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Teaser
Intro Music.
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Items of note:
Phillip Zannini from MacPhilly Almost Live will be doing a podcast with me soon. More info to come.
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Tech news:
MP3 player demand to rise. Global demand for portable digital-music players is expected to nearly quadruple to 104 million units a year by 2009, according to a study released on Tuesday. The surge will be fueled by falling prices, better equipment and a greater availability of legal music, the study says. Led by consumer excitement for Apple Computer’s iPod music players, demand for both hard-disk drive and flash memory-based portable MP3 players is seen jumping from 27.8 million units in 2004, according to research firm In-Stat. Apple holds a 30.2 percent share of the worldwide portable audio players market.
Opera: Firefox user figures ‘inflated’. The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching. Link prefetching is a mechanism that uses browser idle time to download Web pages that the user might visit in the near future. This feature is enabled by default in Firefox 1.0. Google added support for link prefetching to its search engine earlier this year, which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache. Firefox and Opera have a market share of 8.7 and 1.0 percent respectively. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, accounting for 86.6 percent of Web surfers. But Jon von Tetzchner, the chief executive of Opera, claimed that Opera’s market share is likely to be higher than these statistics suggest, as it does not support pre-fetching and has a more efficient caching mechanism.
The first two innings of the July 16th game between the Kansas City T-Bones and the Schaumburg Flyers will be played virtually. Equipped with Microsoft Xbox game controllers instead of baseball gloves and bats, two video gamers will climb into recliner chairs around home plate at CommunityAmerica Ballpark and slug it out on the park’s 16- by 24-foot video screen. Their scores from playing two innings of MVP Baseball 2005 on an Xbox will stand when the T-Bones and Flyers take the field to finish the last seven innings of the game.
CNN is now offering it’s video FREE to the public. Apparently, this is a response to pressure from FOX News who has always offered free video. The video is in Windows Media and you need version 9 to play it.
Dell introduces the LP 1100, a $99 laser printer. The new Dell Laser Printer 1100 may be what you need to print your novel, newsletters or anything else that depends on the high-speed, high-volume text capabilities of a laser printer. The aggressive price of the 600 dpi, 15 ppm printer may cause some home users to rethink their inkjets, at least when it comes to printing text. It may also force other printer companies to rethink their pricing.
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How To: Delete files Windows XP claims are still in use.
If you use Windows XP, you have run across this issue too many times. You attempt to delete a file, and you are told: “in use by another person or program.” The problem is this file is not in use at all.
This is a common problem for Windows users, and a frustrating one at that. Sometimes you have to reboot the computer to correct the condition, and it may persist even after a reboot. The error message isn’t even very helpful, since it doesn’t tell you which person or program has a lock on the file! How do you stop the insanity??
A new freeware utility called Unlocker helps get around this problem. When installed, it creates a right-click context menu in Explorer that provides you with a list of what processes are holding a lock on a particular file. Select the processes, click Unlock, and the locks are freed up. You are then free to move, delete or modify the file.
Unlocker is different from other utilities on the market since it works by closing handles held for a particular file by a process. Other utilities only kill the host process that has a lock on a file — and if the host process in question is Explorer or some other program that really should be left running, this isn’t practical.
Unlocker works great and best of all, it’s completely free. You can download Unlocker from: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
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Ask A Geek:
Alejandro asks:
Which FM transmitter would you recommend to use with my MP3 player in my car? I have the iRock but I get poor sound quality.
Alejandro, you should check out the products on Apple.com and also on eBay. There are tons of iPod accessories out there. If you can connect via a tape-deck or aux, go that route instead.
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Hack:
This segment will return in a future edition of the Geekcast.
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The geek’s view:
This segment will return in a future edition of the Geekcast.
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