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Tech News & Commentary
Victor in Buffalo, Missouri listens via TuneIn asked us: “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?”
Victor, There is only one GoPro that will record 4K video, the $399 Hero3+ Black Edition, 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.
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Steven in Shelbyville, Tennessee listens on 99.7 WTN sent us the following comment: “I drive over the road and I’ve been wanting to have better internet accessibility, a lot of time mobile webs is not cutting it and I would like to get on video games on line, or start school online, but this would need to be mobile on truck internet ability. Internet that can be accessed from laptops, playstation 3, and mobile phones. I was wondering if you have any suggestions.”
Steven,There are really two options you have for accessing the Internet from a long-distance truck driver position. Obviously, most truck stops now offer high speed Internet access directly to the trucks that park overnight. This is sometimes done through Wi-Fi, but you can also get a wired connection at some locations.
The reason this is significant is that Wi-Fi connections, especially ones that are shared, are usually too high in latency for use with games. A wired connection may still be too slow, depending upon how much bandwidth the truck stop has, but it has at least a fighting chance of being fast enough. In the case of a wired connection at a truck stop, you’d want to have your own wireless router to plug in to it, if you wanted your truck to have its own Wi-Fi hotspot.
But that’s truck stops, not over the road. All of these new car ads you’re seeing with Internet hot spots being offered inside the car are using the standard 3G and 4G LTE connections that smartphones also use. You could purchase a mobile broadband device, such as the Verizon MiFi, which would let you create a hotspot that would work even while the truck was moving.
The problem is signal. Signal is usually good when you’re near a big city and becomes increasingly worse as you move out into the wide open spaces. The car-based systems compensate for this a little bit by having their antennas built in to the body of the car, so they can get the best possible reception. A mobile broadband hotspot like the MiFi might have more issues inside a moving vehicle.
Wireless data plans for these mobile devices vary widely, but you need to keep in mind that if you plan to use this Internet connection like you would broadband at home, playing games and watching movies, you’re going to need a fairly large data pool. And you might be shocked at how much that will cost you.
It sounds like a trip to the local Verizon store might be in order. Good luck! Let us know what you decide to do.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Ricardo Lazzari, VP of Engineering – Bay Audio
we custom design our own components, preferring to engineer precise audio solutions rather than settle for prefab parts that limit our output.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
The IFA in 1979 broke all records: 525 companies from 23 countries showed their products, 630,000 attendees were counted. Video 2000 home video recording was finally introduced with two times four hours recording time, and teletext was demonstrated – most manufacturers displayed TV sets with built in teletext capabilities. Blaupunkt introduced the 100 Hertz technology, doubling the sampling frequency to raise the picture quality
Jim in Baton Rouge, Louisiana listening on 107.3 asked: “I have 2 computers with Windows Xp running and I would like to change to Linux, is that a difficult conversion. Would it erase my hard-drive or will it just erase the operating system part.”
Jim, It certainly isn’t what we’d call an easy conversion, Jim. There are a number of things that you’ll need to decide.
First is, which flavor of Linux do you want? There are quite a few of them. Some are entirely free while others want you to buy them. Even though Linux itself is open source and free, when it’s modified with a custom installer, user interface, and applications bundle (often called a “distro,” or distribution package), the people who’ve put it all together want to charge for their time and expertise. Spending some time with Google searching up the pros and cons of the various distros would be an excellent use of your time at this point.
Now, once you select the Linux variant that you want, you have to install it on your computer. That can go two ways. You can use the Linux installer, at least in the case of most distros that you might pay for, to divide your hard drive space between Linux and Windows. Or, you can let Linux reformat your hard drive, which will of course erase all your old data.
Whichever way you go, you’ll still be running Linux, and that’s a mixed bag. Yes, there’s an app for nearly everything you might want to do, and it competes well with Windows and Mac in that way, BUT the app will never be the same ones you’re used to from Windows XP. And that means you’ll have to re-learn your programs and there is no guarantee that Linux apps you find will open your old documents from your Windows XP apps.
If all you want to do is pop in an installation DVD and have Linux erase what’s on your computer and start fresh, then getting one of the commercial distros with a good installer is all you need. It will really go very smoothly for you and you don’t need to be very tech savvy to make it work. You WILL, however, wind up with a computer that doesn’t work the way it always has, and you’ll need to track down replacement apps for everything you used to do, with no guarantee that you’ll like them any better, or even as much.
However, IF you want the dual boot option, then your life is going to get more complicated, and you should have the assistance of someone who’s familiar with Linux and dual-booting it with Windows. We hope that’s answered your question. Thanks for calling!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Christopher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana listening on 107.3 asked: “I’m looking for a peice of software for my computer similar to Print Shop, not PhotoShop. I’m wondering if there is anything that is similar now that it is no longer avaliable. It was so easy to use and it did almost everything that photshop did, it was a lot easier and cheaper.”
Christopher, We should first mention that The Print Shop is still available for purchase. It hasn’t been updated since 2010, but it’s still current software and it’s being actively sold.
If you still want a different program, Scribus is open source, free, and let you design media for print like The Print Shop does, so it might meet your needs. Microsoft also offers Publisher as an easy to use program with a lot of features that match the ones in The Print Shop.
LibreOffice comes with a program called Draw that offers some basic image manipulation, it’s free and nowhere near as complex as Photoshop, so it may be an option for you.
For working with photos, doing things like cropping, resizing, touching up, and making collages and other projects, we often recommend PhotoScape. PhotoScape is a free program available for both Windows and Mac. It won’t make birthday cards like Print Shop will, but it will help you label and fix up your photos much easier and with less cost than Photoshop. You can get it at photoscape.org.
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
Hydreon:Fake TV – Burglary Deterrent Device
iolo: Copies of System Mechanic – Tune-up your PC to increase performance and reliability.
Tylt: ALIN Screen Protectors for the iPad Air
“Into Tomorrow”: Microfiber Screen Cleaning Cloths with Dave’s cartoon on them, for all your smartphones, tablets, TVs, camera lenses and computer screens!