Leo Laporte
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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Sunday May 31, 2009
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Tech News
Zune HD Announced with Thunder
The new Zune HD has been announced and will ship in September. Leo thinks it may bring Zune to relevance. Nice OLED screen. Organic Light Emitting Diode. Great contrast ratio for movies and videos. It’s not HiDef, per se. But you can store 720p HD video and then connect to your HD TV and watch them.
Google Wave to change how we communicate … again
Google Wave is a collaboration tool which Google wants to replace conventional email. Think email meets social media. It promises real time communication.
Guests
David Caukins, Robotic Society of America
The 6th Annual RoboGames is coming June 12–14th in San Francisco and David is our guest to talk about it. Robots from over 40 different countries are scheduled to complete. Most are made in garages by enthusiasts. For more information on robotics, David suggests a LEGO Mindstorms home school kit.
Dr Web - Rick Alber - Talkin’ about new Google stuff
Dr. Web reports from Google I/O. What’s new with Android? Cupcake (vs. 1.5) has been released to G1 phones worldwide. It’s got a lot of big improvements including better UI access, a Camcorder, virtual keyboard … the next Android version 2.0 will be called “Donut.”
Google Wave. Rick got to see an online demo of Wave. Completely open source platform which offers not only email, but social networking, etc. Based on the “three p’s” of product, platform, and protocol. A “wave” is a hosted conversation that has a variety of media elements including blog post, Twitter like client, email, etc. Developers will be able to create extensions and create additional capabilities. Real time translation engines, contextual spell checking.
Chris Marquardt - Tips from the Top Floor
Chris is back from Nepal. He was there for about 3 weeks and took about 4,000 pictures. The beauty though with digital is you can weed them out as you go. He bought two 80GB hard discs, specified for over 18,000 feet to store them on. He also brought a lot of compact flash cards so he could swap out cards and save battery life on his hard drives. Chris was so stunned at how nice the Sherpas were, giving whatever help they could in spite of the language barrier.
If you want to see more of Chris’ Everest trip, swing over to http://www.Netvibes.com/everesttrek and pictures can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/everesttrek2009/
Hour 1
Q Thomas, Manhattan Beach, CA - Starting a tech company
Thomas is 10 years old and he wants to start a software company with his friends! He programs in C++, Java, and Python?! Wow. Leo says he wants Thomas to learn these programs right, not just noodling with them and learning bad habits. So Leo says that Alice is a good place to start, but Leo suggests HTDP.ORG. It’s a programming book written by software professors all over the country and teaches “SCHEME,” which is a “flavor” of a programming language called LISP. Download DrScheme. This will teach you to plan, design, and organize your software ideas.
Q Jeff, Upland, CA - Can’t print with MAC
Jeff networked his 20″ iMAC and PC and now he can’t print with the MAC. Leo says download and install the updated printer drivers.
Q Jared, Harrisburg, PA - PC Parental controls
Jared wants to use Vista’s parental controls. Leo recommends going one step further and using OpenDNS.com as your DNS settings. You can limit the kinds of sites the kids can see, but they can’t hack their way around it.
Q Ellie, Hawaii - Programmable remote control
Ellie has seniors who aren’t computer literate. What can she do to program shows and enable them to playback easily without having to worry about computers, etc.? Leo says the Logitech Harmony One remote is great because it’s programmable. You can press a combination of buttons and it will record a specific program. Or, just one dedicated button doing the same thing. At $250 it’s not cheap, but it does the job nicely.
Hour 2
Q; Kevin, Montrose, MI - Server trouble
Kevin has Windows Server 2003 and needs to access files larger than 2GB. Leo says Kevin needs have NTFS as his formatted file structure. Kevin needs to access the files remotely. Leo says that’s the problem. Remote access may cause a file ceiling of 2GB. FTP has no file size limit, but Leo suspects the system Kevin is copying data to may have a limit. It may also be a limitation of the FTP client. Update the FTP client. Leo also recommends FileZilla. It’s free and has no limit.
Q Simon, United Kingdom (via Skype) - Imaging Hard drive
Simon needs to image his hard drive. Leo’s been recommending TruImage. Steve Gibson recommended Drive Snapshot, but he’s changed his tune and the best now is ImageforWindows by TerraByte Unlimited. Leo says he’d prefer, however to have a bootable ISO.
From the Chat Room there’s a free disc imager that makes a bootable ISO. Runtime Drive Image XML.
Q Jeff, Brentwood, CA - Online virus scan
Jeff wants to know if those advertised online speed boost/virus scan services are legit. Leo says they’re not. They over promise and under deliver. Here’s the list of legitimate online scanners you can use to scan your computer. Some may require active X installed, BTW, as well as running as an administrator:
House Call, Trend Micro
Eset Nod 32
Norton Security Scan
Kaspersky Online Scanner
McAfee Online Scanner
Q Phil, Torrance, CA - live webcams
Phil is part of a group that runs steam trains at Wilson Park. They want to put wireless webcams on the trains they run over 5 acres of the park. Can it be done? Leo says it can be done with three well placed Wi-fi repeater antennas, maybe more. They can be directional. Not too expensive. Another option is using EVDO using 3G cell networks. But it’s more expensive using an external service - $60 a month. Axis cameras are very good for Networked wi-fi cameras. Use Wireless Distribution System (WDS). The side benefit is that you’ll be wiring up the park with Wi-Fi.
Hour 3
Q Thomas, Canoga Park CA - Copying discs to hard drive
Thomas has Video Professor CDs that he wants to run straight from his Hard Drive. But the Secure ROM DRM won’t let him copy from it. Leo hates it when providers treat their customers as criminals. Criminals know how to break that copy protection and only inconveniences paying customers. Here’s how to break it:
Alcohol 120% will back up the CDRom onto your hard drive.
And here’s a report which shows a link between DRM and driving people to embrace piracy.
Q David, San Jose, CA - Outlook export trouble
David wants to export his Outlook emails to LiveMail. But he can’t. Leo says that’s because Outlook stores all the information into a single .pst file. Leo hates that. You can export each email as a .eml file by dragging them into a folder. Then you can import them. According to LockerGnome, Live Mail should have an Outlook importer. In order to import from a pst file, have Outlook installed and running onto the same system. So, download a trial version of Outlook. Then, LiveMail will import it. Then remove the trial version of Outlook and you’re good to go. What a hassle!
Q Rod, Mezzula, MT - Cleaning off his hard drive
Rod is rapidly running out of hard drive space. He just updated Windows. Leo says it’s always best to erase and start over when updating Windows. So it’s always best to format and install fresh. Backup your data, then format the hard drive. This has the added benefit of improving your computer performance since it doesn’t have to deal with “kruft” and “bitrot,” which will slow a computer down and even cause the hard drive to fail.
Boot information has to be on the C drive, but Windows doesn’t have to live there. But Leo doesn’t advise that for beginning computer users. But what he does recommend is keeping your data separate from your OS/Applications.
You really need a backup anyway. Go get an external hard drive. They’re very cheap for a LOT of space.
Q Ally, Dallas, CA - Hard Drive grinding
Ally just updated Windows and now his hard drive has started grinding. Leo suspects bad sectors on the hard drive which is causing Windows to keep trying to rewrite or reread to the sector until it ‘times out.’ Leo recommends Spin Rite by GRC.Com. It’ll read it, work until it reads them - doesn’t stop - moves the data to a good sector and marks the sector as bad so it won’t be used.
Q Rocky, Hawthorne, CA - Virtual memory error
Rocky just got a new HP laptop. She scans an image, then adjusts it in Premiere Elements 2 and she’s getting virtual memory errors when she prints.
Leo thinks that the setup has gone bad. The Chatroom thinks it may also be a conflict between the 64 bit OS and the drivers. Go to the printer websites and get the latest Vista 64 bit drivers. You can check your virtual memory to increase it. Hit the Windows key and type “system properties”. Check the box that says “automatically manage page files.” This will make Windows automatically manage the virtual memory. Or, manually set it to twice your RAM.
Have a great geek week!
