batteries warm against your body and swap them out. In fact, you can perhaps squeeze extra shots out of your battery by taking it out and warming them up in your pocket for a few minutes.
The new assignment … SILHOUETTE. Take a picture and upload it to Flickr, tag it with silhouette and add it to the Tech Guy group. Like these guys did:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29959922@N06/3179282579/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30913760@N07/3190282574/
http://flickr.com/photos/alexsingh/3212758161
And follow Chris on flickr at http://www.twitter.com/nubui!
Hour 1
Q Adam, New York, NY – Shooting RAW
Sad that Circuit City is shutting down. He really liked their price matching philosophy. But in the end, the competition of online shopping and the 800 lb gorilla known as WalMart just doomed them. And Leo believes that online stores will always be able to undercut brick and mortar companies.
Adam also just bought the Nikon D40 yesterday w/ the 18-55mm lens. Really likes it. It’s his first “big boy” camera. But Adam wants to know the difference between JPEG and RAW. What are the advantages of using RAW? Most pros shoot in both. JPEG is a compressed format and the quality is reduced. The camera renders the photo out deciding on white balance, exposure, etc. RAW, on the other hand, is an unprocessed image that has everything. So the image is much larger. If you plan to photo edit and process your pictures, then shooting in RAW is definitely the way to go.
Thing about RAW though is that different cameras have different RAW formats. And to work on them, many programs don’t even understand the format. Leo recommends Adobe Lightroom ($300) and Adobe Photoshop Elements ($59). Nice thing is, that you can try before you buy and they are good photo processing utilities to get your picture just the way you like it. But JPEG isn’t that bad. Pros will shoot JPEG when they know they aren’t tweaking or processing the image. You’ll also need larger memory cards.
Here’s the thing though, the lion’s share of photography is all about photo composition (the rule of thirds). Books to recommend, Mikkel Aaland has written a great book called SHOOTING DIGITAL: Pro Tips for shooting great pictures with a digital camera. Mikkel includes some great photography in his books for inspiration and examples. You’ll learn about RAW, lighting, portraiture. Mikal also wrote a great book on Adobe LightRoom. Derek Story has a great handbook by O’Reilly called Digital Photography Companion.
Digital photography is a great hobby to get into! BTW Check out the Tech Guy Flickr Group and upload pictures describing our latest subject. It’s great to get a critique for your pictures. It helps to improve your picture taking.
Q Lil, (Dr. Mom, TWIT Army), Long Island, NY – Getting music off iPod
Lil says that if you enable the iPod for Disk Use and use the finder, you can enable show hidden files, under iPod Control is all your music. Copy the music to your desk and point iTunes to it. Leo says the problem with that is, although you get the music, you don’t get the meta data.
Lil also wants to set up a network home server. If she goes with a RAID, what’s the best software for automatic backup? Leo says that if you buy a NAS (network att’d storage) – Leo likes ReadyNas – you can get a RAID5 storage that has built in backup software that will automatically back up the data files. Leo also suggests the HP Media Smart. Network attached storage is just a computer box (no monitor, keyboard or mouse) that serves as the central data hub for a home network. The NAS will be visible to all the computers on the network. Place iTunes on it and every computer can access the music and play it. It can also serve as a media center network.
Q Eric, Switzerland – using Facebook
Eric wants to use Facebook to follow all his friends, but is concerned about security. How much should he put on there? He doesn’t want just anyone to see pictures of his kids, etc. Leo says that security measures allow you to be in control of who sees what. But the question is, does it work? Leo says that Facebook works very hard to maintain the kind of security members want and need. Leo also says that it’s not really that risky, so don’t worry, Facebook is safe. But you should be very careful not to give information about your kids. Don’t say what school they go to or other personal details. Act as if your information could leak out and you’ll be safe.
Hour 2
Q Ed, Tampa, FL – Eric has an idea.
Ed pitched an idea of doing a video podcast to teach fans how to use media programs and then get a job using them. Leo loves that idea as it allows for more focused topics, rather than the broad themes one has to stick to with broadcast media. He also thinks that Alex Lindsay and the Pixel Corps would be an excellent resource for it. Leo does 30 hours of video and podcasting every week, which gives him freedom to focus on stuff that you can’t do on mass media.
Q Ed, Diamond Bar, CA – Adding a hard drive to a television
Ed wants to know if it’s possible to attached a hard drive to a television and watch videos from them. Leo says he’s certain that TVs will become equipped with hard drives in the future, but at this juncture, you still need a computer to process and un-compress the video that’s stored on the hard drive and put them out in a format that the TV can display. You may be able to network the television and turn the PC into a media center which will do the same function.
Leo just got the Dell Studio laptop, which has an HDMI connector and Blu-ray player allowing him to hook his laptop to the TV and watch the movie. Hooking up a laptop would make an ideal option. DVI would also work as you can get a DVI to HDMI connector. Note though, DVI is video only and you’ll need to have an audio channel as well. And you’ll have to fiddle with the resolution to sync it up right. An AppleTV box will also do the same job.
Q John, Bakersfield, CA – More on Facebook
John wants to know if he can integrate say, Twitter with Facebook, etc. Leo says that’s really the future and although you can update your Facebook status through Twitter, you can’t go the other way yet. It would be great if you could have that kind of synergy between all your social hubs, but Facebook wants you to live there, so it’s rather walled up. But eventually, we’ll all be hooked up on the Net, to it won’t really matter what our hub is, we’ll be able to go from one to the other.
John also wants to record his Skype calls, but wants to record both channels. Unfortunately, SKYPE won’t record both ends of a conversation. Leo recommends Pamela. And even though it comes with a lite version on Skype, Leo says you’ll need the full download to have the capability.
For MAC users, eCam’s Call Recorder.
Nightenjail, from the chatroom recommends using CallGraph.in, for Windows or Linux. And word has it that it records the holy grail of skyping … two separate channels! Ask Bill Mitchell in the chatroom also says to set your Skype settings to “Line In” or “Mix” as Skype rather messes with those settings.
Follow John on Twitter, handle is Ball of Spray.
Q Mark, Tustin, CA - Help with Pagemaker
Mark has a friend who makes handouts on his old G4 using Adobe Pagemaker. But it’s time to update his rig. What software should he use? Leo says that Apple’s iWork has a great utility called “Pages,” which offers great templates and works great for what he needs it for. Pages is free to try for 30 days. In Design, which he wants to get is seriously overkill. And Pagemaker files can be converter into MS Word, which can then be imported into Pages. So older files can be ported over with little trouble. For photo editing, Leo says that the new iPhoto will work just fine and when he gets his new Mac, he should make sure that he can get an upgrade to iPhoto 2009. But there’s also Aperture or Lightroom, but at over $200 for each, that’s a tad more than he needs to spend, considering iLife is free.
Always start with what you get for free and see if you need to grow out of it before you spend several hundred dollars on software that’ll probably be overkill.
Q Gary, Buffalo, NY - Running 64 Bit windows on a MAC in Virtual Machine?
Gary wants to download Windows 7 on his MAC, should he get 64 bit? Leo says the only reason to get 64 bit Windows is to expand RAM access past 4GB. So there’s little reason to use it in Virtual Machine. Leo also thinks that Windows 7 is done and Microsoft should just release it now! It’s ready, release the hounds!
GuildFTP is a free FTP server you can use on a Windows Machine and turn it into a network server. But caution, it’s a free public FTP Server, so you’ll need to turn on encryption, otherwise anyone can get what you have. WebDav is a consistent connection and makes and http mounted drive look like a file system. You’ll need to find a WebDav server which will mount onto a local server as a local drive.
Hour 3
Q Tom, Dana Point, CA - Running out of drive space
Tom is running out of drive space. Leo suggests uninstalling programs you don’t use, and do a search for very large files over a gig that you can get rid of. Winderstat.info is a nice little program which shows you a graphical representation of your hard drive usage and let’s you see what’s taking up all the space and what you can get rid of. Course, Hard Drives are real cheap now, 750GB - 1 terra for under $100 these days. So why not just get more storage? Chances are, you have more room in the case for an extra drive - and you can place all your data there. Windows likes to live on the C drive and prefers all the software be on that same drive for easy of access.
Tom wants the have the Show Desktop icon as the only quick launch tool bar turned on. Tom will have to, recreate the show desktop icon (notes coming soon). Go to Microsoft.com and search for KB Article 190355. This will tell you how to recreate it. There’s also WinKeyD, which will also show it. Wizmo, by GRC can also do it.
Q Louis, Palos Verdes, CA - Help with Outlook Express
Louis’ Outlook is corrupted. Leo says Outlook can get out of sync, so you need to rebuild the list of subject headers. Leo says you can rebuild Outlook Express. Download OEMail Recovery. It will repair your Outlook email. But eventually, you want to download LiveMail, as Outlook Express is no longer being updated or supported.
Q Dan, Tampa, FL - SPAM SPAM SPAM
Dan gets spam and it’s coming from himself! Is it really coming from his computer? Leo says no. The problem with email is that there’s little, if any, security. The Spammer can just make sure the return address field is your email address. Not much you can do about it, unfortunately. Welcome to the wacky world of spam.
Q Trish in the chatroom - Photoshop Elements backup
Trish wants to know if there’s a way to back up in Photoshop Elements. Leo says yes, there is. Photoshop Elements has a built in backup routing that backs up everything. It’s called the Photoshop Elements Organizer Backup and it will backup the meta data as well. Look under the file menu.
Q Moe, San Pedro, CA - Virus trouble
Moe is concerned that he may have a virus. His system keeps crashing. Leo says that it’s probably not a virus. Moe should run Windows Repair. Toss in the installation disc and run Windows repair. This will fix whatever system files that have been corrupted and get your OS back up and running.
See you next week!
