HOUR 1:
Tech News & Commentary
Telbe in Wyoming listening to the podcast asked: “Hey Dave and the gang, my question’s regarding software for the iPad 2. I’m currently thinking about getting an iPad 2 but before I do, I was wondering what kind of applications and/or software I can get for the iPad 2 for note taking. I’m currently a full time student in college and I’m involved in my clubs and organizations around campus. I currently use Microsoft One Note on my PC but I was wondering what kind of software like One Note or maybe even better than One Note is available for the iPad 2. Anything will help. Thanks Guys.”
The fan favorite seems to be Evernote, it syncs your notes with their server so you have access to them no matter what and you can get it from the App Store for free.
Another very well liked app is Penultimate, unlike Evernote it’s not free, it costs $3, but you can write with your fingers or a stylus and you can draw circles, arrows, doodles, or anything else like you would on paper or OneNote. You can also email your notes to yourself from within the app. Penultimate is a very impressive app, if you get an iPad and like to take notepad style notes you should definitely have a look at it, it’s about as similar to OneNote as we’ve seen and if you use a stylus like pen you can pretty much take the same kind of notes you would on paper.
This is kind of an obvious one but, how about the built in Notes app? it does let you type as many notes as you want and email them to yourself, you can even copy that email into OneNote if you want to keep using OneNote.
For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
“Consumer
Reports” Feature with Terry Sullivan
Smart phones are quickly elbowing aside basic point-and-shoot cameras as the device of choice for sharing everyday experiences. But, they are still no match for stand-alone dedicated devices. Terry Sullivan, Associate Electronics Editor for Consumer Reports, shares the results of their recent lab tests.
The “Into Tomorrow” team discussed the latest apps that they
have been playing with recently.
For Android:
• Mark recommends: US Newspapers, FREE
“My App this week is US Newspapers. This free app does pretty much what the name suggests. It gives you an index of newspaper mobile websites. While it’s true that you could EVENTUALLY have all these papers bookmarked in the browser, why bother? Here they are indexed neatly for you. The ones you read more often will rise to the top of your list in an auto favorites function. For me, it exposed me to newspapers from around the country that I didn’t even THINK about before getting this app. I very much enjoy browsing other people’s home town news, it seems. I’ll give you one helpful tip, though. There is an adjustment for font size in the app. This is apparently the font size in the list of newspapers ONLY. Font size on the mobile websites themselves are controlled by that site, if they can be adjusted at all. And because they are MOBILE websites, the built in browser will not zoom or re-size them. So if you’re like me and your eyes despise small fonts, there will be SOME papers here that drive you mad. You will like this app, though, guaranteed. US Newspapers, free in the Android Market and the Amazon Appstore.” – Mark
• Listener Shondra recommends: Go Launcher EX, Free
“It has so many tweaks and settings you can customize. It works great on both mobile and tablet platforms.”
• Listener Amy recommends: Cellfire, Free
“On my Android HTC desire, I love my cellfire app. I can use coupons right on my phone and store card. I also love my shopsavvy app, as I can see the price of an item at other stores before I buy it. I’ve saved so much!”
Thank you Shondra and Amy! Share your favorite app with us by calling 1-800-899-INTO, or by clicking here
For iOS:
• Chris recommends: Sun Alert, $0.99
“Just in time for summer fun in the sun, I’m talking about Sun Alert.
With Sun Alert you can use your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to calculate your maximum sun exposure time.
Whether you are at the beach, climbing mountains, skiing, walking, jogging or working outdoors you need to protect your skin from the UV radiation and thereby lower the risk of adverse health effects. First, you select your skin type, then the Sun Protection Factor (SPF) of your sunscreen and the environment. Sun Alert will retrieve the near-real time data of the UV radiation for your location and calculate the time you can safely be expose yourself to the sun. You can also use it to select the SPF of your sunscreen to meet a desired exposure time. For more precise calculation, use the horizontal slider to set desired start time or the vertical slider to set a UV index limit. I imagine this app being very useful in avoiding those painful sunburns. It’s 99 cents in the Apple App Store.” — Chris
• Listener Trevor recommends: iTranslate, Free
“Translate for my iPhone. You just type up whatever you want and pick any of about 100 languages, push translate and it translates. I use it to send texts and letters to my brothers who speak Japanese and Portuguese. It’s what all the cool kids are doing :)”
Thank you Trevor! Share your favorite app with us by calling 1-800-899-INTO, or by clicking here
Tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast for more details.
What are your favorite apps?Let us know!
Guest in this hour:
Scott Rigby, Ph.D., Psychologist & Coauthor of “Glued to Games” – Immersyve
Are you glued to games? Scott is a psychologist who studies gaming and joins us to explain why we really love games and how they satisfy fundamental human needs.
Steve, calling via our Android App, listens to the podcast and asked: “I have to use a VPN from my work computer and the problem is I have a Wireless printer at the house and I can’t seem to print when I’m logged on to VPN, when I’m not logged in I can get it to print. I was wondering if you can tell me how I can make that happen when my VPN is on to print at home. Thank you and have a good day.”
Without getting too technical, the reason you can’t print at home when you’re connected to the VPN is because the VPN is essentially lying to your computer. What you do when you connect to a VPN — or Virtual Private Network — is use secure channels so that you can connect to your office’s internal network from outside of it, the reason you don’t do that through normal channels is because you don’t want to give everyone in the world access to your office’s private computers. The VPN network instead adds layers of security to ensure that if you got access to the office’s network it’s because you belong there, and since you belong there you can use it freely… here’s where the lie comes in… once you’ve passed the security hurdles, your computer’s VPN adapter kinda tells the computer “you’re not at home, you’re at the office” and the computer thinks that it’s directly connected to the office’s network (even though it may actually be thousands of miles away from it).
Since your computer is now acting like it’s at the office, when you tell it “connect to my home printer and print this page” it asks the office’s network “can you connect me to this printer?” and the office network just says “no, no such printer here…” and the print request gets discarded.
There is a way to get around this, it’s not hard, but it is kind of technical. You’re going to need your printer’s and your router’s IP Addresses, once you have that, basically you need to open a command line window (just search cmd.exe on Windows) and paste the following command: route add [IP Address of Printer] MASK 255.255.255.255 [IP Address of Home Router]. That will allow you to print on that printer until you restart your computer, if you want to make it permanent you can do the same, but use the command: route -p add [IP Address of Printer] MASK 255.255.255.255 [IP Address of Home Router]. Just make sure that your printer and router always have the same IP address (it probably won’t be a problem with the router, but the printer’s address may change. For more information you can read this.
For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Dave in Wyoming, Michigan listening on 1260 AM asked: “Wondering if I could run a dual OS with “Ubuntu” and Windows 7 without running anti-virus programs.”
It is never a good idea to run any version of Windows without an antivirus program, especially when there are so many good choices that won’t cost you anything at all. (For home users, anyway, many antivirus companies offer free versions.) Microsoft has their own Security Essentials product that is usually ranked in the top two or three programs, and it’s free. Avira, Avast, and AVG all offer excellent free antivirus programs. And that’s just the start of the list.
One product that interests us is Panda Cloud Antivirus. It runs a small client on your computer but connects to the Internet (or “the cloud”) for its maximum detection capability. It’s always up to date, but it requires an active Internet connection for its best protection. It’s also free.
As for Linux, and we’re assuming you mean Ubuntu, you don’t really need an antivirus program. It’s pretty hard to infect a Linux machine and frankly not many people are trying. It’s the same thing with Mac antivirus. It’s not that viruses don’t exist, but the virus authors are going after the bigger, easier target with Windows. That being said, there ARE Linux antivirus solutions, many of them free.
Sophos, AVG, and Kapersky all have Linux versions of their antivirus solutions. So you could protect your Linux partition, if you like, but it’s not really as essential as it is with Windows.
Good luck developing a split personality with your computer! Let us know how it turns out.
For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
iLuv: Several iSP110 Mini Portable Stereo Speakers (in a variety of colors)
Microsoft: Copies of Street & Trips Software with GPS receiver
VSO Software: Copies of Convert-X-to-DVD 4 – Lets you convert videos to DVD and watch on any DVD player.
wEASEL: Several wEASEL Easel Smartphone Stand with Hanging Loop in Black or White