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Tech News & Commentary
Jim in Idaho Falls, ID listening on 1260 AM asked: “Trying to get together with Raspberry Pi and needed a new monitor. Was wondering if there was a small 20-30 inch TV that would work as a monitor when I wanted to use it on occasion. Hopefully inexpensive.”
The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI output, so any TV that takes an HDMI input should work just fine with it. And of course, many new TVs offer several HDMI ports these days, so you can even leave it connected if you’d like.
The biggest problem you’re going to find is finding a TV that small.There are a few still around, you can buy a 24 inch refurbished RCA set for $140 on Sears’ website, and it does come with one HDMI port, so if you only want to use it with the Pi and TV, it should work for you.
Best Buy is currently selling 24” Haiers and 22” RCAs for around $130, and those would work for your purposes too.
The Raspberry Pi is a very interesting computer. For those not familiar, it’s a credit card sized single board computer running the Linux OS and selling for around $25. It’s not designed to run your corporate offices, it’s usually part of a specialized system rather than a general purpose computer. We’d just love to know what you’re using it for. Why not share that with our listeners? Call us back and let us know!
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline
Joe in Hazleton, Pennsylvania listening online and asked: “Hi Dave, I got a question about a computer i just got, a used one, however the previous owner took out the hard drive. now i have another harddrive from a computer thats about the same age. Now i want to take the drive and put it into the one i just got. the computer i just got is a dell from about 2007, 2008. I want to know can i keep my programs without doing a full install and instead do a repair from my windows xp boot disc? Follow-up: I play guitar and sing and i wanted to record using my new PC. I have windows xp thinking about getting 7. my PC has 2GB RAM, 1.5GHz Processing speed. If i got a new computer, what would it need to do multi-track recording using programs like n-Track Studio ?”
If the drive was set as a bootable drive on your old computer, it’s likely that you won’t even need to run anything from the Windows boot disk.
Your operating system, as well as your programs, would all just be there and work. You may run into a few problems though.
Your new computer will almost certainly be made up of different components than your old one, so you may need new drivers for everything to work. We found out recently that getting all the drivers you need can be a very time consuming process.
There’s also a chance that Windows may look at it’s surroundings and say “well.. I don’t know that motherboard, or video card, or CPU… I’ve been pirated!.” If that happens, a call to Microsoft should be enough to get them to transfer your old license to your new computer, so don’t worry, you don’t necessarily have to buy a new license, or search the darker corners of the web for a borrowed one.
n-Track doesn’t give out specific requirements on the hardware that you need, but some are a must for a computer today, especially for a recording machine. Having at least a dual core 64 bit processor is something you should think about getting because if you want to monitor live what you are recording, and if you are adding effects and other instruments, you need that processing power.
An intel core i5 is what most starter systems use for recording, then when it comes to ram, that really depends on what you plan on recording as well, if you are just doing three or four tracks per song, then 4GB should do the trick, but you might want to think about what you will be doing before purchasing. As for the hard drive, you might want to get at least a 500GB one for storing all of your recordings, sound effects and so on. n-Track says that their software works on windows xp, vista, 7, 8 and 2003.
Bare in mind that if you want to put more than 4GB of ram, you need to get the 64bit version of windows and the 64bit version of n-Track.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Steven listening via the Android App told us: “Quick question. I kinda washed my bluetooth in the washing machine, it came out clean but not working so well, so um what do you guys recomend for a new one? I have a motorola that flips open. It needs to connect to 2 phones and have good sound quality.”
Depending on your budget, you have plenty of options. The Plantronics M55 will cost you around $50, and it’s comfortable, well built and it provides good call quality.
If you want a headset than can do more than your phone, the Jawbone Era comes with built in voice activated commands and is touch sensitive! Having said that, $130 may be a little much to pay for a fancy bluetooth headset.
The Plantronics Marque M165 might also work for you, it’s not really as good as the M55 when it comes to noise cancellation and overall voice quality, but it should meet your needs.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Frank in North Pole, Alaska listening on KFBX 970 AM told us: “My old HP laptop needs a new hard drive. Should I replace with original 5400 rpm or upgrade to 7200 rpm? I have XP os.”
Go for 7200 RPM. Windows XP won’t have any trouble handling a faster drive and you will notice the speed improvement.
It will be more noticeable if you doing anything that uses a lot of memory, but even if you don’t do that, programs should launch faster and the computer will feel more responsive.
If you don’t mind spending the money, and SSD will make much bigger difference, but again, it will cost you extra and it’s probably not super necessary if you were doing ok with a 5400RPM drive.
We do want to note that by “much bigger difference,” we mean “absolutely night and day difference.” Going from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM will indeed give you a modest performance boost, and if the difference in price is just a few dollars, it’s well worth it.
But if you chose to spend the money and buy an SSD (solid state drive) for your HP laptop, you would, in all honesty, feel like you’d just bought a much newer and faster laptop. An SSD is that good.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Chrysta Olson, Director of Communications – Pheed
Delroy asked: “How do I connect my Dell 968w AIO to a Macbook air. OS X 10.8.5?”
The Dell 968w doesn’t really play nice with anyone, it may be time to consider a replacement. Mac OS X was never a supported OS from the start, but the printer also does not support Windows 8, and had issues with Windows 7 64-bit for a while.
Some people seem to have tricked it into working by making it use Lexmark drivers, and you can always try and see how it reacts to generics as well, but the truth is, the printer wasn’t designed to play nice with Mac OS X, so you won’t ever find standard drivers for it.
That’s the bad news. The good news is, there’s never been a better time to purchase an all-in-one printer, scanner, and copier. Most models cost under $100, and even a high end one with separate ink tanks will cost less than $200. They have stellar print quality, they’re excellent scanners and copiers, they’re quite fast, and most of them are supported on a Mac.
We’ve had personal experience with the Canon Pixma series of all-in-ones and can affirm that any recent model in those lines support not only Mac computers but also offer AirPrint support for your iPhone and iPad to be able to print directly to them.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Glen in Paducah, Kentucky listening via our FREE “Into Tomorrow” App asked: “I’ve been listening live on the radio and you’re talking about transfering files from an old computer to a new one. I’m getting ready to do that. Now I have tons of duplicates on iTunes and was wondering what was the best way to get rid of duplicates on iTunes, Thanks a lot.”
Since your files are on iTunes, finding duplicates is not hard. Under the File menu you should be able to find an option to “Display Exact Duplicates”. From that list, just select the second set of songs with the same titles and delete them as you would any other song.
That’s really it, your music library should be free of duplicates and ready to transfer.
Just make sure you don’t select everything and delete it because that will get rid of the originals as well as the duplicates, only select the duplicate set before deleting.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Scottevest: Lola Puff Jackets for Women & Puffer Jackets for Men – Complete with pockets for all your gadgets.
iolo: Copies of System Mechanic- Fix and speed up your PC Automatically.
TYLT: An assortment of Smartphone charging accessories and bluetooth speakers.
Nite Ize Innovation: Connect Case and Connect Cradle for iPhone – Hard case with belt clip, vehicle mount and desk stand.