HOUR 3:
Tech News & Commentary
Gary in Jefferson City, Missouri listens via Podcast and asked: “I am responsible for digitizing the family photos that have been taken over the last 70 years. Recognizing that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life and are only gonna last for so long. How do I ensure that the photos will be available to future generations. It seems like even hard drives have a life expectancy. How can I be assured that these photographs can me maintained for the generations to come?”
What you’re looking for is redundancy, a hard drive may die unexpectedly, but if you copy the files to three of them, one will probably survive long enough for you to make a new copy.
CDs and DVDs do have a shelf life, but good quality disks supposedly have a shelf life in the decades (not that you’re likely to find an optical drive in a few decades), you could try to buy expensive media meant to last.
The other obvious option is the cloud, storing your images on third party servers that are constantly and automatically backed up may be a good choice.
Your best bet is to rely on no one thing, the good thing about digital media is that making copies is quick and inexpensive, so make them… a lot of them… odds are if you lose one set you’ll have another working set and you can use it to replace the lost copies, that way your odds of losing your precious memories will be minimized.
If you are going to store your digital pictures on hard drives, you may want to consider setting up a RAID storage system. You can set up RAID in a computer or you can buy an external network drive enclosure that will give you a RAID array. You’ll want RAID 1 or 5, not RAID 0, as RAID 0 is strictly performance and provides no redundancy to protect against drive failure.
Reliable hard drives combined with multiple backups using multiple technologies, and you should be safe from everything…except perhaps human error. Good luck! Good time for our regular weekly reminder … ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Jack in Los Alamos, New Mexico listens on KTRC and asked: “I’ve been very intrigued by the Apple Siri application and wondered if there is anything similar that would work on my Windows PC or laptop”
You won’t find anything quite like Siri for now. There are rumors about Siri being ported to Mac OS X soon, thought that’s not for sure yet, and considering Siri needs an internet connection to work, Apple may not want to offer it on a device that isn’t necessarily connected 24/7.
You asked about Windows. Windows does have built in speech recognition, but it doesn’t not interpret natural speech patterns the way Siri does, it just knows a series of commands and listens for them, it may come in handy every once in a while, but it’s much more similar to Android’s speech recognition than it is like Siri.
There is plenty of software that will allow you to dictate text to you computer, some of the programs are more reliable than others, but those programs will typically let you do little more than dictate.
If Siri proves popular in the long run, it’s likely that solutions like it will be integrated into computer operating systems, but for now you don’t have anything that’s really like it available to use.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guest in this hour:
Robert Siciliano, McAfee Online Security Expert – McAfee
So you find that brand new tablet under your Christmas tree and you immediately start downloading and doing everything you can with it … but wait! Are you doing it all safely?
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
At the International Funkausstellung 1989, known worldwide as IFA, Thomson had a 10.000 square foot booth to demonstrate future technologies and presented there, the first prototype of a CD recorder named MOD, Magneto Optical Disc. With MOD, developed in Germany, for the first time it was possible to record on a CD, using phase shift technology. At the same IFA show, LaserVision video discs by Philips had their world premiere and were first introduced to the US market soon after as a test market.
Howard in Vicksburg, Mississippi asked: “My question regards Ooma’s VoIP. I am confronted by a constellation of Ooma products with no clear guidelines of which ones are appropriate for my needs. I would like a phone system that allowed at least two lines with separate phone numbers, with one of these allowing for attachment of a fax for both outgoing and incoming messages. I would also like to ‘port’ my main number, and if possible operate the fax through the second number. If I do away with all of my land lines, are there any options for reliably coordinating the alarm system with VoIP (cellular may be one, but the system becomes less stable, I am told)? My current alarm system is the: Z1100 by Moose Products, Inc.”
From Jim Gustke at Ooma: “As far as I can tell from the email, all he would need is the Telo, with Premier service for the second line. The Telo Handset is optional. Porting an existing number is $39.99, or free when purchasing annual Premier service. For the alarm, I would recommend keeping the traditional land line with no long distance or other calling features. Hope that helps.”
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Ray in Varilla, Kentucky listening on WLRC asked: “I have an HTC Inspire 4G phone on AT&T. I noticed like the Fox News Application needs root access in order to work correctly. I wonder if I should bother unlocking my phone or look for a different app. I didn’t know what the risk was.”
The Fox News app available on the Android Market doesn’t require root access to work, are you sure you’re downloading the official one?
We’ve tried the app in our studios on non-rooted Android phones and it seems to work just fine. In fact, Horacio tried it on several Android phones and they all worked.
If you come by our website we’ll link you to the official version on the market, if you download that one you should be able to use it without needing to root your phone.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Moe in Saudi Arabia listening on the Armed Forces Network asked: “Is there an office application in Android that has the same usability experience as the iWorks and the slate office lite edition?”
You won’t find the exact iWork experience on Android, but you will find very useful office apps. iWork’s Pages, for example, isn’t just a word processor, a lot of it revolves about the design of its templates, that’s the kind of thing you won’t easily find on Android apps.
If what you’re looking for is an easy way to edit documents, you do have options and you also have options that, like iWork, will sync to the cloud.
The first one we should mention is the one we use, Google Docs, there’s an Android app for it, and it let you access your documents on Google’s servers.
If you want a more traditional office application you can try Documents To Go or Quickoffice, the will both handle all the usual file types if you work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but they will cost you some money … Documents To Go is $14.99 and Quickoffice sells for $9.99, but there’s a trial version if you want to see how you like it first.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Jesse in Baton Rouge, Louisiana listening on 107.3 WBRP asked: “I have an old RCA 32-inch CRT television and I was wondering if there was a way to hookup my new Toshiba laptop to it. Maybe an adapter to go to the red, yellow and white plugs.”
Yes, there is. (Assuming your laptop has a VGA output. Most of them do.) All you need is to pick up an adapter to go from the VGA connector on your laptop to the composite video signal on your TV. These are very inexpensive. You can find them for about ten bucks.
If your laptop is one of the fancy dancy ones, with HDMI output, it’s still possible, but it gets a little more expensive, since rather than buying just a cable, you have to buy a box that will convert it to an analog signal.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
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This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Boingo: Two months of FREE Boingo WiFi Service available at hundreds of thousands of hotspots worldwide
Dane-Elec: Marvel Classic Heroes 4GB USB Drives – Spiderman, Iron Man & Wolverine
Solar Components: Several JOOS Orange Portable Solar Chargers – Designed to charge all personal electronic devices (cell phones, smart phones, MP3 players, GPS devices, portable game devices and more)