HOUR 1:
Tech News & Commentary
Rickey in Columbus, Ohio listening via the podcast asked two questions: “I have a netbook from work and I need to reload WinXP on the Netbook. Obviously, the netbooks don’t have an optical drive. I’m using an external CD drive, but it fails during the installation process. What can I do to fix that?
Second Question: I have 2 iMac G5s that I’m trying to restore the OS on. Where can I get my hands on a copy of Mac OSX that would be supported by them?”
You didn’t really say how it wasn’t working for you. Is it failing to read the disc? That might be a bad drive. More likely, I think, it’s not able to boot from the external drive (many computers can’t boot from a USB CD drive and Windows XP requires a reboot as part of the installation process). You might be able to use a USB flash drive, though.
Before you can install Windows XP from a flash drive, you have to prep the flash drive from a computer that has a working installation of Windows XP on it. If you don’t have such a computer, then you can’t use the flash drive, and you’re back to an external optical drive (but many of those won’t work because the computer will refuse to boot from them).
You can find instructions on prepping the flash drive at this two links: OCIA and TechRepublic, but in the meantime we also want to ask whether you’ve checked for a reinstallation partition on the hard drive? On a Dell netbook, for instance, you can press F8 while it’s booting, select the Repair option, then the Reload Factory Software, and you’re all set. Other manufacturers are different, of course.
About the second question: iMac G5s will run any Mac OS X that supports PowerPC processors. That means that you should be fine running anything up to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), but you won’t be able to run the latest Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on them. You can still find Leopard online. We found it on Amazon for you, click here to go to it.
For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
“Consumer
Reports” Feature with Donna Tapellini
RIM finally brought out their BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet, but how does this professional-grade tablet stand up to existing tablets on the market? Donna Tapellini from Consumer Reports shares their early impressions.
The “Into Tomorrow” team discussed the latest apps that they
have been playing with recently.
For Android:
• Mark recommends: Picazza
“The Android Gallery prior to version 2.2 had excellent integration with Google’s Picasa Web Albums for online photo storage and viewing. But for some reason, with Froyo, at least on Motorola Android phones, that integration isn’t working like you expect it to. I’m a big fan of Picasa’s free multigigabyte online storage, so I have a number of folders and a lot of files there. With Picazza, it’s as if the photos were stored on my local SD card. I can access them for viewing, sharing, and more, fast and without a lot of fiddly signing in and tweaking things. Picazza is free in the Android Market.” – Mark
For iOS:
• Rob recommends: Voice Changer Plus
“I found a fun app under Top Free Apps. It’s called Voice Changer Plus. You choose a fun, effect voice and make a recording. If you want to try a different voice, you don’t need to record again. Just change the voice. Even after you save it, you can change the effect. With the paid version, you have the option to save your recordings, share them via email, Facebook & Twitter, and create ringtones. I bought the paid version because I wanted to save my recordings, not so much for ringtone-making. ” – Rob
• Chris recommends: Heart Fitness
An app that lets you check your heart rate by placing your finger in front of both the flash and the built in camera of your iPhone 4.
Some of our listeners sent us their own app suggestions:
• Shawn in Shanendoah, Iowa listening on 99.3 KMA recommendes: Gmote
An app that lets you remote control your computer using your Android phone, allowing you to control movies and audio from a distance.
• Gloria in San Jose, California listening on KLIV 1590 recommends: WunderRadio
An app available for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows that lets you stream thousands of radio stations, including local radio!
• George in Milton-Freewater, Oregon listens Online recommends: Screebl
An Android app that allow to control whether your screen stays on or turns off based on the orientation of your phone.
Tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast for more details.
What are your favorite apps?Let us know!
Guest in this hour:
Bernard Luthi, VP of Marketing, Web Management & Customer Service – Newegg.com
Shares some cool gift ideas for the Digital Mom.
Kenny from Ohio listens to the podcast and asked: ” I listen to a lot of lossless audio codecs on Blu-ray discs and I want to know how come so many movie studios are going with DTS HD-Master Audio and abandoning Dolby True-HD? Are all the major film studios going with DTS HD-Master Audio? Thanks. l like Into Tomorrow and keep up the good work.”
It’s hard to say what the film studios are going to do. We’ve done a lot of digging on this topic and found that essentially, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master audio are very similar. Most people, who are not audiophiles, would not be able to tell a difference in the two.
It turns out studios probably like it better because it’s easier and more cost effective to encode DTS HD Master Audio than it is to encode True-HD. The difference comes from being able to have a backwards compatible (or “lossy”) DTS on the same stream that carries that lossless DTS, that means that there is only one stream to encode, where as with Dolby True-HD studios have to encode the audio several times.
Another important factor is software cost, DTS HD MA encoding software is apparently much less expensive than Dolby’s True-HD encoding software. To make matters worse, Dolby True-HD encoding software is Mac-only requiring big authoring houses to have a few expensive Macs around when they can just do the job on whatever platform they find more convenient if they choose DTS.
Secret option number three would be PCM audio, everyone agrees that PCM sounds great, since it has no compression induced problems to worry about, but no compression means huge files, and having huge audio files complicates dubbing movies for foreign markets (and those include Miami-Dade County, Harlem, Los Angeles, towns around the Mexican border, etc…), and that’s why it’s not even in the running for most studios.
We’re not saying that any of these are the reasons studios tend to favor DTS. Sometimes, we’re not even sure the studios know why they make some of the decisions they make. It could be, too, that Dolby came out first. Maybe DTS was able to learn from some of their mistakes and possibily make a better product.
For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Wireless Update with Chuck Hamby from Verizon Wireless
Here’s one for our younger listeners and their thumbs. Chuck Hamby of Verizon Wireless has some information on the dangers of texting while driving.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Microsoft: Copies of Street and Trips Software with GPS receiver
Powermat: Several PowerMat Dual 1850 (Black) & PowerMat Dual 1200 (White) Portable Battery Backup Packs
Que Publishing: Copies of the book: “My iPad 2” (and it covers iOS 4.3)