Ask The Tech Guys 357

Tech News

The Slingbox allows you to stream your own TV signal across the Internet to your PC anywhere in the world. However, the MLB is threatening the company.

Apple has begun selling songs from EMI in a higher bitrate and sans copy-protection for $1.29. Hopefully more record companies will jump on this bandwagon.

Guests

Q Justine Ezarik - Lifecasting/Image-macros

• Justin.tv is launching new channels
• Justine is now streaming nearly 24/7
• Sometimes points camera to herself as well
• Find Justine's stream at iJustine.TV or Justin.TV/ijustine

• I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? hosts images of cats with random phrases overlayed on them
• Quite humorous
• Not necessarily of cats
  • LOLKev.com has pictures of Kevin Rose
  • LOLPresidents.com has pictures of presidents
• Meant to mock people or subjects
• Image-macros became popular on various forums
  • Slowly taking over the Internet
• The roflbot generates image-macros for you
• Justine has made a few of her own
  • lolblog
  • lolerskating on ur newbz
• Takes advantage of Internet slang and mocks it

Q Steve Gibson - WiFi

• Most people are not encrypting WiFi
• Routers are like radio stations, not a magical wireless wire
• On open WiFi networks on default settings, the routers may be compromised
• WEP (wired equivalent privacy) is easily hackable
  • Designers of WEP not cryptography experts
  • WEP can be hacked within 1 minute!
• "Good" cryptography is WPA
  • What everybody should be using
  • WPA "TKIP" is Temporal Key Integrity Profile
    • Even that is absolutely strong enough

Q Merlin Mann - Making better meetings

• Always have an agenda
• Can use email to circulate the agenda
• Make sure to have an end time for a meeting
• If you can't come out of a meeting without completing your agenda, you haven't accomplished anything
• Backpack and Stikkit help with lightweight collaboration
• Make sure each person is of a contribution to the meeting
• Need to have someone in charge of the meeting the entire time
  • Someone to be a bouncer, timekeeper, and referee
• Doodle allows you to invite people to meetings with certain times
  • Will allow you to see what times are optimal to meet
• Mindmapping with something like MindMeister or even Post-It notes can help people organize brainstorming

Hour 1

Q Rob - Cannot defrag hard drive

• Background applications using the disk
• Should run defragmentation in safe mode

Q Jim from Riverside - Cannot install Service Pack 2

• The farther PC gets from original XP installation, harder to install Service Pack 2
• Best way to do this would be to do clean install of XP and then install SP2 immediately
• May also be time to get a new PC
  • PC is 5 years old

Q Michael - Connecting NAS to the Internet

• Doing a tech help parody video show
• People will download from the NAS
• No web server software on the NAS installed
• Worked through Feeder because it uses a browser
  • Browsers can see FTP pages
• iTunes is not able to see FTP for some reason
• Ask the college if they have a website to host it on

Hour 2

Q Nicole from Santa Clarita - Moving from Thunderbird to Outlook/Fixing auto-correct

• Needs to move all Thunderbird emails to Outlook
• Looks like you'll have to export to .csv format which Outlook can import
• IMAPSize has a tool called Mbox2EML which will convert the standard format to Outlook's proprietary format
  • The developer's website has a tutorial
• Changing "doris" to "dories"
• Want to go into the autocorrect options
  • There you can replace dories

Q Liz - Laptop overheating and crashing

• Dust probably is blocking airflow
• Most definitely not a virus
• Take it to a computer store that will do some diagnostics for you
• Make a backup of your data before taking it to the store

Hour 3

Q Steve - Playing iPod in garage/office & Podcasts downloading automatically

• Take a look at the Griffin RoadTrip
• Allows you to stream to the radio and charge iPod in cradle
• If you subscribe in a podcatcher like iTunes, yes podcasts will download automatically

Q Joe - Getting a new camera

• Sanyo Xacti HD2 is your best bet
• You also want to shoot HD video - this will do it

Q Port 0 open?

• Using Shields Up to test security
• Ports are like TV channels
  • 65000 ports
• Best thing to do is to keep ports "stealthed"
• Port 0 is not a real port
  • Means malformed packets coming in

Q Sheryl - Condenser microphone

• Normal condenser microphones use XLR connectors
  • Would need to buy an interface with "phantom power" and then transfer to the computer using Firewire or USB
• USB microphone choices are much more limited
  • MicFlex
  • Samson C01u is a condenser mic
    • Condenser mic is very sensitive

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