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Tech News & Commentary
James in Erie, Pennsylvania listens on 1450 WPSE asked: “I play the tumpet and I played the National Anthem at a minor league baseball game. They sent me a copy of it, but it’s in a VOB format. I cannot get that into any of my systems. I cannot translate that into an MP4 format, for example, so I can edit it in Audacity. I have Windows 7. There’s so many so called “Free downloads” online, but as soon as you start to do something, you have to pay something to get a program to do this. If you can help me, I’d be very grateful and I’ll even let you hear the National Anthem if you’d like.”
If you want to convert VOB to MP4 using an actually free tool, you can try WinFF. It’s free and it’ll let you convert the video in a very simple way, you basically just select it and choose MP4 as your format and either “widescreen” or “fullscreen” and it will take care of the rest.
You can also try Any Video Converter, it has several paid versions, but you should be able to use the free version to convert VOB to MP4 as well.
If you’re not interested in converting the video, but you’d be happy with just being able to watch it, VLC Player will play VOB files and you can download it for free.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Craig in Moreno Valley, California asked: “Hi Dave, I’ve been listening for about four months now, love you guys’ show. I called last time and asked about the battery life of an iPhone. I was thinking about changing from Android, no way … I’m not gonna do that, I’m an Android. This week I’d like to know about SSD drives. I have an old Dell computer that’s about 4 years old and everything works, but I think I’d like to pep it up with an SSD drive. Just worried about reliability of those things these days. They are pretty expensive still, so I was wondering what you guys think about that.”
SSD drives are proving to be just as reliable as regular hard drives, which is a good thing given how much they cost. I’m using a brand new S-series Sony Vaio Laptop with SSD and I love it! There are some good news and bad news about your 4-year old Dell, however. And it has to do with the SATA interface that connects your hard drive to the computer’s main board.
The good news is, that machine only has a 3 gigabit-per-second SATA interface. This means you can use the less expensive drives from companies like Intel and Crucial, who sell a 120GB SSD for $240 and $220, respectively. That’s a bit cheaper than the top of the line models.
And that brings us to the bad news. Well, maybe it’s good news of a sort. You see, the fastest SSDs on the market right now are the OCZ Technology Vertex 3 models, but you really need a modern 6 gigabit-per-second SATA interface to take advantage of the drive’s speed. That’s bad, for older computers. What’s GOOD, though, is that the 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD is only about $280. So while you could save money NOW by purchasing the cheaper and slower drives, and not notice it, you could also spent just a few dollars more and get the fastest drive, making your SSD better if you should upgrade your computer in the future.
Of course, as with any technology, if you wait a couple more years, they’ll have something completely new available, and you’d probably want that anyway. But we commend you on your choice to buy an SSD. It will make a gigantic speed boost for your computer. You’ll love it.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
CTIA Wireless Reports…
| HOUR 3 GUESTS | ||
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| Patrick Serrato, Product Marketing Manager, Home Entertainment Group – SRS Labs | Alan Wallace, Senior Global PR Manager – Trend Micro | |
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| The back of Intel’s newAndroid smartphone |
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
Transmitting pictures is a very old dream of engineers. Already in 1883, Paul Nipkow, a German engineer, developed the basic idea of a disc with tiny holes which could break a picture into several pieces. The Nipkow disc, patented in 1884, became the basis of all future television technologies. In 1897 the German engineer Ferdinand Braun invented the cathode ray tube. He had no idea that he had created the basis of a future mass medium. Hundreds of millions of these tubes, CRT in short, became the core display of television sets for about a hundred years and was the star of IFA for decades.
Craig in Fairbanks, Alaska listening on KFBX 970 AM asked: “Will speech recognition software work with my speech impediment?”
It depends on how severe your speech impediment is, but generally it will.
Speech recognition software doesn’t really just work right out of the box, instead it uses a type of artificial intelligence called “neural networks” that learns from the user, if your speech impediment is mild enough that you always pronounce words the same way (even if they’re not the exact same way other people would) you should be ok.
If you think about it people from Georgia don’t sound the same as people from Wisconsin, and people from Hawaii don’t sound the same as people from Boston, and that’s just sticking to accents within this one country, but speech recognition companies usually sell their software not only all across the country but to many other countries too. If people can understand you when you speak, then the software probably will too, after you train it.
We have to stress training, don’t be discouraged if you install the software, read Shakespeare to it and it starts typing a recipe for banana bread, it happens to everyone, you have to train the software to get it to work reliably.
The training usually involves the software displaying text and you reading it back into a microphone so it can see how you pronounce different words and it’s a process that will take hours to fully complete.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Brett in Greenbush, Wisconsin listening on WOSH 1490 AM asked: “Rather than throwing away my old serial plug scanner, creating more ewaste, is there a plug or adapter of some kind, to plug it into a USB port? Is it worth the cost? Thanks!”
It depends on how much your willing to spend. We looked online and found several adaptors that could work for you and they all ranged from 10-20 dollars. Which compared to the price of a new scanner is well worth looking into.
Cables do affect the the scanner and how it works. A cheap cable may end up breaking early, or giving you longer scan times; So make sure you are looking at the reviews for the cables so you get something that will not hinder the performance of your scanner.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Amber in North Pole, Alaska asked: “I am trying to find out how a laptop can communicate wirelessly. Because after I got a virus, I got a $400 internet bill even though I only connected to the Internet for five minutes that whole month. The tech found the file that proved I was only on that long. And somehow I still got a $400 bill. And the Internet said it was “turned off” on the computer. Wondering if Laptops can dial, like a cell phone can dial, and connect that way, because it was not connected to the wall. It was a wireless connection.”
How do you pay for internet? If you have a dial-up connection something needs to be connected to the phone line, your computer can’t dial it wirelessly unless your modem allows it, but it’s unlikely you even have a separate modem for a dial up connection.
If you get charged by the data transferred, then it is possible that the virus was transferring the data wirelessly, but only if you have WiFi at home.
It’s hard to say exactly what could’ve happened without knowing how you connect to the internet, but we’d suggest talking to your internet provider, this sounds more like it may have been a billing error than a problem related to the virus, $400 is a lot of money and if you normally have to plug in your computer to connect to the internet there’s little chance that this virus managed to get around that unless you have a wireless network you don’t know about.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
| New Orleans Candids | ||
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| Canal Street in New Orleans | Dave & Rob on Bourbon Street | |
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| Dave & Rob having dinner with their friends Jens & Dirk from IFA | Dave testing out his “bionic”shoulder post-surgery | Bourbon Street at Night |
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Creative: Live! Cam Connect HD — Webcam that records 720p video
Planon System Solutions: A couple of SlimScan SS100 Credit Card Sized Scanners
Scott Steinberg: Copies of his new book “The Modern Parent’s Guide to Kids and Video Games”