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Tech News & Commentary
Hank in Orlando, Florida listens asked: “What is one of the best external hard drives to use for a Mac? Is there a difference between a PC hard drive and a Mac hard drive?”
Generally speaking, any hard drive will work with both PCs and Macs without you having to do anything, the few that do require you to do something, just require a reformat and after that they will work with your computer whatever kind it happens to be.
Avoid NTFS drives, NTFS is not supported straight out of the box by Mac OS X (though there is software to enable NTFS support).
If you want a drive that comes pre-formatted for Mac only, you can get a Hitachi G-Drive. They will not work with PCs unless you format them, but they will work with Macs out of the box.
Just about any drive you buy, will work with both straight out of the box and you won’t have to do anything to it other than plugging it into your computer.
There are some advantages associated with using a Mac formatted external drive if you have an Apple computer, there’s a slight increase in speed, but you won’t really notice it, it can handle far bigger files and volumes than FAT32 can, but the most important advantage is the journaling.
Journaling gives Mac formatted drives a better chance to survive events like sudden loss of power, or an accidental disconnection without suffering from data corruption. Having said that, unless you’re working with really big files or really big drives, you won’t have trouble using a FAT32 drive.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Gilbert in Lake Forrest, Illinois listening on the Into Tomorrow app asked: “Hey Dave, I took a photography class in school, and I love it! I want to get started on my own now, but i only have 150 dollars to spend, can that get me anything worthy while to start off with? If so what do you recommend?”
This is a god question, you can find a number of good cameras in your price range, these cameras are like many compact cameras you find just to take family pictures and what not, but can have many of the features you are looking for.
Now in the case of photography you really want to get into the DSLR family, these cameras are going to give you the ability to create the pictures you want. It’s all in the lens!!! With DSLR you get a much higher quality lens in which you can then truly, not digitally, manipulate the light, focus and all the other things you need to in order to get the shot you want.
When it comes to DSLRS the price is unfortunately out of your range. Now you can grab your self a Canon power shot, or Nikon Coolpix camera and with the wide variety of features they bring you can definitely get started in pursing your photography dreams. The other option is to save your money until you afford to buy your self one of these nice shiney DSLR cameras we mention and you can go off and running that way. Which ever as long as you follow your passion you should have no problem.
Andrew “the intern” suggests that you might also be able to look into buying a used DSLR camera. Many photographers use the latest and greatest in camera and often leave there old cameras to storage. If you’re lucky, you might be able to find it cheap online or maybe at your local photography studio (just remember used products may break on you and may not have warranty to fix it). but at the vary least it doesn’t hurt to look or ask around. Maybe you can get more tips or information on the subject by looking around and talking to people. You never know…
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guest in this hour:
Alok Ranjan, Founder – ifood.tv
Do you love to cook and want some new recipes? Alok has founded a website that may help you and can be accessed anywhere for free.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
In 1919 the Hungarian physicist Denes von Mihaly presented “Telehor”, the first functioning television set with which he was able to transmit simple shadow pictures via cable. Mihaly later moved to Berlin in Germany and founded his own laboratory. In 1923 he received a German patent for a technology to sample every pixel of an image ten times per second. One year later, the year the IFA was founded, another patented system by Max Dieckmann “to make moving images visible in a distance” was publicly shown.
Don in Boston Valley, New York listens online asked: “I have a Kindle Fire and I was using it for about a month to play chess on a site called chessworld.net. For some reason, all of a sudden I got locked out and I can’t use it anymore. But I can use the site on the computer. I’ve lost my ability to get on the site with my Kindle Fire. It tells me that my username and password are not correct.”
Your Kindle Fire didn’t change, so odds are what changed was something in the way the website handles logins, you can email the webmaster and see if they’re willing to fix it, but a better option might be for you to just find an alternative that will always work with the Kindle Fire.
Chesspresso, for example, is a paid app for the Fire, it costs $3.99, it lets you play against opponents from all over the world. Chess Free is, obviously, free, it will let you play against the computer or against a second player.
Chess Grandmaster will let you play online or offline and it won’t cost you any money either.
Any of those are made for the Kindle Fire, so they should continue to work with it and you shouldn’t lose access to the games you’re playing, , they’re all available on Amazon, and they also all feature user interfaces that look similar to ChessWorld.net.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Ron asked: “How do I determine if my computer can run the 64 bit version of Windows 7 as opposed to the 32 bit version? I am running a Quad 9550 CPU with Windows XP 32 bit version.”
The first problem you’re going to face is: Microsoft won’t let you directly upgrade from a 32-bit version of Windows to a 64 bit version. If your computer has a 64-bit chip, you should still be able to run a 64-bit edition of Windows, but you will need to perform a clean installation, which will wipe your files, so be sure to back everything up first.
The easiest way to know if your computer can run a 64-bit version of Windows 7 is to go to the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Page.
You may want to check in to what is called an “OEM” or “System Builder” license to Windows 7. Last time we checked, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium could be purchased for $99 in this version. That’s upgrade price territory, for sure! Now, you do give up Microsoft tech support for that price, you’ll be entirely on your own if problems crop up, but let’s be serious here — how many times has Microsoft actually helped a consumer get Windows working on their PC? You’re better off calling a geek friend, or asking US, when a problem crops up.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Glen in Bowling Green, Kentucky asked: “Are there viruses that attack iPhones? what about the phones that use the Android market or whatever? Is there antivirus for them?”
There’s not much malware for iPhones or Android phones that you really have to worry about these days, Glen.
There are antiviruses for Android, not for iOS, but the truth is that both iOS and Android isolate their apps in a way that a malicious app cannot infect another app, so antivirus scans are less important than they are on computers, it’s not about finding every file that’s infected, but about finding the one app that may have malicious intent.
So far there aren’t any huge threats for you to worry about, just read reviews, make sure the app doesn’t seem to be causing trouble for anyone else and you should be fine.
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
Blue Microphones: Yeti Pro — A professional USB and XLR microphone. Great for podcast recordings!
Kingston: 16GB SD memory cards and a 64GB Wi-Drive
Radio Shack: Enercell Universal Portable Power chargers
ZoneAlarm (Check Point Software): Download keys for ZoneAlarm Extreme Security