Leo Laporte
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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday March 1, 2009
- Show Audio
- Tech News
- Guests
- Hour 1
- Hour 2
- Hour 3
- Greg, Whittier, CA - Getting flash on the iPhone
- Mike, Los Angeles, CA - MAC Carbonite problems
- Jessica, West Covina, CA - Scanning a document
- Joe, Gardena, CA - Website plug
- Chris, Georgia - Price difference between silver/black cameras
- Jack, From Twitter: What if Carbonite gets hit by calamity?
- Dale, Oxnard, CA - Internet connectivity in the mountains
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Tech News
Changes accelerating for old media
With new media like YouTube, podcasting and blogs, changes are being accelerated in the real of old media. Especially with newspapers as newspapers and magazines are beginning to go out of business. After 150 years, the Rocky Mountain News shut down this week. The San Francisco Chronicle is on the verge of going out of business, losing $50 million a year. The Seattle Post Intelligencer is also on hard times. Things aren’t looking any better for the Gray Old Lady (NY Times) which spends over a billion a year in printing and distribution. ANd with eBook readers like the Kindle 2 being able to wirelessly deliver the news, newspapers like the Times and Chronicle could save over half their costs if they just provided each subscriber with a Kindle 2 and delivered it wirelessly.
And it’s all Craig Newmark’s fault … with Craigslist. Where people can place free ads all over the country.
Paul Harvey, 1918–2009
With over seventy years in radio, Paul Harvey was one of the modern trailblazers in radio broadcasting. He died yesterday, at age 90. A great voice, and great legend.
Leo reviews the Kindle 2
Leo thought the Kindle was okay, but he LOVES the Kindle 2. Amazon fixed the minor annoyances and now it’s on par with the iPod for form and function. It’s wireless connectivity direct to Amazon for buying eBooks and for newspaper delivery is changing the way publishing is happening and will certainly put another nail in the coffin of old media. The Kindle also has a computer generated audio reader built in in both male or female voice. And you can speed up or slow down the pace of the speech. Negatives - 1) price $359 - way too expensive. 2) DRM is ridiculous. You can’t share anything you download. Leo thinks copy protection is a bad thing for the business, for writers, for everybody.
It’s a brilliant step forward.
Guests
Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak joins Leo to talk about about his upcoming stint on Dancing with the Stars. Steve quips that he has zero dancing experience and it’s his job to prove everyone wrong who believes they’re the worst dancers in the world. Steve had the chance drop in his lap through Kathy Griffin’s show and was basically drafted into it. Woz is partnered with DwtS veteran Karina Smirnoff, and says he’s working hard to learn how to dance and do all geeks proud.
Steve also says he’s going to try and work the Segway into a dance.
According to Leo’s Tweet: “(Woz) says it “would be wrong” to stuff the ballot box but @VoteWoz! #votewoz
Chris Marquardt - Tips from the Top Floor
Today, we’re looking at photos with the theme “Opposites”. Sadly, Leo and Chris didn’t get their assignment done in time! LOL.
The first one is called Self-Control. Great because he’s both the puppeteer and the puppet!
Next is Opposites Attract, which Chris thinks tells a great story.
Lastly, there’s “Opposite Polls of a Magnet” where the photographer put a magnet on a CRT screen and photographed it to show the polls. This is a cool effect, but you don’t really want to do this on a TV or CRT monitor you want because it could demagnetize the screen and mess up the color pretty badly. Cool shot though!
Our next assignment? DECAY. Users can post pictures by joinging a free account on flickr and tagging them with the Tech Guy Group.
Hour 1
Q Ken, Upland, CA - Reading newsgroups
Ken is plugged into a lot of newsgroups on the internet, but Verizon has killed complete access to newsgroups. Newsgroups predate the world wide web and are a valuable community to plug into for support and information on things that interest you. Fortunately, there are options. Supernews is one, but that’s a subscription service. Ken can also read newsgroups for free through Google. Leo thinks that Verizon does their users a disservice by thinking they can decide what parts of the Net are important to who and people should send a message to Verizon by dropping their service.
Ken can also sign up through DSL Extreme and get full access to all newsgroups. The best way to protect our rights online is to encourage competition by supporting independent ISPs.
Q David, San Diego, CA - email problems
David’s daughter is overseas studying and is having trouble sending/receiving email. Here SMTP settings aren’t working. Leo says that it sounds like Cox is blocking access to the servers here from outside the U.S. Not uncommon at all as this is a spam prevention issue. Here best bet is to use web-based email like from Google’s GMail or Yahoo Mail. She can then use their outbound settings in Outlook and she’s good to go. Also try using the secondary SSL port (port 467?) instead of port 25.
Q Ryan, Scotland - Router Recommendation
Ryan has a MAC and would like a recommendation for a WiFi Router. Leo says that Apple’s routers are way overpriced except for their software which is written for the Airport. Leo recommends Linksys routers. G or N? Leo says that N works great and most routers are compatible for it. Leo also says to consider investing in the WRT54G running the Tomato firmware.
Hour 2
Q Mindy, San Francisco - Bought a computer from last week
Mindy was leaning towards a Mac, but Leo thought a Windows machine was more practical for work. Mindy then borrowed a friend’s Mac and next thing you know, she’s buying the 13″ Macbook. She needs an external monitor though. Leo says that Apple sells a 24″ monitor which connects to her MacBook prefectly. But it’s a pricey monitor at $900!
She saw a Viewsonic 24″ monitor at Costco for $200, and Leo says that’s ideal even though you have to open the laptop to use it. And use the mini-DVI adapter with it. Sadly, you have to pay $30 from Apple for it.
And with her 500GB hard drive, she can install Windows in on it and run it through Boot Camp.
But does she need an AVS? Leo says not really, if you run it in VMWare or Parallels, you can just dump the boot and restart. But in Boot Camp, your mac does become a Windows machine, so it is vulnerable. But since Mindy is just using it for a few work related applications, she can just rely on Leo’s Six Rules for Safe Computing.
Q Joe, Mission Hills, CA - Norton Ghost trouble
Joe has used Norton Ghost to copy his hard drive but it crashes during restoration. Leo says this started to happen with NT. Leo says it could be a partition issue, but believes that that the NT Kernal is misreading it as a different drive and as such, can’t restore it.
Leo recommends another free option with WDTools from Western Digital. Put the new drive as the secondary drive and then you can make a bit for bit copy of the drive directly onto the new hard drive. Then, you can pull the old drive and make it the master drive.
Q Fiona, Irvine, CA - Buying a new laptop
Fiona’s looking for a new laptop for her son. Dell? Leo says Dell is a great place to get a laptop. Very reliable. Leo always buys Dell. But he recognizes that Dell’s laptop nomenclature can be confusing. The fastest is the XPS, which is great for gaming. The Studio is a gorgeous laptop that has great multimedia capability. And the Inspiron is the low cost line (but even these can play movies). If it’s for work, the Inspiron works fine. But Leo is a big fan of the Dell Studio 16. Make sure it’s a Core 2 with 2 GB RAM minimum. And a 250GB hard drive. Screen size? Depends on how portable he wants to be.
Hour 3
Q Greg, Whittier, CA - Getting flash on the iPhone
Great would love to be able to watch Leo’s show on the iPhone. But there’s no flash. Why? Leo says that Steve Jobs has just arbitrarily decided not to put flash on the iPhone - even though Adobe can port it over, but won’t without Cupertino’s approval. Leo speculates that a flash player could impact battery life. Then, there’s also that Adobe is an “uneasy” partner with Apple due to software competition. SVG, the open source player, is preferred by Apple - sort of. Leo thinks that sooner or later, Apple is going to have to bite the bullet on the iPhone.
Leo is also annoyed that you can’t record video on the iPhone. And with Samsung and other handsets coming out with 8MP cameras, the future is bright for better camera phones. But put video in there, darn it!
Greg would also like to add a flash attachment to his iPhone to take pictures in low light. Leo says adding a flash to the iPhone is very unlikely from Apple’s point of view and the camera is rather lousy anyway. A third party battery pack unit that the phone will slide into that has a flash built in (the FastMac IV - thanks to Jazz G4 in the chatroom). Cost is about $40 and has the added advantage of adding to the iPhone’s battery life.
Q Mike, Los Angeles, CA - MAC Carbonite problems
Mike has a Quicksilver G4 (Power PC) and he can’t install . Leo suspects the software only supports Intel processor and Leopard. :(
Q Jessica, West Covina, CA - Scanning a document
Jessica wants to scan a document and turn it into text. Leo says you need optical character recognition (OCR) software which can read the scan and create a text document out of it. Leo says your scanner may have come with software that performs this function within the scanning software. Nuance makes OmniPage and it’s the best software out there. Freebies include JOCR.
Q Joe, Gardena, CA - Website plug
Joe made website for an upcoming PBS show for kids he’s doing called [[http://www.i-can-be.com|”I Can Be.”]
Q Chris, Georgia - Price difference between silver/black cameras
Chris wants to know why a Panasonic camera he likes is $20 more for the black than the silver. Leo says this is a very common ploy and that there’s no difference between the cameras. So save $20 and get the silver model.
Q Jack, From Twitter: What if Carbonite gets hit by calamity?
Backup isn’t perfect. Even a cataclymic event can hit just about anyone. Carbonite does have multiple backup sites itself, so, it’s unlikely. But worst case, always have your own backup.
Q Dale, Oxnard, CA - Internet connectivity in the mountains
Dale can’t get wireless connectivity where he lives in the mountains. Leo thinks that in the mountains, a low frequency RF is best as it can go around things. But Dale says that it happens during specific times of the day. It could be interference from a local military base and the ISP really needs to make it a priority to fix the issue. In House surge protectors and even looking at power conditioning could help the issue.
Don’t forget to back up today and have a great Geek week!
