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Sunday, December 5, 2004
Show #98
Broadcasting live from the studios of Newstalk 1010 CFRB in Toronto this weekend.
I will appear on Live with Regis and Kelly Monday at around 9:40a. You can see a list of all the things I showed with prices and links right here?!
Looks like I’ll be doing the radio show live from Los Angeles December 18–19. Stay tuned for details!
Andy Walker, Amber MacArthur, and Mikey Lazazzera from Call for Help Canada join me in studio for the first hour.
toc | toc
Today’s news items
Mike B’s trivia question of the day
Herman Hollerith is best known for: 1
a) Inventing the first punched card computer
b) Designing the first integrated circuit
c) Developing the first cathode ray tube
d) Leo’s first book editor at Que
Noon-1p
Gary in Hisperia - Putting his Tivo videos on DVD
DVD extraction from the Tivo is tricky and requires hacking the Tivo hardware. Visit the Dealdatabase Forums and read up on video extraction for information on how to do that. Once you get the video on your hard drive you may want to use DVDShrink to fit it onto a single disc, or use a dual-layer drive. The easiest way to convert analog video to DVD is the HP MovieWriter
Handbrake for the Mac is great for turning DVDs into files.
Zkay adds that he likes DVD Decrypter for Windows and DVD Backup for the Mac
Louis in Whittier - unerasing files once the Recycle Bin has been emptied
Emptying the recycle bin does not delete the file, it just releases the space for reuse. If you act before the file has been overwritten you can recover it in its entirety. Norton’s Unerase will work, as will ??
Lost the Windows admin password? There are three ways to recover it.
- Restart in safe mode and use the secret Administator account to log in. The password is blank unless you’ve changed it. (Oliver Wine write: If you put in an administrator password in XP setup, then that is the password.)
- Use a brute force password cracking utility like LOphtCrack to guess it
- Use EBCD, a Linux boot disc to clear all passwords.
1–2p
Cliff in Temecula - PC answering machine software
He’s looking for Windows based voicemail program that can check the time of day and caller id to decide how to handle a call. Try Teley. Anyone have any other recommendations?
They Might Be Giants Dial-A-Song: (718) 387–6962 (that’s long distance to Brooklyn NY)
Listener responses:
- Try www.sunny-beach.net/default.htm - it’s $259 but sounds very powerful. I’m not sure if this is what that guy wanted for calling software but its a try.
- www.tucows.com/preview/197836.html
- www.internetsoftsolution.com
- www.voicecallcentral.com
- www.thephonebot.com
- www.nch.com.au/in/ggivm_b.html
MechMan says: The software I had with my old US Robotics Fax/Voice Modem on my old computer could do everything the caller wanted except the call forwarding task. It was only with my US Robotics modem, so it might be a proprietary software for them. Unfortunately the stuff for that is buried in my garage somewhere. I will attempt to find it this week. You might want to check the US Robotics website, since it was bundled with the modem. It might still be.
Dave says: I used to have a “Complete PC” answering machine/modem board that used 2 lines and CENTREX blind transfer to do this. It just did not have Caller ID. The Complete PC was bought by Baca who is now Zoom.
Bob says: You might want to try a Home Automation option. With a software package like Homeseer, you can completely control your home and telephone. The HomeSeer Phone option will do everything that you asked about and more. Note you need to have HomeSeer running on your PC, but it is truly amazing what you can do with Home Automation.
Kathy in Woodland Hills - HP printer driver clobbered her system
If you can run the System File Checker it may be able to replace the files replaced by the driver. At the command prompt type: sfc /scannow. Otherwise, it’s time for a Windows install.
Mark in Santa Ana - web site builder
He wants to build a political activism site linking data about people, companies, and issues. You want a database backend. There are many ways to do this. This site, for instance, is dynamically created each time you visit it using a programming language called PHP. (You can tell because the program, pmwiki.php, is in the URL above). The LAMP combination, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (Pearl and/or Python), is a very popular open source solution. But if you dont’ want to spend a lot of time writing your own database code, I recommend ColdFusion from Macromedia. It integrates with Dreamweaver and makes it very easy to whip up a databased web site. You’ll need a host that supports ColdFusion.
Robert in Carlsbad - AVG and caller ID spoofing
Yes I recommend AVG, the free anti-virus all the time.
And yes, caller ID can be spoofed.
Anthony in San Gabriel - voice recognition software
The best is Dragon Naturally Speaking from ScanSoft - no question. If you’re going to use it in a noisy environment (like the car) make sure to get a good noise cancelling microphone.
Bob in San Diego says: The latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking - Version 8 was just recently released. It is the best version yet with a significant improvement in accuracy. It is truly amazing and Leo, it has gotten much easier to use and make corrections.
‘Speaking’ of David Pogue, he just had a review in the N.Y. Times Pogue Dragon Naturally Speaking Review. It is definitely worth taking a look at and there is an amazing video of Pogue using DNS in action!
Another remarkable demonstration of DNS 8.0 can be seen here: Dragon Naturally Speaking Demonstration Video
2–3p
Harry in San Diego - Windows 98 keeps asking for XP install disc
Something is very wrong here, Harry. I think your best path is to back up the data, format the drive, and reinstall.
Harold suggests: Since large hard drives are less than $40 for a 120 Gig on sale, a safer and quicker method would be to purchase and install a new hard drive and install from scratch. This would preserve your data and always allow you to go back to it. The old drive could be retained as a secondary drive or external drive and things like mail, documents and data could be imported into the new drive. Most of the time when people format and reinstall they forget their mail and address book since they are not stored in “My Documents”.
Trish in Burbank - Moving iTunes to a different drive
Use the iTunes preferences to point to a different location for the library.
Chuck in Newbury Park - converting his VHS videos to DVD looks terrible
It’s probably the interlacing. Deinterlacing the video will really improve the quality. Look at the samples on www.100fps.com to verify that this is the problem. The site also recommends some solutions.
Lisa in Huntington Beach - wants to spy on her teenage daughter
Her daughter is chatting and posting suspicious messages on message boards. She uses an eMac. I recommend turning on logging in iChat or AIM to keep track of the chat conversations (it’s a setting in preferences). You may want to install a keystroke logger as well.
Chat Logs and Show Audio
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1 Answer is a) Inventing the first punched card computer. The Hollerith tabulating machine was used to calculate the 1890 census. Hollerith went on to found a well known computer company that we know today as International Business Machines. Biography of Herman Hollerith. (↑)
