HOUR 3:
Tech News & Commentary
Shelley in Jefferson City, Missouri listening on KLIV 1240 AM asked: “I was trying to download a couple of pictures that a family member emailed to me and when I couldn’t open them, I accidentally deleted my photo program (iPhoto) on my iMac. It had thousands of my pictures from my vacations, adventures and milestones that I’d love to try and recover. I have a Mac OS X version 10.1.5 with a Power PC G3 Processor and 256 MB of memory. Is there any way to get my iPhoto back? I may have the original installation discs if I need to reinstall the program, but I’m really hoping you smarty-pants guys can help save my pictures.”
You seem to have a very old iMac running OS X 10.1.5 and it won’t have “Time Machine Backup” on it. That was feature that was added with Leopard (OS X 10.5). If you did have it, it would make your photo recovery a lot easier. So, unless you had a separate backup of files on your computer, you may not be able to restore or find your old pictures. Once you restore iPhoto from the original installation discs, your iPhoto Library will be replaced.
We wonder if iPhoto was completely removed. Have you searched for it everywhere? We ask because you didn’t specify how it got deleted. It could’ve been the icon that was deleted, but not the entire application and library. You can search your computer for “iPhoto”.
Since you have a very old version of Mac OS 10, you don’t have “Spotlight”, a search utility that would make finding iPhoto a lot easier, but you should still have Sherlock. To search for iPhoto using Sherlock open a Finder window, click on “File” at the top of the screen, and then on “Find”, and that should open a search window, make sure to search both for “iPhoto” and for “jpg” since your pictures may still be there even if you did delete iPhoto.
If a similar problem happens to a Mac running OS X 10.3 or higher, there may be a software program you can try. It’s called “iPhoto Recovery”. It analyzes any affected media and will restore the lost, missing and deleted digital photos in a secure location. iPhoto Recovery is available online for less than $100.
Unfortunately, Shelley we can’t give you an exact answer. We’d have to in front of your computer to help you. If you have an Apple Store nearby, try seeing their Genius Bar Specialists.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Joe from Raleigh, North Carolina listening on WPTF 680 AM:
“Is there a way to recover a USB memory stick drive when the contact that is inserted into the PC USB port is broken?”
Well… yes, it can be done, but it’s not that simple, you can damage delicate components while trying to fix the drive. So… before doing anything you have to ask yourself, how important is this data? how much is it worth to you?
Paying a recovery company to rescue the data off your drive can cost you somewhere around a couple of hundred dollars, if that’s too much you can try to fix the drive yourself, but you should keep a few things in mind:
a) You’re not fixing it, you’re rigging it to try to get the data off, but it can fail permanently at any second.
b) There is a pretty good chance you’ll finishing breaking it and this time it will be for good.
c) You have just realized that backups are great!
If you still want to attempt to fix it will link you to a few online guides from our show page, but try to think of it less as “fixing it” and more as a fun project that may or may not work out…
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Paul in Wilmington, Delaware listening on WDEL 1150 AM asked: “I was wondering when is it that you will update your show — your 24/7 feed. It’s still replaying the first week of the month (April). And I would like to get the other shows to be able to listen to them in their entirety. Since during the day, when I hear it on the radio, I can’t catch everything.”
The stream is updated weekly with that week’s show playing for the first time on Sundays at 2pm Eastern Time, you may have caught the same show a few times because our stream plays the last 5 weeks worth of shows (15 hours of Into Tomorrow) on a loop 24/7.
The other thing you can try if you want to be able to hand pick what show you want to listen to, is to go to our podcast instead, you can find it on iTunes by searching for “Into Tomorrow”, or on our main page, look for the RSS symbol on the right, that will show you a long list of shows that you can download and listen to at your leisure.
Since you have an Android phone, if you want to make it even easier you can add our RSS feed to Google Reader or Google Listen (both free downloads from the Android market) and load our feed there or you can download TuneIn Radio and search for Into Tomorrow, both our stream and our podcast are preloaded on to the app.
We’re gonna add a 6th week, just so there is less of a chance that you’ll be hearing the same thing. It’s all about pleasing you, our audience!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Victor in Smyrna, GA listens to the podcast and asked: “Can you recommend an external hard drive and which one might be the fastest and the most reliable and convenient?”
When it comes to external hard drives, the best names are generally the same as the best names for internal hard drives. Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, BuffaloTech & so forth. There are a few exceptions, like LaCie, who make external drives exclusively, but any of the big name models should be fine.
There are really a couple different types of external drives. The first is a standard, full speed, desktop computer type hard drive mounted in an external enclosure with a separate interface to the computer and external power source. They’re bigger and often have cooling fans. If you’re using one that has an eSATA interface (remember you need that port on your computer too, if you want to connect that way), the performance will be virtually identical to an internal hard drive. Reliability will be very similar to an internal hard drive as well. Which is to say, very reliable. Hard drive failures still happen, of course, and we always recommend you make backups of your data, but hard drives in general are extremely reliable.
The other type of external drive is the ultra portable, highly compact drives that are the very small hard drives designed for notebook or netbook use, in a small enclosure that typically gets its power from the USB interface. They will almost always be USB, which isn’t going to be anywhere near as fast as eSATA, but every computer made these days has a USB port. These drives, because they’re designed for portable computers, typically have better shock resistance and protection against being banged around and carried places. That makes them extremely reliable, but again — hard drives can and do fail, so make backups. For convenience, it’s hard to beat one of these ultra portable drives.
One final option, if you’re looking for the ultimate in speed, is to roll your own. You can buy an external eSATA enclosure, with cooling fan and power supply, all ready for you to install your own hard drive. Then grab something like a Western Digital Velociraptor drive, and you’ll have put together one awesomely fast external drive. Again, remember that you’ll need an eSATA port on your computer, so check to see if you have one first, before you suffer from “plugis interruptus.”
For those who have Mac products, Hitachi’s G-Technology Series of drives are Mac-friendly. They also work with PCs, but you have to reformat them first.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Group Discussion: New Dating Website with a lot of controversy: WhatsYourPrice.com, it’s motto: “Everyone has a price”
They offer:
• For the Generous:
Date beautiful people guaranteed.
• For the Beautiful: Get paid for dating guaranteed.
Tune in to Hour 3 for more details.
Guests in this hour:
Abbas Mehdi, Product Manager – iolo Technologies
Rekindle the love with your PC!
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
It’s time now for our IFA History Feature. IFA, the Internationale FunkAusstellung, one of the largest and oldest tech shows in the world. With this week’s look back at IFA’s storied past, here’s Chris Graveline.
That’s this week’s IFA Update brought to you by Messe-Berlin. Be sure to visit IFA-Berlin.com.
Jim in State College, PA listening on WRSC 103.1 FM asked: “I would like to watch Netflix on my laptop. I have a cable that runs from a 1/8″ stereo jack (from my laptop) to 2 RCA jacks on the back of my amplifier, but I get a buzz. Like a 60-cycle hum. I want to know how to eliminate that hum.”
There are a couple things you can try. First, if your laptop power supply has three prongs, use a ground lifter (That adapter that will turn it into a two-prong plug) Many times, the noise you get comes from a grounding issue. Lifting that ground may clear that up. Chris always carries several on all our Remote broadcasts.
You can also try different cables. sometimes when it comes to audio and video cables, you get what you pay for. Try some higher-end cables. (but keep your receipt. If it doesn’t solve your problem you could always return them to the store.)
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Arty emailed us and asked: “Other than the price, what are the draw-backs and advantages of an SSD on a PCI Express card?”
The advantages of SSDs are clear, super fast read access, no moving parts for improved reliability, low power consumption. The disadvantages are usually less known, the one everyone knows about is the one that you mention: price, SSDs are much more expensive than hard disk drives, another well known disadvantage is capacity, SSDs are usually not nearly as roomy as HDDs and the larger drivers bring us right back to price: large capacity SSDs are expensive…
There are lesser known disadvantages though, and some of them are important.
The first one we should mention is the slow write speed, while SSDs are much faster when it comes to reading but some of them are actually slower when it comes to writing data. The other big, important problem is that, unlike HDDs, SSDs have a limited number of write cycles.
What this means is that after you write on your hard drive an X amount of time it’s sectors start to become unusable and it dies.
It sounds pretty bad, huh? Let’s try to put it into perspective… even under relatively heavy use your solid state drive will almost certainly outlive the usefulness of your computer by years, so it’s the limited write cycles are not as big an issue as they seem to be, and if you look at portable computers in particular a solid state drive has the added advantage of not having moving parts that can get jammed when dropped or moved roughly.
Overall SSDs present a huge performance gain and we’re going to see them more and more.
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
C.Crane: Several Super USB WiFi Antenna
Endangerbles: Several music CDs to help children learn about endangered species
Lynda.com: 1-year premium gift subscription – You’ll have access to all of Lynda.com instructional videos, on hundred of topics.