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Contact info: | Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/geekcast | Website: TheGeekcast.com | geekcast@gmail.com | Skype & Gizmo: Geekcast | 206-98-geek-1 | Show notes: send blank e-mail to geekcastpodcast-subscribe@yahoogroups.com |
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Items of Note:
Sorry the audio quality is crappy. My audio filters were not behaving.
This episode begins a series of product reviews in each Geekcast to help you all with your holiday shopping.
A shout out to Teresa who used my router reset trick, featured in episode 61, to save her butt in a power outage. Thanks for listening to the show!
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Tech news:
Schools punish students for using blogs. As parents wring their hands about Internet predators, many teens are worried about a different kind of online intruder: the school principal. Students are blogging about schoolyard crushes and feuds, posting gossip about classmates on social-networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, and sharing their party snapshots on public Web pages. Increasingly, their readers include school administrators, who are doling out punishments for online writings that they say cross the line.
The Google Caste System. Google doesn’t like to do things traditionally. Right from their IPO, when they dumped Goldman Sachs for secretly trying to deal with their big investor, Kleiner Perkins. Business Week covers the Google Caste System, ‘in which business types are second-class citizens to Google’s valued code jockeys. They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.’ At last a company is shouting at the top of it’s voice, engineers make the world.
Google launches click-to-call. Google is now testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to advertisers found on a Google search results page over the phone. When a user clicks a phone icon, Google calls your number and after you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Google blocks your number so the advertiser can’t see it. In addition, they say they’ll delete the number from their servers after a short period of time.
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Test a geek:
–Last Question–
What does the “SUN” in SUN Microsystems stand for?
Answer: Stanford University Network
–New Question–
This is a two-part question:
What video game console was named after a move made in a board-game?
1. What is the console?
2. What is the name of the game.
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How To: Learn Mac OsX 10.4 (Tiger) for free
When working in the world of a mac, you are limited by what you know. Sometimes things you know how to do in Windows can help you on a mac but sometimes there are ways to do things better or there are features you may not even know about.
With Atomic Learning you can not only learn how to use OsX, you can watch it happen. All the tutorials are on video that play in Quicktime. Best yet, this is all free! Atomic Learning has many videos that deal with the Finder, Smart Folders, Spotlight, Dashboard, RSS, burning, making PDF’s and much more. In all there are over 30 videos for you to check out. Each one is short and right to the point. This is a great resource for anyone looking to broaden their computer knowledge.
Check it out at http://www.atomiclearning.com/osx_tiger_orientation
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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The geek’s view: Apple’s .Mac
When looking for an interesting gift to give that mac user in your family, there is one thing that a lot of people overlook: a .Mac membership. .Mac is an online extension for any Apple computer that allows you to do a variety of things and also gives you access to useful downloads.
The main benefits of .Mac include an e-mail address, online disk storage, and a homepage. Each of these are nice to have but not very important to many people out there. The online storage is the best of the three because it’s accessible from anywhere and you can also administer it on a Windows computer. You get 1gb of storage with the membership.
Hands-down the best reason to use .Mac is for the robust Backup program included with membership. Using Backup in conjunction with the iDisk, you can backup your computer automatically and then upload the file to your online storage. Backup is very powerful for being a free application for .Mac members. You can not only back up your files and folders but also settings and those deep system-level items that aren’t just in a folder. If a catastrophic failure was to hit your mac, Backup can be a bright light in a dark tunnel. Best of all you can backup to a CD, DVD, network drive, etc.
Other misc items you can get are extra loops for GarageBand, iCards which are online greeting cards you can email to people, group creation which is similar to Yahoo Groups, share your iCal calendar, and access your bookmarks from any computer. Finally, a great item on .Mac are the various tutorials teaching you how to use iLife, iWork, and various items on OsX.
Overall .Mac is a good product and if all parts of it are used, it can be beneficial to any mac user. Some parts are better than others but .Mac is nice addition to any mac. A one-year membership to .Mac is $99 and can be purchased from Apple.com or an Apple Store near you.
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