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Tech News & Commentary
Ray in Santa Fe, New Mexico listens on KTRC 1260 asked: “I have a G4 Apple PowerMac and obviously, Apple is not supporting their Tiger OS anymore. I’m trying to figure a way to upgrade without having to sell my car to pay for it. Can you help me out?”
You won’t be able to get a new Mac for cheap, but your easiest option will probably be to look at refurbished computers. This is something we’ve recommended in the past.
Apple sells refurbished products with equal or similar warranties as a new ones, and for a discounted price. We checked their refurbished products page for you and found Macbook Airs from a little over $700, Macbook Pro’s starting at around $900, but it will all depend on when you look.
You can also look at used computers. We’ve found a big inventory of used Macs at TheMacStore.com, but how they were treated is obviously not known and they’re not that much cheaper than refurbished ones, so they may not be worth the trouble.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Funcom, makes of Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, has launched their latest MMORPG, The Secret World. Billed as an open-ended “sandbox” style game with no classes and no leveling, The Secret World proposes to be an entirely different gameplay experience. So is it? I played the second public beta of the game in order to find out.
The first thing you notice is an introductory movie that’s over 8 minutes in length. That’s a LOT for a video game, but it’s very well done and both informative AND cryptic at the same time. After that, you find yourself on the street and your adventure begins.
Let’s start by disabusing some hype here. While it is true that the game does not have “levels” per se, your character does gain experience and periodically earn skill points that can be used to unlock skills on the skill wheel. The game has something around 500 different skills that you can access, but many of them are grouped together and you must unlock the lower skills first to get to the really good stuff. Funcom may not want to CALL that leveling, but simply put an RPG will ALWAYS have levels. You may not be a “level 20 whatever,” but you have earned enough experience to unlock the Uber Spell of Leetness, and you had to unlock three other spells first? That’s leveling.
They also said no classes. Traditional MMORPGs have you choose a character at the beginning and that locks you into certain choices. In Rift, for instance, if I choose to play a mage, I will never be the tank. I can be a damage dealer, even a HEALER, but tanks come from the other three classes (Warriors, Clerics, or Rogues, if you’re curious). Since The Secret World has no other races other than human, you really only choose gender and appearance, and you form your character by choosing the skills you want. But there are still certain skills that lend themselves to taking a pounding and other skills that heal and other skills that do damage. So again, you might not call it a “class,” but you still have a set of skills that define your role. We’d call that a “class” in another MMORPG. It IS true that you’re not locked into a role based on an early character choice, and that’s nice, but at the same time having everyone else in the game playing humans is a little boring.
We’re all human because the game is set in the real world. Something bad has happened, you see, and people are turning into zombies. There are some drow involved, many ugly things that need to be shot, and you’re just the recently super powered person to do it. The familiar settings (New York, London, Tokyo, etc.) are a lot of fun.
Graphics are good, the game runs on the Age of Conan engine, sound is excellent, and the gameplay is fast paced and fun. The game is “story driven” which is gamer-speak for “every time you get a big mission, you’re going to watch a little cut-scene movie.” But unlike other MMOs where the story is all they HAVE (I’m looking at you, Star Wars The Old Republic), The Secret World has a fascinating world to explore. You can spend all your time wandering about, if you like, or you can get involved with missions.
The game isn’t quite as revolutionary as Funcom was hyping it to be, but it’s an MMORPG that doesn’t feel anything at ALL like World of Warcraft. And in my book, that’s a good thing. I’m giving the game 9 out of 10 based on early impressions, but that score might slide if Funcom can’t push out content quickly enough. The game costs $50 to buy and $15 a month to play, and they offer several customization packs that offer you additional perks and goodies. $15, $60, and $200 (that one includes a Secret World leather jacket). That makes The Secret World quite expensive to play, if you want all the fun stuff, but if you’re completely burned out on WoW and games that feel just like WoW, I can promise you The Secret World is different.
That’s your Into Gaming update, I’m Mark Lautenschlager.
Denzel in The Bahamas asked: “What is the best telephone for a blind person? Something I can regularly talk to and have all the apps interact by speaking?”
You won’t find any extremely good solutions. What we mean by that is, you should be able to use a smart phone. The phone will help you find everything on the screen and read it to you, but it won’t be super easy and fast at first.
You won’t be able to use all apps by simply talking to them or having them talk to you. Instead, what you will find will be systems more in line with the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature, where you run your finger through the screen and it will read the text back to you.
iPhones introduced VoiceOver as part of the accessibility revamp that came with the iPhone 3GS, and they quickly became big favorites with people who are blind and those with impaired vision in general (since there were more features than just VoiceOver). What the iPhone is lacking that might be of use to you is a physical keyboard, this is probably far less important now since the iPhone 4S added voice dictation, but you may still consider it a useful feature.
There aren’t many modern Android phones left with physical keyboards either, but you can look at something like the Droid Pro that will give you Android’s version of the VoiceOver which they seem to just call “Text-To-Speech” and a large, comfortable physical keyboard and you will retain the ability to dictate text to your phone if you’d rather do that.
We know there are loyal Into Tomorrow listeners who may be visually-impaired and we’d like to get your input for Denzel. What do you use? Do you prefer the iPhone VoiceOver accessibility features or Android’s Text-to-Speech? Join us via the AskDave Hotline: 800-899-4686.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Amber asked: “I have a Verizon HTC Incredible phone (the original Incredible). Lately, I’ve been having issues about “low space” (which I assume means low memory b/c I have plenty of storage space.) I have tried deleting apps, pics, etc. I even took it to the Verizon store for help. The employee cleared out “data” from apps which I now find myself doing daily. It all seems to have happened since my last system update ( I have Android version 2.3.4). On a regular basis it says that I need another system update, but gets stuck where it says it’s going to reboot and never does. I was reading online about “rooting” your Android phone. Is this option something that might help with my issues? Will it allow me to delete apps that were programmed on my phone when I bought it that I never use? I don’t want to buy a new phone because I have the unlimited data plan through Verizon and don’t want to be forced out of it as they no longer offer it anymore.”
Let us start by offering you another option, it’s not a great option, but you should know it exists: if you upgrade paying full price for the phone, you get to keep your unlimited data, Verizon will only force you onto the new limited plans if you buy a subsidized phone. Now, this is not a fantastic option because you will be paying hundreds for a phone that would otherwise cost you very little money, but you would get to keep your plan.
Now, if that doesn’t work for you and you do want to keep your current phone, yes, rooting will allow you to get rid of apps that you can’t delete now.
What’s happening to you right now is that it’s internal memory is getting full, that’s the reason for the warning and the reason you can’t upgrade your operating system. You can move apps to your memory card either manually or using an app like Apps2SD, and that should help, but it’s not always enough.
Apps don’t just store themselves in the internal memory, they also store information that for whatever reason cannot be in the memory card. This may be for performance purposes, security purposes or just because for the app to function that’s where that data needs to go.
What this means to you, is that even if you move all the apps you can move, you may still run low on space every now and then anyway.
Now, rooting is called rooting because “Root” is the superuser under Unix-based systems, it’s the user that can do absolutely everything so, if you root your phone, you will gain the ability to modify files that would normally be off-limits to the “regular” end user, that include the ability to delete apps that came bundled in with the phone, whether that’s Facebook, or Twitter, or one of the apps most people may have some use for, or those silly “download an overpriced ringtone from us, this totally requires it’s own app”.
There’s one last thing for you to think about, do you reach whatever your data cap would be under the new plans? because, in the real world, you may not have any use for the unlimited plan you have and it may not hurt you to switch to a capped plan.
We should note that if you choose to root your phone, you would be reformatting it and installing new ROMs. This would erase every bit of data presently stored on the phone and that alone will remedy your storage issues, at least for a while. Rooting is not illegal and it will not harm your phone, but it can leave it in an inoperative state, and your wireless provider won’t support it in that case. So rooting your phone is definitely a “proceed at your own risk” enterprise.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guests in this hour:
Sorin Mihailovici, Founder & Developer, Scam Detector App – Scam Detector
How can consumers help other consumers stay away from an online scam? Sorin has developed an app that exposes most fraudulent activities in the world.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
To bring color to the TV, new technologies had to be invented. The German Werner Flechsig in 1938 got a first patent for a stripe mask, separating red, green and blue with filters. That was the basis for color tubes, but it came too early. Nine years later in 1947, after World War 2, RCA developed a first prototype with such a shadow mask, the screen was no bigger than a postcard. In 1954, finally the market started in the United States with a round tube about 22 inches. BBC in the UK and Russian television began trials with color television. IFA was, of course, the showcase for these innovations as well.
Tom in Albuquerque, New Mexico listens to the podcast – calling in via the App asked: “What is Apple’s beef with widgets, the one thing I miss about my old Android phone is the ability to have the little power widget thing that lets you have the ability to to turn off your Bluetooth and wifi and so on. On iOS 5.0 I had the widgets and when 5.1 when came around they’re gone. Is there gonna be an Apple update that’ll let me have my widgets back I don’t have to plow through hundreds and hundreds of menus to get to to my Bluetooth and my WiFi. Maybe the iDork will have something on this one so I can have something like you and the rest of the Android have.”
If you had widgets on iOS 5.0 (other than the weather and stocks widget), your phone must have been jailbroken. Apple has only released pretty lightweight widgets so far for iOS, there are rumors that a music control widget might be coming, which would make sense, and the reason for that is probably battery life.
Android phones tend to have pretty lousy battery life, the iPhone … also has lousy battery life, but not as lousy. One of the reasons for that is probably that running services are kept to a minimum. If you ask someone complaining about their Android’s battery life to shut off every widget and use a static wallpaper, odds are, their battery life will noticeably improve. That’s probably the only reason Apple hasn’t supported widgets and live wallpapers until now.
We suspect that, in time, they will add more widgets to the notification bar and slowly let people get used to the idea that if they want to ruin their own battery life, it’s not Apple’s fault, but that may take a while.
If you don’t mind jailbreaking your iPhone, you can install widgets to the notification bar, including power control widgets but, as we suspect you found out already, if you update the phone the jailbreak will likely go away and you’ll have to start over with all the widget installations again.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Listener Dan asked: “Do you know of a good app that I can use on my iPhone 4 to print to my wireless printer? My printer is probably 5 years old and is an HP 1312nfi multipurpose color laser. I can print from my laptop wirelessly to this printer currently. I love your show.”
To print on a printer that wasn’t designed to work with Apple’s AirPrint, you’re going to need your computer’s help, you’re going to have to set up your computer to share that printer with your iPhone, and then print from the phone through your computer, which means your computer will need to be on for you to be able to print from the phone.
If you happen to have a Mac, there’s a program that makes it pretty easy, it’s called AirPrint Activator and it will allow you to use AirPrint with any printer that’s shared on your Mac. After you install it just use AirPrint on your phone, as if you had an AirPrint compatible printer.
For both Windows and Mac you can use FingerPrint, a program that will also share any printer with your iPhone and make it seem to it that it’s AirPrint compatible, the downside of FingerPrint compared to AirPrint Activator is that it will cost you $10.
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
NQ Mobile: Activation codes for NQ Mobile Vault (Premium Version) — An Android app that keeps your text messages, pictures, and videos safely hidden from prying eyes.
StrikeForce Technologies: Several Download Keys for GuardedID – anti-keylogging software
ZoneAlarm by Check Point Software: Several download keys for ZoneAlarm Extreme Security (antivirus, firewall, spyware protection)