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Saturday, July 31, 2004

Show #61

It’s the weekend! Time to talk tech! 1–800–520–1KFI.

I’ll be taking more calls on Sunday after the show. We’re pre-recording shows for August 15 and 21. Sunday from 3–4:30p is a good time to call if you’ve had trouble getting through during the live show.

Welcome to the Wiki version of the show notes! Listen to the show for the edit password.

The ultimate Wiki is Wikipedia.

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

Microsoft finally released a patch for the Internet Explorer hole that allowed bad pages to inject trojan horses onto your system without your knowledge. (This is the hole that allowed the Scob virus last month). Microsoft had posted a workaround, but this patch actually fixes the problem and two others. According to Symantec there have been 424 attacks using the hole in the past six weeks. Ouch. Download the patch by running Windows Update in IE.

Intel is working on a single chipset that can give you access to a variety of wireless networks, including Wi-Fi, WiMax, and next-gen cellular networks.

Have you downloaded the Doom III trailer yet? Our poll question of the day: Are you upgrading your computer to get ready for Doom III?

Noon-1p

Brandy in Mission Viejo

Husband and she are setting up a mini home theater

• budget: $30,000
• use wall - no screen necessary if you have a flat white wall - in fact it’s better
• get a DLP projector with Faroujda pre-processing. Check to make sure the DLP rainbow effect doesn’t bug you (it does about 10% of the population)

Jan in Beverley Hills

Importing video, imovie or Final Cut? which is better for importing. Doesn’t matter. Whenever you copy video from a DV camcorder using Firewire you’re importing the movie exactly as it is on the tape. Both iMovie and Final Cut import the file exactly the same way.

Matt in Huntington Beach

Artist wants to know how to get his BIG pictures on the web.

1. Reduce file size by compression
2. Reduce image size to about 5×7 inches (640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high)

There are many tools to do this. He has a Mac and iPhoto works great for that. Use the Export feature and select a reasonable file size and JPEG file format.

Picasa is a good free choice for Windows. Also take a look at Irfanview.

Try Flickr for remote image hosting and exporting.

1–2p

Matt in Riverside

Video on computer is too dark, looks fine on TV.
Anyone know why? According to Dan in the radio chat, the guns in your monitor may be on their way out, making contrast/brightness a whole lot weaker. Try it on a different monitor and see if the image is still having the issue, then you’ll know it’s probably time to replace it.

Here are a couple of additional thoughts. Often on our computer screens we have a light coloured brackground behind the window we are looking at. This will close down the iris in the eye and make the image in the window we are interested in appear even darker. Try to avoid a bright background.

A second thought is more of an observation of the differences between monitors for computers and video. Generally speaking, video monitors are set up to be as bright as possible for the showroom. The white level (brightness) should be toned down during calibration but this is a topic for another day. As the resolution for a video monitor is generally not as high (or as critical) as for a computer monitor, they can have more image defects. For example, some blooming of white into dark areas in direct and rear-projection CRTs for video is commonly accepted. In a computer, blooming like this would have too much of an impact on the legibility of text to be acceptable. - Rob

Bill on the road to San Francisco

Wants to create a VCD - he has AVI and MPG file. You should use TMpgEnc to re-encode the video files into the proper format then you can use most any burning program to create the VCD.

Carol in Las Vegas

Did a system restore without backing up - can she get her data back? Probably not. Once data is overwritten it’s lost forever. A good backup format is to burn an image to a CD or DVD with Norton Ghost or just burn a CD with your important documents with Nero Burning ROM

Tom in Torrance

Looking for an HDTV, $3000, 42″ - not plasma. What resolution should he look for? real HDTV is the 1080i specification (1080 interlaced lines of resolution) - this is what you should look for, if it isn’t 1080i it is usually labeled SDTV for “standard definition tv”. “HDTV ready means that the TV does not include an integrated tuner for viewing HDTV content, it does however have the inputs for you to connect one through the component or DVI inputs on the TV. (Dan, the chat mod)

Chris in Dallas

Wants his own Wiki. You need a web programming language available on your server. Here’s a list of Wiki software and the languages they work with. I use PMWiki - and LOVE it!

[Gary in Northern Greece adds>>] There was a follow on question from Chris regarding a DSL modem and the distance of in-house wiring possibly being a problem. As Leo said, if you’re talking about cable from the modem to the computer, that is standard Ethernet and shouldn’t be a problem. However if you were speaking of the cable from the phone jack to the modem it “might” be a problem if you use a long cable that has small gauge wires (cheap extension cords). I rented a house in North Carolina that was wired with cheap cable. Sprint DSL wouldn’t work in the house until Sprint replaced a section of cable with a better grade wire. So be aware! Of course YMMV.

Dirk in Santa Ana

Has seen a “Hi-Def” DVD player. I think it’s probably just another way of saying it’s progressive scan. Anamorphic DVDs are required for true widescreen video. Read The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD for more information on what anamorphic means.

Dan the chat mod says: so called “HD” dvd players actually are relatively new to the scene, most of these use a hardware chip to upscale the video from the native 480p format to 720p or 1080i, which can actually look quite good or better than the 480p source displayed on a large tv, suprisingly.

2–3p

Kimberley in Valencia

My ip address is visible - Get Anonymizer to hide your IP address from websites and more!

Betty in Santa Monica

Does Anonymizer work with Windows 98?
Buying a router as a firewall. The netgear is cheaper - is it ok? You bet! Netgear is great. I usually recommend Linksys because they’re the best selling brand, but DLink, Netgear, and SMC are all great, too.
She also has spyware. Read my article on Main/RemovingSpyware.

Scott in Rancho Santa Margarita

All his image files have disappeared - they are zero bytes long. Yikes! He has scanned for viruses and says he’s clean (this was a common side-effect of some older virii). I say make a backup of the hard drive then try some disk recovery tools.

List of tools:

• Knoppix - is a linux distro that contains tools to recover files from your hard drive. It can run off a cd drive and does not have to be installed on your hard drive. You can download the .iso file and burn it to a cd.
• Knoppix std - is a customized version of Knoppix that has additional security tools and utilities.

Christy in Moreno Valley

Internet game, Legends of Camelot, they’re both online on their DSL account, but both of them can’t get in. I suspect it’s because they’re both showing up with the same Internet address. Ask the provider if they restrict logons from the same IP.