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Saturday May 2, 2009

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Tech News

How the Internet handles the vast amount of News

Twitter vs. Google. Google tends to be automatic and mainstream, while Twitter is human driven - the wisdom of the crowds, with personal links and experiences. It turns out that using Twitter to sort out and make sense of all the information is better and easier using Twitter, rather than the mainstream information gathering techniques which are reliant of only a handful of professionals who focus, rather than crowds who create a broader picture.

Congress looks at Cyber-bullying

Congress is creating an “anti harassment Act” (AB1966) on the Internet which they say will address the issue of Cyber-bullying on the Internet. Leo is not so sure and worries that it could be too invasive and stifle free speech on the Net.

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

Comic Book Stores all across the country are giving away free comic books all afternoon. So swing in and read some comic books!

Tuvalu is sinking

The owners of the .TV domain name, the volcanic island nation of Tuvalu, is sinking. So much so that Go Daddy! is suggesting people not register for a .TV domain. Huh? So if Tuvalu sinks, what happens to Leo’s sites, do they sink, too?

Leo on Twitter

If you can’t get through to the show on the phone, you can pose a question to Leo on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/leolaporte. Just type @leolaporte and then your question. And if you use #techguy Leo will be able to filter it much easier and see your question.

Guests

Scott Wilkinson, Ultimate AV Magazine

Audyssey, Pioneer, Yamaha, and others which put a special routine in your receivers which reads a plugged in microphone and sets up and calibrates your 5.1 surround sound system for delay, ambient sound, etc. according to the the surroundings of the room you’re putting it in for the best possible sound quality. Scott says it’s really quite good and improves the sound quality quite a bit.

But recently, Scott visited the USC Audio Lab run by Tomlinson Holman (the TH in THx). He says that 5 channels aren’t enough to get that real sense of immersion. Tom says that 10 channels does the job quite nicely. That would be a total of 10 speakers. Since people can read better sound in front, than in back, Tomlinson says that it’s important to put more speakers in the front, in between what’s known as the front left and surround left (this would be the “wide” position). Placing these speakers every 30 degrees, plus two more speakers at 45 degrees vertical, with one speaker is only necessary behind you, not two or more, you’ll get a greater sense of immersion.

Leo wants to know how to drive 10 speakers at once since there’s no 10.1 Dolby. Scott says there’s a new standard coming called DSX, which figures out how to divide the sound channels properly. The irony, though, is that not even movie theaters use 10 channel sound.

Sunday, June 7th, Scott will do all three hours of the Tech Guy Show.

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Hour 1

Q Jim, Freemont, CA - Streaming Video from Computer to TV

Jim wants to stream his internet video to his HDTV. What’s boggling him is how to get the flash or silverlight video streams onto his media center extender. Leo says that you can use a program called “Boxie” which allows you to watch streams, but many content providers aren’t allowing it. Leo says they totally don’t get it and are overly protective of their content. The only real way around it are various hacks or tricks that you can find on the Internet, but none really do it in a quality way.

Q Sarah, Studio City, CA - Rebuilding her website

Sarah’s website got deleted and is trying to redo it in Dreamweaver where she gets a “red x” where the picture should be. Leo says it’s a common problem when it reads relative and absolute links and it can’t find the picture. Leo says Sarah is using the wrong tool for what she wants. Web pages have evolved to content drive sites these days and as such, using a content management system is much more practical for creating and building a website. These include [WordPress, Vox, Blogger, and others.

With Word Press, the template is merged with the content to display the page. This makes it much easier for the Content creator to manage their site. You design and build the site once and from then on, it plugs them in. Most web hosting services will allow you to install Word Press.

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Hour 2

Q Ryan, Santa Ana, CA - Speeding up his website hosting

Ryan is getting a lot of traffic to his site, but his site is starting to slow down. Should he host it himself? Leo says that’s not a good idea. Web hosts have a much higher pipeline than even some of the best home alternatives. What you’d end up with is having your site dominate your internet connection. Leo says that shared hosting isn’t the way to go when your site gets popular. Shared hosting is a server that has thousands of hosts co-habitating and if any of them gets popular, the other sites slow down.

Leo recommends Soft Layer. He uses them for dedicated hosting where you get your own server. Leo has six with 100MB upstream each and one that has 1 GB connection. And even those get bogged down.

Ryan’s Site is called Condron’s Blog Surfer.

Q John, Los Angeles - Web hosting

John’s site gamers.org uses Leo’s host Soft Layer to handle his gaming servers. Leo says bandwidth for that can cost you a bunch of money. It’s not like broadcast where it costs the same whether one or a million listen. For the Internet, the more who go to your site, the more it costs.

Chris is also thinking that OnLive gaming will change his business. Leo agrees. OnLive will push the processing to the servers, rather than the machines. But Leo says it won’t affect Chris’ business so much as the casual gamer. Serious gamers are going to want to have their own dedicated rig to get the most out of the games they play. But the casual gamer who seeks just to play from time to time, OnLive could be a quality alternative. But they have to make it work. The real issue is latency - the lag from which it takes to react to the action and then have it translate to the character.

Q Jason, Brumfeld, CO - Using real time web

Jason is doing a podcast, blog, twitter, the works. He wants to know if brief two-minute audio clips will be popular. Leo says that short form audio isn’t really in great demand. This is because it takes a lot of effort to get podcasts in the first place. Video is quite the opposite since it takes so long to download or buffer video. So the longer the audio, the better and the shorter the video the better.

Leo also says that the problem with audio and video is that it isn’t really searchable by subject like a blog is. That’s why having a companion blog to your podcast is important. Leo also says that getting podcasting for the average person can be quite daunting. There’s a vast array of ways for people to consume and ease of access is important.

Leo also thinks that Jason should put the words “Home of the Learning Digital Photography Podcast” in the title of the page. Google searches and finds the first 1500 characters of your website. So make sure you put content in that first 1500 characters.

Jason’s Podcast is called Learning Digital Photography and it’s on iTunes.

Q Patrick, Vista, CA - Burning audio CDs

Patrick has trouble burning CDs. He’s getting coasters. Leo suggests there is no one best brand. Go to a place that offers an assortment of cheap CD blanks and find the brand that is the most consistent brand for your burner and stick with it. There’s not magic brand for anyone. Leo uses RyTek.

Q John, San Diego, CA - Forming a foundation online

John wants to start a foundation in honor of his friend who recently passed on. They want to do it to raise funds to buy instruments for kids. What domain should they use? Leo says that .ORG is the best to go with. It creates the impression your a non profit. People expects it. Leo also says to check out Triple 8 Network, they provide free hosting for non profits. Leo says for payments, use a trifecta including Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout. That way if others are skittish about one or the other, you have main line alternatives.

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Hour 3

Q Marcus, Garden Grove, CA - Cost of RAM in a MAC

Should Marcus add more RAM to his MacBook and why is it so expensive? Leo says don’t let Apple double your MAC. You pay too much. If you like convenience, then go ahead. But if you want to save money, it’s really easy to install extra RAM in today’s MacBooks. Go to Kingston or Crucial. They have a RAM picker which helps you to determine which and how much RAM to get for your model. Leo uses Mac Sales and Trans International. 4GB is good for OSX.

Q Terry, Riverside, CA - Humidity and HDTVs

Terry has his Plasma HDTV above an aquarium and with summer coming, he’s concerned with humidity. Leo’s pretty certain that designers of plasma TVs factor in areas of high humidity. But most manuals will list a “humdity range” which they best operate in. But Leo says that as long as you don’t have condensation or dew, you should be okay.

Q Angela, Nova Scotia, CAN - iPhone and Coverflow

Angela got a new iPhone and loves the CoverFlow feature which allows her to flip through her albums while in the iPod application. But one album just doesn’t come up right. And everytime she fixes it, it moves back to the old - wrong art. Leo says that Apple doesn’t use a standard method of storing the information, as such, this can happen. It may be that the XML file could be damaged. Leo recommends CoverScout, which is smart enough to store the right album art for the iPod. Great for ripping your own CDs.

Q Trevor, Waco TX - Building a new computer

Trevor is building an AMD Quad Corp Phenom. Use 64 bit? Leo thinks this is a good idea. The main reason is it handles memory in bigger chunks and has a larger address space in the memory. 32 Bit maxes out at 4GB of RAM. So if you need greater RAM, then it’ll help, especially when using Linux.

Q Wesley, San Antonio, TX - backing up external hard drive

Wes has a 1TB external hard drive and wants to back it up. How can he backup an external drive? Leo says that the consumer edition of Carbonite doesn’t allow for backing up Ext. drives. To have an off site option, Off Site options include JungleDisk by Amazon. But Leo suggests getting a second ext. drive and swap em out every week. Taking the other drive to work. That’s the cheap and easy.

Q Guy, Beaumont, CA - Building a new computer

Guy was thinking of using an drive as the boot drive in his new computer and just use the OS on it to speed up the PC. Leo says it will and it’ll also handle the applications faster as well. What you want is to place on them what you PC reads a lot. So both the OS and the Apps will launch very fast that way. Leo recommends the Corsair 128GB SSD Drive.

Q Tim, Los Angeles, CA - Laptop won’t come out of hybernation

Tim has a Toshiba Satellite Laptop and it won’t turn back on after hybernating. Leo says it’s a known bug in the firmware of the LCD. Leo says you can try tapping on the contrast button to see if it’ll wake up, but you need to contact Toshiba about a fix.

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