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Show Notes:
Teaser
Intro Music.
Contact info.
Items of note:
Do you want your tech question answered on the show, send it in text or mp3 form to geekcast@gmail.com
I am trying to normalize the mp3 of this show and also eliminate background noise. Is it working? Please e-mail me and let me know. Thanks!
An upcoming edition of the Geekcast will have a great guest. Who is it? Stay tuned to find out!
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Tech news:
Kensington laptop locks seem to have been hacked again. A video floating on the internet shows a person using a piece of cardboard from a toilet paper tube to open a Kensington lock with very little effort. This is another reason you should not rely on locks to keep your laptop safe. Carry it with you.
The defunct giant Suprnova, best known for it’s stockpile of torrents, has emerged once again by Mr. Sloncek, who was one of the people running the site. Seedler.org has just been launched and already has a decent number of items available for people to download. We’ll see how long this lasts.
Google has released a web accelerator add-on for users but also has raised privacy and security concerns. The download that sends requests through Google’s servers to provide compressed content so it downloads faster, accelerates Web surfing but can also delete pages or serve up password-protected content. Released on Wednesday, quickly a potentially damaging glitch was found. A flaw with Web Accelerator, which Google acknowledges, can serve cached copies of private discussion groups or password-protected pages to people using the software. It does not let you surf as the signed in person and no financial or banking data is cached either. Google’s web accelerator can be downloaded at http://webaccelerator.google.com
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How To: Extract ISO’s without burning CD’s
When someone sends you an ISO file, it means you must burn it to CD or DVD. This can be a major frustration if you deal with ISO’s frequently or do not have any blank media handy. One way around this is a program called WinImage. WinImage is a program that can examine the contents of an ISO, CIF, and DSK images. You can extract those files to anywhere on your computer and no CD burning is needed. To operate WinImage, all you need to do is open an image file, tell it what type of image it is opening and then the contents are listed. You can easily drag and drop the files to your desktop or anywhere else you please. The files are then readily accessable for you to use.
winImage works great and is completely free. It’s an essential tool when dealing with ISO’s. For more information, check the official website at www.winimage.com.
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Music: Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie- Every OS Sucks
http://www.deadtroll.com
(Song is potentially not work-safe, due to some language)
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Ask A Geek:
Scott asks: I want to set up a podcast with livejournal and feedburner. How do I go about this? Also where can I find space that won’t cost me anything or really cheap hosting that will let me upload my mp3 files?
To set up a podcast with LiveJournal you first need to create an account for free at livejournal.com. Once that is done, create a free account over at Feedburner.com. You will want to point your feedburner source to the XML-version of your LiveJournal. This XML is automatically updated each time you create an entry. In Feedburner, you want to make sure you have the SmartCast feature enabled for your feed. This makes the LiveJournal XML code podcast compatible. Then all you do is post a link to your mp3 on livejournal and feedburner will handle the rest.
As for free or cheap hosting for mp3’s, there are many ways to go. .mac accounts are great because it seems that Apple is not limiting bandwith and if your show becomes popular, you won’t get taken down. Daily Source Code was hosted on .mac only until a couple of weeks ago. You can also try rizzn.net or see if you can get in touch with anyone who has a website that can loan you some server space. Finally, you can read the “Podcast Hosting Roundup” written at lockergnome, found at http://channels.lockergnome.com/web/archives/20050502_podcast_hosting_roundup.phtml.
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Hack:
Speed up your boot time in Windows XP
When booting to XP, as time goes on it takes longer and longer for your computer to get into a workable state. This can be frustrating when you boot your computer for a task that is quick. That task can turn into something that takes 10 minutes to complete. One way to help is to speed up your boot time.
When you use programs, XP decides to move a ‘pre-load’ of that program into memory so it will launch faster. If you use Photoshop here and there XP will try to pre-load some of it upon boot so that you can open it faster. Unfortunatly this idea is not flawless because your computer then takes too much time fetching programs you don’t intend to use. You can counter this by deleting the contents of the Prefetch folder.
Open My Computer and go into your Windows folder. You will see a folder called Prefetch. Open this folder, select all items and delete them. It is 100% safe to delete these contents and you will not harm your computer.
Once these items are deleted, you will see your boot time shorten and Windows will become more responsive next time you start your system. Clearing the prefetch folder can be part of your routine maintenance on your PC. Windows will constantly be making entries to this folder, so be aware that items you delete can potentially be recreated by XP.
Another way to speed your boot time up is to clear items out of the Startup folder in your Start Menu. Each item in there launches automatically upon boot.
Finally, you can edit all startup items by launching MSCONFIG from a Run command. There is a tab called Startup and you can disable items that run on startup. Be aware that most items in this list should run on startup and you may encounter errors by disabling entries. You can always re-enable items in this area as well.
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The geek’s view:
Segment will return in a future edition of the Geekcast.
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Contact info.
Outro music / sound clip.
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