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Tech News & Commentary
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Gary in Jefferson City, New Jersey listens to the podcasts asked: “I have a 2006 Saturn Vue which had the radio replaced by the dealer before I bought the car, so it’s not an aftermarket radio. It was installed by the dealership. I signed up for SiriusXM radio and though they have sent three refresh signals, the radio still won’t work. The radio display shows “Theft Locked”. Tech support had no answer and I should take it to the dealer. When I took it to the dealer, they said they didn’t really know what to do but would try. They said they would charge me $49 but they couldn’t guarantee that they could fix the problem. What do I do? Do I accept the issue and buy a portable SiriusXM radio and give up on the radio in the car. I want to know what you all think about the problem and what a solution might be.”
Gary, There’s actually a GM service bulletin out for Saturn Vues and Ions about the problem you’re facing.
The fix seems to involve first installing a software update to 25.002, then after that going through the process of teaching the radio the VIN number it belongs to.
There’s a good chance you will need the dealership to do it, one way or another, but let them know to look for a service bulletin regarding the issue, it may be affecting your car, and if that’s the case, the instructions to make the radio work should be spelled out there.
If your car is not affected, normally the process of unlocking the radio would involve going through its menus and typing in the VIN number it’s tied to, if it’s a legitimately purchased radio tied to your car, that VIN number should be your car’s VIN number, but both SiriusXM and your dealership should know that, so it’s likely that your car is facing the problem addressed by the service bulletin.
We should mention that some SiriusXM radios are tied to one VIN number for life, so if this radio used to be in another car, you may not be able to change the VIN number it needs to be unlocked.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Cliff in Chattanooga, Tennessee listens via the App asked: “What contacts program/app do you recommend that works with most emails, outlook and social media. Thanks for the advice. Right now I’m using “contacts+” it seems to work well except I don’t see how to get it on my laptop as well.”
Believe it or not Cliff, This is actually a pretty tough question, there aren’t many products that meet your requirements.
The best mix we have been able to find would be to continue using Contacts+ on your phone, and to use Apowersoft’s Android Manager on your computer.
Android Manager, allows you to sync contacts with Outlook and manage your phone’s contacts from your computer.
Between both of those, you should be able to get what you want, but unfortunately, unless you can do it through an email provider (and all of the major free ones will let you sync contacts), you won’t find a much easier way to keep everything synced.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Chris in Baton Rouge, Louisiana listening on Talk 107.3 WBRP asked: “I just got a new Nokia Lumia smart phone, I’m upgrading from a very old plain vanilla phone from AT&T. I would like to hook it up the car so that I can use my bluetooth capability so I can listen to my incoming call and then maybe have some kind of gadget that go on my dashboard so I can use the telephone as the microphone, that way I can have two way conversations. I’m wondering what would be the best way to do this? What are some good cases I could use for this phone?”
You may run into a little bit of trouble sending phone calls over Bluetooth to a car radio that doesn’t support phone calls. The Bluetooth standard is kind of smart about things like that and your phone may know that it’s talking to a radio and refuse to send it’s phone calls to it.
You may read somewhere that your phone has something called A2DP, that means Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, and it takes care of distributing audio in ways that “make sense.”
Your phone may talk to your car radio and say “do you have a microphone? No? OK, then you’re just a fancy set of speakers that just happen to be on wheels, you’re for music, not phone calls,” A2DP reduces every device to “a set of speakers” or “a headset with a microphone,” you’re one or you’re the other.
You can look for other solutions to use your phone in the car though, for $20 you can find several different kinds of hands free bluetooth solutions that plug into a 12V port. The will just work as stand-alone devices and not as part of your radio.
As for cases, your best bet is probably to look online if you want variety, but generally speaking you should have no trouble finding one that you like. There are leather cases, rubber cases, causes with belt clips, artsy cases, solid colored cases, cases with kickstands, rugged cases in case you drop the phone, there are plenty of options, but they’re mostly online.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Marc Goodman, FBI Futurist-in-Residence, Interpol Cyber Crimes Expert & author of FUTURE CRIMES – FBI, Interpol
Intersection of science & security, uncovering nascent threats and combating the darker sides of technology
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
In 1936 at the Olympic Games in Berlin, the first electronic camera was tested, named “television cannon”. The lens alone weight about 100 pounds, and the whole camera was 2 ½ yards long. The images were received in 28 “television parlors”. As this was deemed insufficient, another technology during the games saw a world’s first: the projection onto big screens. Two halls were equipped with TV projection. More than 100.000 people watched the Olympics on the big screens, and another 50.000 in the TV parlors.
Sharon in Kansas City, Missouri listens to the podcast asked: “I’m thinking of changing my hard drive to an SSD. A friend of mine told me that you cannot write to an SSD, you can only read and that if you try to write more than three times, it would quit working. I wanted to know if that was true and if it would be a good idea to switch to a solid state drive.”
Sharon, we’re afraid to say that your friend is unbelievably wrong… like “summer is the coldest season” levels of wrong.
SSDs are more taxed by writing than by reading, and they have a finite number of write cycles, which really doesn’t change much, considering that HDD don’t last forever either.
Now, modern drives are rated differently, but think 20TB as a reasonable official limit… TechReport.com tested 5 drives rated at around 20TB of data, they calculated that the average endurance between the drives should make it possible to write 20 to 40 GB of data a day for the entire life of the warranty of each of the drives.
After that they ran an endurance test, none of the drives failed until they were between 600 TB and 1Petabyte of data written, and the sturdiest only died after going over 2PB of data written.
2PB is roughly the equivalent of downloading all of Wikipedia 9,524 times… that’s a little more than 3 writes.
writes would mean that you can’t even install the operating system. Even overwriting the whole drive 3 times wouldn’t make much sense, it’s not a lot of data. SSD drives are in a lot of consumer electronics devices and pretty much every consumer electronic device this day either stores data periodically or gets updated sometimes… writing is a must.
Now that we’ve corrected your friend, yes, switching to an SSD is probably a very good idea, an older computer with a new SSD feels like a new computer, you will absolutely notice the difference, it will be something like having replaced the hard drive and having gotten new RAM at once.
For what it’s worth, traditional rotating magnetic hard drives also have limits to how much they can be used. While the number of read/write cycles on a hard drive does exceed an SSD, even though an SSD is plenty long as we just explained, hard drives will eventually wear out also. Everything made by man eventually wears out and fails.
But it takes long enough to wear out an SSD that we don’t even think twice about recommending them. Many of us here have computers using SSDs now, and we endorse them heartily. You will love yours!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Victor in Buffalo, Missouri listens via TuneIn asked: “Hello Dave, I’m soon going to have a Go Pro camera, thats suppose to be plus 3, so I know they don’t come with micro SD card? Help? I looked online for something. They have HD, Ultra HD, faster, better gooder. What do I actually need for a Go Pro that can record in 4k?”
There are a couple of GoPro cameras that will record 4K video at the monent, starting with the $499 Hero4 Black. The Hero3+ Silver won’t work, it has to be the Black Edition.
If you buy that camera you will have to buy the SD card, but other than that you don’t need anything else. The camera will come with it’s own case and whatever else you decide to get will hinge more on your intended use than anything else.
You can get an external screen, or an external battery pack, or one of the many mounts that they offer, but all of it is optional and you don’t need any of it to use the camera.
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
TYLT: Car Charger RIBBN Cables – These cables rapidly charge 2 Smartphones or 2 Tablets simultaneously.
Jabra: SoleMate Portable Bluetooth speaker for your laptop, tablet, smartphone or music player
Monster: DNA Pro 2.0 High powered Over-ear headphones
Livio Radio: Bluetooth Internet Radio Car Kit – FM transmitter that allows you to bring Internet Radio and hands-free calling to your car.
Verykool: S5015 Spark II Smartphone – Unlocked GSM phone with Android OS and front facing flash – perfect for selfies!
Westinghouse: Unplug Wireless Bluetooth Sound System