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Saturday, November 20, 2004

Show #93

My family and I had such a good time on MacMania III, we’re doing it again. Yes it’s a Baltic Blast cruise combining MacMania 3.5 and the Northern Light digital photography workshop! Join Steve Wozniak, David Pogue, Chris Breen, and me June 30-July 10, 2005 as we cruise the Baltic with Geek Cruises aboard Holland America’s beautiful brand new Westerdam. We’ll be visiting Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Helsinki, Estonia, Berlin, and more while we learn about the Mac and digital photography. I’ll be teaching classes for beginners, a seminar on Mac security, and offering my popular Top 40 for OS X session (with all new software). European cruises book up fast so sign up now at GeekCruises.com!

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

Bill Gates is the “most spammed guy alive” according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Gates gets 4 million email messages a day, most of them spam, and Microsoft has nearly an entire department dedicated to filtering his mail. And you thought you had it bad.

I’ve got my Nintendo DS (I’m bringing it to NYC next week for my Entertainment-To-Go segment on Live with Regis and Kelly. It hits stores tomorrow but I’ll do a quick review on the show today.

One thing I won’t be reviewing is Half-Life 2. I haven’t played with it much yet, but it sure does look beautiful (and scary). Let’s hear your reviews, though.

[hp550c]
If you get sick while playing Half-Life 2 for over an hour then read on… It’s been found that HL2 ships with a field of view (fov) of 75. Most FPS games use a FOV of 90. So to change the FOV just enable cheats by entering ‘sv_cheats “1″’ (without the ‘) in your autoexec.cfg file (this is located in the cfg subdirectory of HL2). Also add the line which reads ‘fov “90″’ (without the ‘) in your autoexec.cfg file also. That will set your FOV to 90, which should get rid of all your sea sickness :)

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback says Internet porn is worse than crack.

If I sounder smarter today it’s because I’ve been reading Google Scholar.

And it’s the end of tech at G4TechTV. I’ll tell you what really happened last week and where technology-oriented television is headed next.

Mike B’s Computer trivia question of the day

Charles Babbage was best known for: ¹
a) Inventing the Difference Englne
b) Founding a chain of software stores
c) Writing the first modern operating system
d) Created a way to mass produce cabbage

Noon-1p

Ellie in Irvine - is the DISH HDTV deal good?

I like it very much. You get an HDTV, either the 34-inch tube TV or the 40-inch projection screen, plus DISH’s 921 high-definition PVR which offers 20 hours of excellent quality HD recording, or 100 hours of regular TV, and the HD DISH (you need a special one). I think it’s an excellent deal, and probably the most reasonable way to go HD.

Lou in Grenada Hills - backed up data on CD but can’t see it

Windows XP can fool you that way. When you insert a CD and copy files to it they look like they’re on the CD, but they’re not until you commit by burning it. You’ll be offered the chance to do so when you eject it, but not before. I recommend using a program like Nero to burn CDs instead.

Jeff in San Diego - having trouble file sharing

One computer is wired, the other wireless. This can sometimes be problematic if the wireless computer is designated by Windows as the “Master Browser.” This is the Windows computer on the network that controls all the interactions in file and printer sharing. One computer must have the browsing service turned on, but it shouldn’t be a wireless computer because any interruption to the network (which happens frequently on a wireless system) will break it.

Make sure a wired system is always the master browser by disabling the browser service on all wirless systems. Click Start→Programs→Administrative Tools→Services, double-click the Browser service and disable it.

For the best Windows XP networking troubleshooting article ever visit Tom’s Networking.

Take a look at this microsoft support article, and this microsoft tip page. -Trent

1–2p

Jeremy in Garden Grove - tablet PC and overhead projector

He’s a math teacher who wants to replace his old acetate slides and overhead projector with a 21st century solution: a tablet PC and wireless Powerpoint projector. I recommend the inexpensive Averatech C3500, a convertible notebook that doubles as a lightweight laptop and tablet PC. It runs around $1200. I haven’t tried the wireless projectors, but the idea is great - instead of being tethered to the connector you can use Wi-Fi to drive it. Infocus makes one called the Liteshow Cablefree for around $500.

From Glich
For the Math Teacher who want to do projection on the cheep use a normal projector and a Linksys WPG12 or WPG54G to project whats on the tablet PC wirelessly.

From WilliamK
I’d suggest a slate rather then the convertible model that Leo suggested. If you are going to carry it around the reduced weight of the slate models would be a benefit. I recommend the Motion brand but there are a few choices. Also I’ve switched to using a tablet for my main computer so I don’t agree with Leo’s view on their usefulness.
You can use a wireless presentation gateway, available from linksys or dlink, to connect to any projector.
There are a few math specific applications that are out there that you might want to look into as well.
If you have any questions, please email me. I’d be happy to help. williamkapes [at] gmail.com

John in Los Angeles - check disk and defrag keep restarting

John figured out the answer himself: restart Windows in Safe Mode then run the optimizer or check disk. Something is running in the background and accessing the hard drive during the defrag, forcing it to restart. But you load a minimal set of programs in Safe Mode, so whatever has been running in the background isn’t starting up. So what is running in the background? It could be any number of things. Microsoft Office’s FindFast, for example, indexes the hard drive in the background, and accesses the disk periodically to save the results. Running defrag in Safe Mode is the best solution.

Mark in Thousand Oaks - how do I convert 12-bit DV audio to 16-bit

He recorded a bunch of video using 12-bit audio - but he gets a synching problem when he edits and burns the video on his Mac. Apple says you have to use 16-bit audio. How does he convert his old video to 16-bit audio? Anyone have a Mac OS X application that can do this?

Listener suggestions:

• Export back to tape recording at 16-bit
• Get a movie resource editor to change the sample. Resource Editor will do it.

Andy in Redondo Beach - which DVD disc format is most compatible with players?

It doesn’t matter. DVD-R and DVD+R are roughly equally compatible. Visit his son’s pocket bike racing page at drewprice.com - go Drew!!!

Andy had a comment about a remote control software program called X1 I think that Leo recommended to him, does anyone have the URL I can find that program at?

2–3p

Donovan in Temecula - what kind of networking does the Nintendo DS have?

It supports 802.11 as well as Nintendo’s own proprietary form of networking. Its built-in chat will work with both.

Bill in Cypress - Office programs are acting up in Windows ME

Try re-installing both Office and ME. One or the other has some damaged files.

Alex in St Louis - CD stops working after 15 minutes

Anyone have any idea what’s wrong here? I’d suggest looking at the power settings and making sure the drive is not turning off. Sometimes you can do this on a per part basis in the hardware device manager.

From Michael:
I have a similar problem with my Dell desktop at work. Usually the only way I can get the CD drive to wake up is to open Windows Media Player and click on the Now Playing button. It seems to work after that.

From Dorian:
I have an internal EIDE SONY CDRW that works fine the first 5 minutes but then it dies and Windows then thinks I have “unplugged” the device (obviously not). I am sure it is a hardware problem inside the CDRW (probably the power supply circuity - power regulating ICs or the like) so Alex might want to find a buddy with the same CD-ROM and swap it to see if he can replicate the problem and determine if it’s the actual CD-ROM.

Joyce in La Morada - crashed hard drive

She took it to a drive recovery center and they wanted to charge her $2300. Her husband wants to do it himself. You often can - with the proper tools and training - but in this case the prognosis isn’t good. The drive suffered a noisy mechanical failure. That usually means the platters will have to be removed in a clean room environment and reseated in another drive. It’s not something you can do yourself and it is very pricey to get someone else to do it. Next time make a backup. All drives fail eventually.

Chat Logs and Show Audio

¹ Answer is a) Babbage invented the Difference (Differential) Engine, one of the world’s first computers. It was a steam powered computer that calculated tables of numbers, much like our modern spreadsheet programs do today. More information on Charles Babbage can be found at The Charles Bababge Institute. (↑)