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Tech News & Commentary
Yvette in Newark, Delaware listening on WDEL asked: “I’m calling about a printer I bought. The printer is an HP 3512. Now it is suppose to print wirelessly from my smartphone. My phone is an LG Lucid Android 4G LTE. When the printer arrived I tried to print from my smartphone and it is set up only to my computer. I was told that there is an app that would allow me to print what is on my phone screen but I can’t find the app. Can you tell me what app would let me do this?”
HP’s printing app for Android is called HP ePrint. You can download it for free from the Google Play store and it will let you print to a long list of HP printers.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Tim in Erie, Pennsylvania listens Online asked: “What is good enough to put vinyl records on a computer? Do they have turntables with USB cables? Also I want to know about putting cassettes on a computer?”
There are USB turntables, they’re not very cheap, but they’re out there you can expect to pay around $300 for one and up from there and that is because they’re not meant to be vinyl collection rippers, they’re DJ tools.
If you want to spend less you can look at a sound card with a regular turntable, which will produce ok results, sometimes good sometimes not so good, if you have access to a mixer you should be able to tweak the quality enough to rip each album with good results. You can also buy a dedicated vinyl ripping sound card, again, those are more of a DJ tool, so you won’t find them for super cheap, they’ll usually cost upwards of a hundred dollars, but the Art USB Phono Plus in particular is designed for ripping specifically and will cost you about $66.
If you don’t mind spending money and want an easy solution, the Denon DP-200USB is by far the simplest option, you play a record with a flash drive connected to the turntable and you’re done, that comfort will cost you $250, though.
There are also cassette to USB devices that would let you make MP3 files out of your cassette recorders. We searched Amazon and found over a half dozen, priced anywhere from $20 to $60. Unfortunately, we can’t give you any recommendations from personal experience. Even if we had a unit to test, we don’t have any cassette tapes left.
You’re on your own with user reviews, I’m afraid. But the devices themselves do exist. Good luck with your project! Let us know how it turns out. Maybe you’ll help a fellow listener who also has a lot of old media they want to convert.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Bill asked: “Can I run microsoft works calendar on windows 8?”
You can install Microsoft Works calendar on Windows 8 and it will work, at least for now, but you might want to think about transitioning to Windows Calendar or any current calendar.
Microsoft Works has been discontinued and it hasn’t been updated since September 2007, for now it just happens to still work (though some users report that it’s making their CPU work a little too hard), but sooner or later it won’t anymore.
If you don’t like Windows Calendar or want to try other features, you can try Windows Live Calendar or Google Calendar, you have plenty of free and paid options out there, but you may want to switch to something that still supported, this years it will be 6 years since Microsoft killed off Works, you probably shouldn’t still be relying on it.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Marian Merritt, Internet Safety Advocate – Norton by Symantec
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
TV sets were black and white in the beginning of course, but already in 1902 Otto von Bronk, a German engineer, received a patent for the first color television technology. NTSC, developed by General Sarnoff and his team in the US several decades later, is based on this early concept. The first TV sets were as tiny as a postage stamp and showed only very unclear pictures with ugly stripes, first shown at the German radio show, today known as IFA. Picture capturing and reception was done mechanically, transmission done by radio waves.
Greg in Manchester, Tennessee listening on SuperTalk WTN 99.7 asked: “I’m trying to check out a google chrome operating system made by samsung, its for an ultra thin notebook. I want to know the disadvantages to using that over a laptop?”
Google marketing aside, ChromeOS is a Google Chrome Window that you can’t close. That is basically all there is to the OS.
You can open websites, use Google Docs, upload pictures to web services, use webmail and just generally do whatever you could do on a browser.
As an advantage, Chromebooks are fairly cheap, they’re very fast to start up (something in the order of 2 seconds), and they have good battery lives and they’re seamlessly updated.
Having said that, they will only work for you if you can do 100% of what you normally do on a web browser, if you need to run any other kind of software, you can’t on them, if you want optical media (which, in all fairness, you probably don’t need anymore) you can’t have that… it’s basically a web browser with a laptop case around it.
Believe it or not, a tablet may actually give you more functionality than a Chromebook, so think about what you would actually use on your laptop. Do you use Skype? Can’t install that on a Chromebook. Do you play any games other than Angry Birds? Chromebooks are probably not for you. Do you need an actual copy of MS Office for anything more complex than what Google Drive allows you to do? Skip a Chromebook.
Here’s the good part: you can test drive one, just download Google Chrome, run it fullscreen, if you never have to minimize it, you can get a Chromebook and benefit from the quicker startup times, the light weight and the long battery life, if at any point you can’t help but minimize it and open something else… Chromebooks are not for you.
My daughter uses a Chromebook that was given to her by the school she attends. This year they’ve used it just as a web browser, with some work in Google Docs. Next year, their entire textbook list will be available only on the Chromebook. And that’s really the point with a Chromebook. They tend to be ideal when you have a limited scope of use. For the high school student using Blackboard, e-textbooks, and Google Docs, it’s perfect. For the guy who wants a notebook computer where they can run anything they might want to, including things they haven’t thought of yet, eh…not so much. The Samsung Chromebook itself is a very nice little device. Plays YouTube videos splendidly, has long battery life, and is very quick. Just be certain you know what you are and are not getting.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Joe asked: “Dave , I dropped my phone in a puddle of water and I retrieved it in about 5 to 10 seconds , from the puddle . I used it right after I dropped it and it worked , but the sound on the other end was not strong . I used my phone again in the evening and now the phone is not working , what I mean is I can call someone and I can hear them but they can not hear me . What can I do to get this phone working again or is it damaged forever .”
Unfortunately it doesn’t look very good for your phone, Joe. The most effective remedy for a phone dropped in water is to immediately remove the back of the phone, the battery and the SIM card, dry them with a towel or dry cloth without moving the phone too much to avoid movement of moisture within the device, and then submerging it in uncooked rice overnight. If it’s done quickly and correctly enough, this can be a lifesaver for your cell.
However in your situation Joe, it seems that too much time has passed and water has already penetrated deep enough to damage and short circuit key components I’m afraid. If I were you I would remove the SIM and memory cards to salvage as much data as possible so that it can be transferred to your replacement phone, which we foresee you purchasing in the very near future.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Ty in Tennessee calling in via the App asked: “I have a Droid Bionic and I have a JVC radio in my truck that is an AV type head unit. Since my phone updated last week, now when I listen to music in my truck throught the Bluetooth settings, about 20 seconds into the first track, the bluetooth loses signal and turns off. I have to restart it, press play again and start over. I’ll be able to listen to the whole song but when the second song comes up, it does the same thing. I’ve contacted Verizon tech support. They were no help.”
This is apparently a fairly common problem with the latest set of Android updates, Google seems to have changed a driver and it’s causing some issues with some phones.
The only way around this that people seem to agree on is to root the phone and install custom ROM. It’s a fairly drastic measure, but whether it’s worth it or not will largely depend on how and how much you use your phone in your car, and whether or not you have other means to connect it to the radio.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
HDRadio: FM/HD Insignia Table Top Radios with 10 presets
Covington Creations: Earbud yo-yo — Now with Dave’s face on them! — A clever solution to tangled earbuds.
iolo: Copies of: Drive Scrubber – Erase data so it can NEVER be recovered.
Touchfire: iPad Keyboards – The world’s thinnest, lightest iPad keyboard.