0
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.5MB)
Show Notes:
Teaser
Intro Music.
Contact info.
Items of note:
The Geekcast now has a phone number thanks to Shooby, 206-98-GEEK-1. That’s 206-984-3351.
Phillip Zannini from MacPhilly Almost Live will be doing a podcast with me soon. More info to come.
Do you want your tech question answered on the show? Send it in text or mp3 form to geekcast@gmail.com
**************
Tech news:
Faulty update crashes ZoneAlarm firewall. A bug in a Zone Labs update caused firewall crashes for about 50,000 users of ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm. The crashes happened after people downloaded the daily Program Advisor update. The update contained a bug that had slipped by Zone Labs’ quality checks.
PCworld has announced their 100 best products of 2005. Topping the list is Mozilla’s Firefox. Among other notable entries are Google’s GMail, OsX Tiger, Skype, ZoneAlarm, iTunes, and EFF’s Tor.
AMD confirmed that the company plans to enhance its Opteron enterprise processor line to four cores in 2007, adding focused optimizations to manage power and improve throughput. Going forward, AMD executives said its progress will be defined by metrics like “throughput per watts per dollars”, backed by specific technologies that it will try to establish as industry standards, rather than following rival Intel’s lead. Future enhancements to the AMD core architecture will include per-core power management, improvements to the HyperTransport specification, secure execution, and even dedicated coprocessors.
My thoughts on the Apple switch from PowerPC to Intel Chips.
Clip of Steve Jobs talking about Podcasting in iTunes 4.9
**************
How To: Kick the habit of using Internet Explorer
If you talk to most PC users out there, they almost definitly use Internet Explorer. IE, while a good browser back in the day, has become one of the biggest reasons people are reformatting their computers and wreaking havok on Dell’s call centers. Eliminating Internet Explorer from your computing life is not difficult at all and can be achieved by anyone with any computer skills.
Step 1: Find an alternative browser. If you’re not going to use IE, then you need another program to use to surf the Internet. There are a lot of browsers out there, but the major players belong to three specific companies: Mozilla, Opera and Netscape. Each has its own pros and cons, while all remaining free. If you’re all about nostalgia then go ahead and get Netscape to relive those days before IE ruled the earth.
Netscape is owned by AOL now and that means it comes with tons of piggy-back programs. It also installs tons of icons onto your system. The newest version 8 is no longer such a resource hog. Netscape also comes with an e-mail application that works really well.
Mozilla’s Firefox is one of the best-known browsers out there, having made a huge debut this year. Tight code, tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocking and conforming to coding standards make Firefox a sure-fire winner. As the popularity of Firefox has grown, Microsoft has seen its marketshare slip month by month. IE is now used by only 80+ % of people out there.
Opera is a true underdog in the browser market. Opera comes in a free and paid version. The free version has all the functionality of the paid version but displays ‘google-style’ text ads while you surf. While this can be annoying to some, the ads are unintrusive and the browser’s speed make it work fantastic. Opera only costs $30 if you like it and it’s definitly a winner.
Netscape: http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Opera: http://opera.com/
Step 2: Export and Import. Once you download and install your IE-killer, you need to get all those Favorites (or as they’re really called, Bookmarks) into your new browser. When you open the newest Netscape or Firefox for the first time, an import wizard starts. It asks if you would like to import your IE settings, Favorites, history, ect into the new browser. Firefox and Netscape, which is built on the Firefox engine, make this process extremely painless and is 99% automatic. Opera has a bookmark importer that will take the .htm file that IE exports and will use that for Opera’s use. While it does not gather other settings, most people will not find they are missing anything.
Step 3: Surf and customize. When you go to your favorite websites, you will now see them slightly differently, but almost all of them will look the same. All three browsers can have skins applied to them to change the look. Firefox has ‘extentions’ that expand its functionality, while Opera has some of the most customizeable toolbars, skins, and sidebar panes I have ever seen. As you see items you want to change, be daring and go for it.
Step 4: Use IE when needed. Lets face it: not all websites code to standard and use IE-specific tags. You will come across websites that say you must use IE or if you use Windows Update, that will require IE as well, so don’t delete those shortcuts so fast. Depending on your surfing, you will use IE about 5-10% of the time.
**************
Ask A Geek:
This segment will return in a future edition of the Geekcast.
**************
Hack: Get any bootdisk, any time.
When you’re working on your computer and you need a specific bootdisk it can be tough to get one created. Of all the Windows bootdisks, the Windows 98 version is the most useful to anyone needing a floppy-startup. Unfortunatly if you are running Windows XP, that specific bootdisk is hard to find. Well not anymore due to a great website called bootdisk.com
Bootdisk.com has all the bootdisks you can find. The list includes: DOS/Windows9X/Me/NT/2K/XP, DOS 3.3+, Premade Linux, Windows XP Fresh Install Bootdisks and much more. When you find the disk you want to create, you download a small .exe file to your PC. You then run it while a blank floppy is in the drive. It will expand the files and create you a perfect floppy disk that you can boot from. The bootdisk is no different than the originals used by the OS that would have created it.
All the exe’s from the website are free, work great and can get you out of a jam when you really need that 1.44mb of aging storage. Check out the website at http://www.bootdisk.com
**************
The geek’s view:
This segment will return in a future edition of the Geekcast.
**************
Contact info.
Outro music / sound clip.
Related Episodes:
E-mail
Voicemail
