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Sunday, August 15, 2004

Show #66

I’m on vacation and this show was taped ahead of time. Please help me (and other listeners) out by adding to these notes as you listen to the show. Thanks!

I’ll be back live on Sunday, August 22. Call in then!

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

Creative, maker’s of Sound Blaster, plans to unveil EAX 5.0, its environmental audio technology in October

QuakeCon in full swing today, Check it out for the gamers!

Apple gets bite by a hacker. CNet News reports that hacker famous for cracking DVD encryption says he has cracked Apple AirPort Express!

It’s been 1 year today since the great blackout, that effected most of the north-eastern united states.

AOL Instant Messanger “Away” hole now listed as critical according to Info World article.

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Noon-1p

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[ anyone have any info from start of show to John’s call? I didn’t get to hear the stream because it was down —Dan ]

1–2p

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John in Lincoln, NE

has a Creative Muvo 2 MP3 player - he wants to play it through his car stereo. Doesn’t know how.

Leo says there are two ways to hook it up.

1. Through a cassette adapter for the best quality.
2. Through a FM transmitter. These wirelessly transmit your music on the FM frequency for your car or home stereo to pick up. These work very well unless you are in a city with a lot of FM stations, in a city it will probably have too much interference to work good.

Also wants to know a cheap, good video card:
Leo recommended a Radeon 9800 or a Radeon 9600 Pro from ATI - the 2nd generation video card from ATI. he recommends finding them on PriceGrabber.

Zkay says that another good place to look for Cheap hardware is Pricewatch

Priscilla in Dana Point

is Looking for a good text editor. Mac OS X Panther user.

Leo recommends BBedit. It’s a bit expensive, but it’s a very good text editor and is amazing for programming, and editing website code… very powerful. It even has a built in FTP client! he also recommends their cheaper product TextWrangler if you can’t afford BBedit, it’s half the cost.

On the Windows side, Leo recommends the free program NoteTab.

Trevor Evans says: I have been looking for a text editor as well for Mac to program. Here are some of free ones I have found

• Jedit, nice open source Java text editor with some nice, and very free
• nedit, free X windows text editor but is geeky as it needs X11 which you can get from Apple
• SubEthaEdit, is great free text editor that has “realtime collaboration” so multiple people can work on the same text together.
• emacs, nice Unix GNU text editor given in OS X already
• vi or vim, like emacs is Unix based and given with OS X, and Leo has been know to say great things about it speak up Leo… :)

As for an alternative to Notepad in Windows what I like is a free program called EditPad Lite. There is pro version for sale, and both can be used for Win 95 and up and there is a linux version as well.

2–3p

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Landen in Jackson, TN

has a PC and is looking into Macs. Wants to know the pros and cons.

Leo says: a computer is a computer, there’s not a huge amount of difference between a Mac and a PC. However, if you want to broaden your horizons, it’s good to try out everything. Macs have less security issues, and have no spyware or any real viruses. OS X is based on the geekiest operating system of them all, UNIX, but is really easy to use… That’s a huge plus. Macs usually have decent amounts of software, however, things like CAD programs and games are harder to find on the Mac side.

Leo also says to check out Linux if you’re feeling ambitious! He recommends checking out Knoppix if you feel like testing Linux without any risk of wrecking your PC.

David in Knoxville, TN

Uses Norton Internet Security 2003, hates it and wants to get rid of it.

Leo says: Get rid of that junk! NIS seems to try to do everything at once and does it all poorly. Uninstall it and get a free Antivirus like AVG Free Edition.

Trevor Evans says: Now without NIS consider some of Leo’s great standbys to computer care and security to take up the slack in addition to AVG.

Paul in San Diego

Has a “Multi-user” (read: pirated) copy of Windows XP and wants to know if he can use Automatic Updating to keep his OS up to date without getting in trouble from Microsoft.

Leo says Yes, the automatic updates still work on a pirated copy of Windows XP - but you may have issues with the new Service Pack 2 installing.

Dan notes: this is a taped show that happened before SP2 came out, and Service Pack 2 actually does install just fine on pirated copies of XP unless your serial number is blacklisted.

Caller also wanted to know what MDB files are. - It is a Microsoft Access Database file. Watch out for viruses! Leo’s favorite site to find out what a certain file extension belongs to is: filext.com.

Jill in Maine

System is hanging, running Win2000 on a Sony Vaio laptop - hangs on startup and hangs on shutdown. Usually has to restart 2–3 times to get it to work properly. Any other time it’s usually fine.

Leo has a few ideas - could be hardware or a software issue. Could also be a spyware issue. Not really sure. He recommends possibly reinstalling the OS if there is not any spyware or virus issues, it may be the OS. Could also be USB devices or almost anything. Jill has a lot of work ahead of her!

Jerry in Valencia

He is changing his OS from Windows 98 to Windows XP Home using a full install. He wants to use one of Kevin Rose’s recommended “ultra erasing” tools to make sure everything’s wiped clean. Also wanted to use Windows 98′s backup program to move his data across.

Leo says: this probably isn’t necessary if you’re reinstalling the OS on top of it. The new OS will overwrite most of the information that was on previously. If you were selling the hard drive it’d be a different matter. DON’T use Windows 98′s backup program, it lumps everything together into a big unverifiable heap, and I don’t trust it. Leo recommends to burn a CD with the data you want to transfer over. Verify that the data is there after you burn it. Don’t waste time backing up program files, they will need to be reinstalled anyway.

Jimmy777 from the chat room adds: Win98′s backup program and WinXP’s backup program from MS are not compatible. XP’s backup program won’t read the files from 98 and visa versa. Just zip the files you want and burn to CD as Leo suggested.

Leo also recommends Dantz Retrospect as a great backup program - built in file verification and a really nice program. Check it out!

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