Leo Laporte
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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday January 31, 2009
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Tech News
Google goes down …
This morning, every single result from Google was flagged as Spyware. It was down for an hour and basically sidetracked most of the net as a result. Leo wants to know who gave Google the keys to deciding what’s bad and what’s good? This may be why it’s good to have competition … to prevent Google from deciding what we can and can’t see on the Net.
[technical difficulties ensue for the show, please stand by]
Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Google’s story is that a “typo” brought them down. Leo got the news on Twitter. A simple “slash” on a list of bad sites caused every site on the internet to being listed on the site. It took and hour to fix the issue.
Windows 7 Ready to Roll Out?
Leo was reading the Windows 7 Development Blog and it looks like the development group is jonsin’ over how well 7 is running now. Leo agrees and wants Windows 7 out now! And while you’re at it, make it a $99 upgrade!
Guests
Scott Wilkinson, Ultimate AV Magazine
The delay of the DTV Switchover. The Senate passed a delay until June, the House says no way! The problem is that the Coupon program ran out of money and 40% who got coupons didn’t even redeem them. Congress needs a super majority to pass it. Scott was initially in favor of the delay, but he’s hearing that most people are saying switch and be done with it. Leo says it’s like delaying pulling off the band aid. Just pull it already!
Scott Bourne, Wildlife/Nature Photographer.
Scott is a professional photographer and host of This Week in Photography (TWIPhoto).
Today’s topic - Evaluative Thru The Lens Flash (ETTL) for Canon DSLRs (ITTL for Nikons). This is a cool flash spectrum users can use to manage and take perfect pictures with your DSLR. But they aren’t cheap … yet. Choosing ETTL will enable the flash to do all the work. Works in aperture priority. The flash will make the exposure in ambient light and send a pre-flash to measure distance to the subject and determine how much flash is necessary and open the shutter a tad longer - like mille-seconds. Called “dragging the shutter.” Also works great outdoors in sunlight to add a little “pop” on your subject in daylight.
Check out Scott’s website and links to his pics on PhoTrade at http://www.scottbourne.com
Hour 1
Q Calem, Beauford, SC - Doing a split screen with Cam Twist
Calem wants to do split screen video for the internet. Can he use Cam Twist? You can switch from one cam source to another, but doing a split screen is the real trick. Stay tuned, we’ll see what we can find out.
Q Gwendolyn, CA - Getting a new website and computer
Gwen is getting a new computer for some graphic design. She wants to create her own website but is concerned that a freebie website will advertise what she doesn’t like. Leo says that WordPress maintains a very tasteful ad space and you have some control over what ads can be put on your site.
She has a Sony Vaio and wants to be able to transfer her data to the new box. Leo says that if the computer is only two years old, it’s still plenty fast for her. Stop listening to your friends and listen to Leo - don’t buy a new computer yet. Even though it’s running slow, Leo says to get an external USB and then move the data over to her it. Then, reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows to restore the computer back it’s fast functioning form. Then run Windows update until there’s nothing to update. Then, your computer will speed right up.
And backup your data every week or so just to be safe.
Q Jared, Columbus, OH - Refurbished computers, good buy?
Jared is looking for a refurbished notebook. Good buy? Leo says that often, refurb’d computers are practically unused and were returned or were demos. Leo buys them all the time but suggests you get them from the ORIGINAL manufacturer (like Apple) and not a third party. You can save some coin too.
Hour 2
Q Kibby Zero, from Twitter - content management systems
Are they a good way to run a website? Leo says absolutely. That’s what blogs are. It allows you to think about content and not style - which is attached to a design stylesheet. It makes it much easier to update your site. Leo’s fav is WordPress. Great community support, great plugins. Makes it easy to put content up frequently. A heavier duty tool is Drupal. It’s much harder to use if you aren’t a Drupal expert.
Q Brad, Riverside, CA - alternatives to Verizon’s FIOS
Brad has AT&Ts UVerse, their answer to Verizon’s FIOS. Can he get a wireless repeater to increase his WiFi signal? Leo says you need to find out what manufacturer made the AT&T box. A wireless distribution system (WDS) allows you to set up repeaters. Sadly, WDS is really loosely written so you really need to know who makes the box so you can choose the proper repeater. Or, you can hook up a ethernet cable to another WiFi base station - set in bridge mode. If you don’t mind the wire, that’s another valid option.
Q Ken, San Marcos, CA - iTunes trouble
Ken is having trouble syncing his iPod Touch with iTunes. It crashes just before finishing. Leo says to repair disc permissions on your hard drive. Run the Disk Utility and repair permissions. This will check each permission setting in each program and verify or repair it. If that doesn’t solve the issue, it’s possible that the library or index has gotten corrupted. Make sure your iPod is backed up, and your iTunes library as well. Then, create a dummy iTunes account and sync the iPod to it. This will erase the iPod. If you can’t, then the data is the issue and not iTunes. Delete the information about the songs in the iTunes library (NOT THE SONGS) and recreate it.
Q Colleen, Huntington Beach, CA - Getting a new laptop
Colleen is getting her husband a new laptop. But there’s a price jump in “expendable RAM.” Leo says that’s because of a cascade to Windows 64 bit (32 bit only sees 4GB RAM), the laptop needs room for another bay of memory, etc. But do you really need expandable memory? After 4GB, there’s hardly any speed advantage over 4GB of RAM. So, unless you’re doing serious photo or video editing, you can get away with a 32 bit system.
Leo likes the MSI Wind which runs on XP. Nice thing is that the SODIMM RAM is only $10 for a second GB. Sweet! But the screen is fairly small for a main laptop. Leo also likes the Dell Studio 15 laptop as a main machine.
Q Warren, Huntington Beach, CA - AVS Information
Warren is confused about an error message that popped up asking if it’s okay to send “additional information” to Microsoft. Leo says that often happens as the program wants to phone home with diagnostic information. Clicking OKAY won’t hurt you.
Hour 3
Q Dale, Palmdale, CA - Making a recovery disc
Dale is about to reinstall Windows and other programs to speed up his laptop. After which, can he create his own custom recovery disc? Leo says YES! Use Drive Snapshot. Put it on an external drive. Then, make a dos bootdisc of Drive Snapshot also so you’ll be able to restore.
Dale also wants to know if he can use Virtual PC to run other OS. Leo says it’s a great idea but suggests VMWare. Microsoft has a similar one called Steady State.
Q Crystal, San Diego, CA - Defrag an iMac …
Crystal wants to know if she should defrag her iMac from time to time. Leo says no. The file system is more efficient and as such, defragging is simply unnecessary. You can restore permissions when you need to, but that’s about it. And it’s one of the main reasons he likes recommending Apple.
Crystal also wants to know about photo editing software and Leo recommends Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Q William, Elan, OH - Prioritizing traffic
Leo says you want to do QOS on a router to improve streaming video and gaming. DLink’s Gamer Lounge is a really good router. You can prioritize VOIP traffic, but he’s unsure if you can put Hulu ahead of it. But if you prioritize flash, then it’ll include Hulu.
Q Jacqueline, Simi Valley, CA - Computer OS compatibility
Jacqueline’s computer died and her new HP PC runs on Vista, but many of her programs won’t run on Vista. Leo says that anything can run on Vista can easily run on XP. But you can simply install XP on that box if you really need to. Stay with XP as Microsoft still supports it. You’ll be fine.
Q Kenny, Palo Alto, CA - DROBO
Kenny wants to hook up his PC to a DROBO Raid device. What happens to his data on the drives he wants to put in them. Leo says that DROBO will erase the drives. But the good news is that Kenny could backup to Carbonite and then restore to Drobo once he’s got it all set up. But it’ll take a few weeks to get all that data online. Better to just pickup a few TB Hard drives from NewEgg for $100 and back up to them directly.
Q Bob, Agoura Hills, CA - BotNet infections
Bob wants to know how do you know if you’ve been infected by a botnet infection? Leo says you can’t, really. That’s the problem with the Downdump virus. 9 Million computers infected so far. It used to be that hackers would get attention for taking over your computers. But these days, the hackers don’t want you to know because the longer they’re on your computer, the better. So they hide. They install an IRC client which the hacker can monitor the computer and actually take the computer over.
That’s why it’s so crucial to keep up on Windows updates, since exploits don’t really come out until the patches are announced. Get the updates and your inoculated against them.
