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Sunday, July 4, 2004
Show #54
Happy 4th of July. I’m live today, so celebrate your independence from bad technology by calling 1–800–520–1KFI, and let the fireworks begin!
toc | toc
Noon-1p
Jay in Fullerton
has a new baby on the way. That means it’s time for a new camcorder. I recommend the Panasonic PVDV-53, but read the reviews at CamcorderInfo for more excellent choices.
Gail in Pennsylvania
wants to copy her DVDs to her laptop for her next plane flight. It should extend the battery life. I recommend the free DVDBackup for Macintosh OS X. For Windows use the free DVD Decrypter.
Ed in San Pedro
is looking for portable printer for his daughter to take with her to Europe. Take a look at the Canon BJC-55 or i80.
Chuck in Denver
is having trouble removing the additional user profiles he created in MSN Messenger. Jim Quinley was the first to find the answer in this Microsoft tech note. Thanks, Jim!
To find the skins browser in Windows Media Player 9 make sure you’re using the Full Mode, not the Skin Mode by pressing Control-1. Click the Skin Chooser button to the left of the video screen.
Rick in Iowa
asks is RAID a good idea for video editing? See my comments from yesterday, but I do have to say that video editing might be one of the few good reasons to use RAID striping on a desktop machine. You get more capacity and faster writes.
1–2p
Jerry in La Crescenta
likes to listen to old time radio he downloads from the Internet. He wants to clean up the audio before he burns them to CD. I recommend Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. To fix the level on his MP3s you can use a program like MP3Trim to normalize the sound. You can also use a good audio editor to clean up the sound. I use a professional grade program from Adobe called Audition but the free Audacity is good, too.
Ron in Yorba Linda
has switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox but it doesn’t have an email program. The developers of Firefox, The Mozilla Project, also have an excellent free email program called Thunderbird.
You can still use Outlook, of course, but you should understand that HTML emails rendered by Outlook are just as dangerous as web pages in Internet Explorer. I recommend turning off the Preview Pane in Outlook:
- In Outlook Express: Click View Menu > Layout and remove the checkmark beside Show Preview Pane
- In Outlook 2000/XP: Click View Menu > Preview Pane
- In Outlook 2003: Click View Menu > Reading Pane > Off
Outlook 2003 also lets you turn off HTML mail entirely (a good idea in my opinion) by selection Options… from the Tools menu, clicking the Preferences tab and pressing the Email Options… button. Check the “Read all standard mail in plain text” box. Mail won’t be as pretty, but it won’t be as much of a security hazard either.
Randy in Tennesee
is a high school band director who makes videos of the band throughout the year. He has a number of older PCs and would like to configure one of them to be a file server so he can use it to back up his video over the network. That’s a great idea. File servers are becoming more popular everywhere, even in homes, as a central backup and storage device.
You can buy file servers, sometimes called NAS, or network addressable storage, fairly inexpensively these days. Try Buffalo’s Linkstation Network Storage Center with 120 GB for $290 or the 160GB Ximeta NetDisk for $250.. There’s a roundup of products on the G4techTV site. It’s much easier to buy new, but you can build your own if you’re in the mood for an interesting project.
File servers are typically nothing more a computer with a big hard drive running the Linux or BSD operating systems. They don’t need a keyboard, mouse, or monitor (that is, they’re headless) because they can be maintained from any computer on the network.
Your server will also be running Samba, that’s the software that makes the server’s hard drive visible as a network drive to Windows machines. To learn more about Samba, and how to get it running on your file server read the excellent HOW-TO at Linux Orbit.
As far as I know, there’s no Linux distribution dedicated to creating a file server, but most distros come with Samba ready to run. I recommend SuSE but there are many other good choices. You can download a copy free, but they tend to be a gigabyte or more. I’d recommend just buying the discs from somewhere like Cheap Bytes. A minimal install will do - just make sure to include Samba and basic networking functionality. Don’t bother to install X Window - you’d don’t need a GUI to do this! Do install SSH so you can log into your server securely. You’ll need PuTTY to log-in from a Windows machine.
Another issue arises, and that’s the question of getting one of today’s monster hard drives to work with that older system. In most cases buying a modern IDE card to go with that drive should solve the problem.
Mike in NJ
is looking for a browser with a shrink to fit window view option. In other words, he’d like to be able to resize the window and have the web page re-size to match it. No program I know of does that, and I think it’s unlikely that any will since some web pages can be quite large.
Reggie in Burbank
would like to send his home recordings on CD to friends via email. He’s a Mac user. The basic steps are to “rip” the CD, that is, to copy its audio to the hard drive as MP3 files, then to attach those MP3 files to an email.
On Mac OS X most people use iTunes to rip songs. Start by opening the preferences, clicking the Importing button, and selecting MP3 Encoder for Import Using:. Now change the setting to Custom. I’d suggest a low bit rate for emails. 128 Kbps will create files of one megabyte for every minute of music. That’s pretty big for email. Try using 64 Kbps. It’s lo-fi, but the file sizes will be cut in half. Using mono instead of stereo will halve the size again. Once you rip the songs they will be added to your Library. Find the song you want to sent, then Command-click on it and select Show File. When the file appears in the finder window, select it, click Services under the Finder menu, and select the Mail service, then choose email file. That will open Apple’s Mail program and create a new message with your song attached.
If you’re using AOL you’ll have to attach the file manually.
Tom in New York
has a new Windows machine and he wants it to be quiet. With today’s faster processors and more powerful video cards, PCs are hotter than ever. And to keep them cool, manufacturers typically add three or four fans to them. That means they can sound like a jet taking off in the silence of your home. Getting them to quiet down is not an easy matter. Read how Yoshi built his silent computer, to get some ideas. I also recommend CompuQuiet for parts and information on quieter PCs and The Silent PC. Some manufacturers like Niveus are now selling fanless PCs, but even these aren’t exactly silent, because hard drives make noise, too.
2–3p
Linda in Santa Monica
is looking for books for older computer users. I recommend the Absolute Beginner’s Guides from Que - 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.
Suzie in Anaheim
drove out here from Montana with her 11-year-old son, a laptop, and a bunch of DVDs. Problem is, he couldn’t hear the DVDs. That’s not uncommon. Notebook amplifiers are underpowered to save battery life. You need a headphone amp. The Boostaroo costs $30 and allows you to plug in three sets of headphones. It adds about 16 db to the level - which should be sufficient. If you want to watch the movie with him (not while driving please!) try a set of powered speakers. There are many excellent choices. I use the Altec-Lansing inMotion speakers with my iPod and they sound pretty good. There’s an external jack for connecting my notebook when I want to watch movies.
Aaron in Avocado Heights
wants to create a Macintosh OS X boot disk. The simplest way to do this is to use the Disk Utility that comes with OS X to create a image of any bootable CD. Add the files you need to the image, then burn it to CD.
For a much more complicated, but flexible way, try this explanation.
He is also getting set to build a wireless network for his Macs, and he wants to know if he has to buy Apple’s Airport products. Only if you want the internal cards for the notebooks. Otherwise I’d save money and buy 802.11b gear designed for PCs. It works just the same - in fact, it’s often the same hardware Apple uses - for a lot less loot.
Jeff in La Habra
got hit by a browser hijacker. This is one of the reasons I tell people never to use Internet Explorer again. Browser hijackers only work with IE. Use Spyware Blaster to prevent future infections. Read up on browser hijackers at Spywareinfo. Removing hijackers is tricky, and sometimes requires specialized software. Start with Hijack This.
Reinstalling Dial-up Networking may help get him back online.
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