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Tech News & Commentary
Steve in Chena, Alaska and listening via 700AM KBYR Alaska Talk Here asked: “I wondering if anyone makes a DVR for Radio, say you wanted to listen to your show but were too busy at the time and didn’t get the chance. I know there’s podcast. It would be cool to have a DVR or DRR to record your shows.”
There aren’t lots of options for radio-DVRs, but not too long ago a service called DAR.fm (Digital Audio Recorder) was launched.
The service lets you record your favorite talk shows and your favorite music, and as long as you don’t want to record more than one show at a time, you can use the basic tier for free.
DAR.fm works with computers, Android and iPhone, the pro accounts range from $50 a year to about $250 a year.
If you’re interested in hardware instead, Sansa has a line of MP3 players that can record FM radio, but they won’t give you access to a programming guide or let you set them to record a specific show every day or every week, they just record when you press record.
And we would be remiss if we didn’t note that one of our favorite radio apps for iOS and Android, TuneIn Radio, supports recording your favorite shows in its Pro version. The free standard version does not, but if you pay the $6.99 for the Pro version, you can record any radio station they stream.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Consumer Reports Feature With Jim Willcox
With Sony and Panasonic now touting new TVs with HDMI 2.0 connections, you may be wondering, “What the heck is HDMI 2.0, and why should I care about it?” Consumer Reports Senior Editor Jim Willcox is here with some answers.
The “Into Tomorrow” team discussed the latest apps that they have been playing with recently.
• Dave recommends: iBiquity, FREE
- “iBiquity now has its first “HD Radio Guide” App for iOS and Android. The app is pretty cool – it knows where you are, so it can offer a menu of available HD Radio stations and signals. The station guide “also allows users to connect instantly with their favorite stations through SMS, phone and social media networks” – and one section of the app shows you the various models of HD Radio receivers available for sale.”
• Mark recommends: Meeting Pad, $4.99
- “The app I’m featuring this week is called Meeting Pad and it’s designed for the Apple iPad. It’s not a free app, it costs $4.99, but it is well worth that price. Meeting Pad is for taking notes at meetings. It lets you tag attendees from your Contacts, or add additional people. You can even enter a seating chart, to track people by where they are sitting. You can take notes both by typing (a bluetooth keyboard helps tons here) and recording audio. A very slick feature ties the notes you enter to the audio being recorded. That way, after a meeting, if you don’t understand your notes, a simple tap will play the audio that was recorded at the time you entered the note. Very cool. When the meeting is over, you can email the notes to the attendees with a single button tap before you pack up your iPad. Meeting Pad is $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.” — Mark
• Chris recommends: The Weather Channel For Windows 8, FREE
- “The Weather Channel for Windows 8 provides you with weather information, along with personalized interactive maps. With over 200 meteorologists and, our ultra-local TruPoint(sm) forecasting technology, we provide you with information you need to plan the best day possible.”
What are your favorite Apps? Let us know at 800-899-INTO and we’ll feature them in this segment!
- Tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast for more details
Guest Segment:
Peter Gerstberger, Senior Category Merchant – Staples
Tim in West Lafayette, Indiana and listening via iPhone 5 Tune-In Radio App calling in from the app asks us: “I’m a legally blind developer using Windows 7 64 bit OS and my magnification software called Zoomtext by AI Square which lets me magnify my screen. Is there a way to develop an HTML5 for the ios? If so where can i find this and how much will it cost me?”
HTML5 is the upcoming version of the HTML standard, but it’s not fully finished yet and no browser offers complete support, including Safari for iOS, but all tend to offer at least some kind support.
If you want to develop HTML5 sites for iOS, you can do it for free, you just need to host the pages somewhere but, technically, you can create HTML5 files with just any text editor, so you don’t need any kind of expensive software.
iOS supports a reasonable set of HTML5 features, and you can find what it does and does not support at MobileHTML5.org.
The biggest difference between Flash, the previous web application king, and HTML5 is that Flash sent an app to your computer, which then ran on your computer, using the Flash plugin. There were constant security holes discovered in Flash and since you were inviting a program to run on your computer, many unfortunate cases of malicious software were delivered through a rogue Flash app.
HTML5 gives websites the tools they need to create user interfaces and store data on the local computer, but without sending any program to it. Browsers that support HTML5 have all these things built in to them. So the web developer can write apps in the development platform of their choice, running entirely on the web server, that simply use the browser on your computer as the screen and keyboard, which is how it should be. It’s faster, in most cases, and more secure, in all cases.
But this is a big, complicated question you ask. How do you learn to code for HTML5? For an online resource, you could try the HTML5 course at Lynda.com. But there are a fairly large number of places to learn HTML5 programming. Which one you find works for you is likely to be individual preference. Googling “learning HTML5 coding” is a good place to start.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Kent in Madison, Tennessee and listening via SuperTalk 99.7 WTN calling in asked us: “Never have been able to connect iPhone 4S to WiFi on home Win8 machine. Works fine at Mex place or donut place.”
If you can connect to other networks but not the one at home, the problem is almost certainly with your home network.
The first thing you should try is the mandatory unplugging and plugging back in of your router, since that fixes a lot of these types of problems.
If that doesn’t fix the issue, can other people connect to your router? If they can, then you may need to reset your phone’s network settings, since something may have gone wrong.
Resetting your iPhone’s network settings, will get rid of all your saved WiFi information, so if you have passwords saved for other networks like the mexican place or the donut place, you will have to reenter them.
You say you can’t connect to the Windows 8 MACHINE at home. You didn’t say to your home network. Are you trying to connect to a wireless router, or are you trying to connect to a computer that is configured to provide a hotspot? Because these two things are markedly different.
Generally speaking, though, when someone tells us they can’t get an iPhone to connect with a wireless network, 99.5% of the time it comes down to them either not knowing the security code or not being able to get it successfully typed in on the phone’s onscreen keyboard.
Chances are these other networks, at restaurants for example, are running open networks for their customers to use. No security code is needed.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
John in Decatur Alabama and listening via Online calling in asked us: “I’m having problems with Adobe Reader; it keeps going into default. it’ll work for a couple days, I get done messing’ with it, update it, a couple of days later it won’t open again.”
It’s hard to tell why exactly it’s not opening without knowing more, but you should consider running a virus scan. If the message you’re getting is “Acrobat Failed To Load core DLL”, it may be a known virus that disables Acrobat Reader.
Kaspersky in particular has a tool recommended by Adobe to remove that particular virus.
You may also be running to a registry issue, you may want to run a registry cleaner such as CCleaner and see if that helps, registry problems seem to be a common issue with Adobe software, so have a look at that.
You should try doing a complete uninstall of Adobe Acrobat Reader from your computer and then downloading and installing a fresh copy directly from the Adobe website.
If that doesn’t solve your problem, you could always look at using an alternative PDF viewer. There are scads of them. The PDF-XChange Viewer is one we’ve used and recommend. The basic functions are free, but if you register the program it will do some things Adobe’s reader does not, such as capturing pages as graphic images, which is excellent for making document thumbnails on a website, for instance.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Dave Cicirelli: Copies of his book – “Fakebook” – exploring our cultural obsession with social media. It’s a true story, based on actual lies.
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.