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Tech News & Commentary
Seth in Nashville, Tennessee listening on “Super Talk” WTN 99.7 FM asked: “I’m trying to find a cheap way to get into the iPhone. I don’t have a Smartphone now and I’m looking at Smartphones. I’ve been looking on Craigslist but was wondering if there was a better way of getting one. Also trying to find the best way to get on a plan. I don’t think I can afford an AT&T or a Sprint plan, but was looking at either the AT&T Go Phone plans or the Walmart family talk.”
If you don’t want a contract Seth, there’s no magic way to get a cheap iPhone, just pretty much stick to what you’re doing and add a few other sites that sell used items like eBay and see what’s out there, finding a decent used iPhone will involve the same process that you’d apply to finding a used violin, or a used TV, or a used anything else … just look for them wherever used electronics are sold and try to find one in good shape.
As for cheap plans, most prepaid companies are offering some kind of smartphone plan that you can get for half or less of what conventional plans would cost you, Cricket has plans starting at just $25/month, as long as you’re ok with just 300 minutes and they go as high as $45 a month for 1000 minutes. Virigin has plans ranging from $35/month to $55, which will get you unlimited everything, and Straight Talk has plans ranging from $35/month to $60 a month and will give you discounts if you buy several months in advance.
Your biggest problem will likely be finding the phone, after that you should be able to find plenty of companies willing to provide the service for you for much, much less than AT&T or Sprint.
Also, you might be able to try auction sites, such as Quibids.com, These are penny auctions sites, that give consumers the opportunity to buy expensive electronics at a discounted price. However if you are not familiar with these websites make sure you do your research and understand how they work. If you have more questions, please feel free to call back, and we will be happy to assist you.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Shawn Rogers, Managing Director – Nascar
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
In 1933 at the 10th Funkausstellung, today known as IFA, several companies had already presented TV sets with bigger screens ready for the market, now about the size of a postcard instead of a postage stamp, with 180 lines and 25 frames per second. These receivers were expensive, but the engineer Dr.Walter Bruch from Telefunken developed a small and cheaper unit for the masses, named “Volksempfänger” which is German for “people’s receiver. Two years later in 1935 the first regular TV broadcast in the world started in Berlin, with 90 minutes three times a week.
Dave in Tyrone, Pennsylvania listening on 103.1 WRSC asked: “My children have a Kindle Fire and I was wondering if you could play movies from that on a television.”
It depends on what Kindle Fire you have. If you have the original version, you’re out of luck, the original Kindle Fire was not built with video-out capabilities. If you have a Kindle Fire HD though, not only can you do it, but you can do it very cheaply.
The Kindle Fire HD comes with a mini-HDMI connector, all you have to do is buy a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, which you can find only for next to nothing, plug it into your TV and you’re ready to go.
You should be able to play movies from your Kindle Fire, whether they’re from Netflix, Amazon On-Demand, downloaded movies, YouTube videos or pretty much anything else.
Keep in mind that if you want to sit on the other side of the room with your Kindle Fire and have its display output on your HDTV, you will need a longer HDMI cable. You’ll see a lot of things said about HDMI cable lengths. In our experience, anything under 15 feet rarely, if ever, presents a problem. Beyond that point, you might have trouble, depending on your cable.
There are wireless HDMI extender kits selling for around $200, but we’ve heard mixed things about those. So just give some thought to the distance this cable needs to run and plan accordingly.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Patrick in Nashville, Tennessee listening on Supertalk 99.7 WTN asked: “I love this new option that many of the new routers have that you can plug in a USB device and access it wirelessly. I did that with a small USB drive. I can access the files on the drive but I cannot save to that drive from other wireless devices. I’m wondering if that’s not a feature that you can go both ways with it, or if I’m missing something.”
It all depends on your particular router, but there is typically an option somewhere on the settings that will let you choose whether the drive should be treated as read-only or not, and sometimes even who can write to it.
For example, a router may let anyone on the network access it, but only let users with administrator privileges write to it, or it may not let anyone without a password see any files, let regular users with a password access the files, and only let administrators save files to the drive.
Without knowing what particular brand and model you’re using, we can’t really tell you exactly how to set it up, or whether it’s even possible, but if your router comes with a USB port, there’s almost certainly an option to enable writing on the drive, check your manual if you have one or the settings on the drive. If you don’t, it should be pretty obvious when you see it.
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
HDRadio: FM/HD Insignia Table Top Radios with 10 presets
Covington Creations: Earbud yo-yo — Now with Dave’s face on them! — A clever solution to tangled earbuds.
iolo: Copies of: Drive Scrubber – Erase data so it can NEVER be recovered.
Magix: Music Maker 2013 Premium – Make Music Now! With More Sounds. More Possibilities.