Audience Questions

Audience QuestionsHour 1

Hour 1 Hour 2 Hour 3

WiFi in RVs

Watch Don from California Comments

Don is having trouble with his RV wireless network and when he’s at an RV camp, he can’t pick up the signal. Hawk82 says that in order for WDS to work, the park would have to enable it. A 2DBI antenna by Bare Extender may handle it. You need a repeater that will boost the wireless signal and extending an antenna from the roof of the RV would be good. With a repeater that can pass on the signal. Check out CellExtender.com. Also, check out CCrane’s point to point antenna. 15DBI. That’s the ticket. Another option is a long range WiFi Kit by JEFATECH which plugs into USB of a computer.

Backing up

Watch Patrick from Canada Comments

Patrick recently bought a MacBook Air with an SSD drive to replace his laptop. But now he wants to replace his desktop and connect to his 21″ display. He also wants to connect to a thunderbolt drive. But Carbonite will not do backups from external drives. Leo says to avoid the Thunderbolt drives because capacities are low and prices are high. And the drive doesn’t even come with cables (which are $50 from Apple). And for a data drive, they don’t need to be that fast. Leo also says that Carbonite will be adding external drives to backup soon. So, in the meantime, pick up a pair of regular 500GB external drives and swap them out every once in awhile after you do your backup. Another thing you can do is get Apple’s Thunderbolt Monitor. Pop in the MacAir and you’ve got a desktop. That way you don’t have to buy a second computer.

What about CrashPlan? Leo says it’s an excellent backup option, but may be more expensive. Another one is BackBlaze. JungleDisk (w Amazon S3).

Patrick has also been inspired by Leo to start a technology group in his retirement community. Leo says that’s a brilliant idea! We’ve gone far beyond just PC user groups and incorporating tablets and smartphones keeps up with the pace of where technology is going. Well done, Patrick!

Manufacturing an idea

Watch Anthony from Orange County, CA Comments

Chris has a patent and wants to know how to go about getting his gadget manufactured. Leo says that’s a challenge because it’s probably not cost effective to make it here in the US. China is probably the best idea. Check out ChinaSources.com. But that’s probably the least of your worries since it’s probably going to cost you $100,000 just to get to prototype and your first run of product.

Audience QuestionsHour 2

Hour 1 Hour 2 Hour 3

Upgrading to a more secure router

Watch Steven from Rosscommon, MI Comments

Steven has one of the routers that has a WPS button on the front. To make it easier to implement security on Wi-Fi routers, about a year and a half ago, all the router companies started putting this "WPS (wireless protected security)" button on the front. This implements an 8 digit PIN that never changes, and the way it's implemented, it's more like a 4 digit PIN. This is very easy to crack. Once cracked, all security is broken. Many routers will allow disabling this, although some routers don't allow disabling it without a firmware update.

If it rotates PINs (if every time he pushes the button it gives him 2 minutes to access it with a new PIN), then he should be ok. If it's always the same PIN, that's not so good.

Check here to see if your router is vulnerable to this: http://www.safegadget.com/72/major-wireless-network-vulnerability-wps-bug/

Leo would look and see if Netgear is offering a firmware upgrade for his router. That will make it fully N complient, instead of "Draft N" that he has. He probably doesn't have to retire the router. But he should upgrade it to the latest firmware, and if it has that WPS flaw, he should disable the WPS.

APS power supply failure

Watch Don from Orange County, CA Comments

Don has an HP computer with an APS backup power supply. They had a power outage and now the computer is frozen. He tries to restart and nothing happens. Leo says that most APC surge protectors have insurance attached to them, and the computer is obviously damaged. Good news that the power supply still works, but there’s likely damage to the hard drive and the motherboard. So Leo recommends getting in touch with the manufacturer and letting them know the APS didn’t do it’s job.

Recording HD with your PC

Watch Josh from Amarillo, TX Comments

Josh has become a “chord cutter,” and is has his computer recording OTA HD TV which he streams using XBMC. But it’s starting to freeze up a lot. Leo says that recording two things at the same time will likely overtax the computer’s capability. If you were watching one and recording another, that would be one thing. But two separate HD video signals writing to a hard drive is a challenge. You could also see if Windows Media Center allows you to record to two different hard drive. But that’s unlikely. Boosting to a faster processor and a faster hard drive will make a difference. Or you can cut the quality down.

streaming video

Watch Walter from Huntington, WV Comments

Walter listens to Leo’s podcasts on his iPad but wants to know if he can watch Leo’s shows in spite of his 3GB bandwidth. Leo says that video uses a lot and could use up that cap really quickly. And you’d be surprised how much websites will take up.

Android

Watch Craig from Arkansas Comments

Craig bought an Android Samsung Stratosphere, but after two faulty phones, he got upgraded to a better HTC phone. But he can’t upload to his Picasa account. Is it the phone? Leo says probably not. Something is screwed up. Try apps like Picasa Tool and Picasa Mobile. You can also use Google Plus, which should upload all images automatically to Picasa. You can also log out of your Google account and log back in to reset it. Craig says he does it via Facebook. Leo says then it’s probably a permissions issue on Facebook. You’ll need to give Facebook permission to interact with Picasa. Account info can sometimes get messed up. Just logging out and logging back in often solves the issue.

web design

Watch Sandy from San Diego, CA Comments

Sandy is a web designer and wants to know what’s the easiest and cheapest way to test out her site builds on both platforms. Leo says that since Sandy runs a Mac, he recommends running VirtualBox with Windows. Another option is BrowserShots.org, which will allow you to check out how well a site works on every browser known to man. Another option is BrowserStack.

Audience QuestionsHour 3

Hour 1 Hour 2 Hour 3

Ripping DVDs

Watch Dave from Calgary, Alberta, Canada Comments

Dave just got the New iPad and would like to rip some blu-rays & DVDs onto it. Leo says that DVDs are pretty easy to rip using Handbrake and VLC Media Center. If blu-ray is in the mix, you’ll need to get something like SlySoft’s AnyDVDHD. Then you can sync them to iTunes.

video encooding

Watch Ron from West Hollywood, CA Comments

Ron wants to know about codecs. He just got a new Mac Pro Tower and wants to move everything over to it from older computers. But he has a few videos recorded by an RCA Little Wonder pocket camcorder and are AVI files that are a flavor of H.264. He has to re-encode it. Leo says that it’s possible that the codec is proprietary and that could pose a problem. The good news is that once Ron makes the codec “vanilla” he won’t have to reencode it again. But getting there is the challenge. Handbrake with VLC does a great job. But if you’re getting video and not audio, then you’re missing an audio codec. And that means it’s a pretty strange format that the Little Wonder is using. But Handbrake should do it. Another option is FFMPEG, but that’s a command line program. MPEG Streamclip. Also, if you google RCA Little Wonder and Mac you may be able to find what you need.

From the Chatroom - The RCA Little Wonder records in DIVX with MPEG1 layer 2 audio (which is essentially HQ mp3). Leo says that’s a tower of bable with formats difficult to sync.

Scanning documents

Watch Tom from Riverside, CA Comments

Tom is scanning black/white documents, but he gets a lot of black dots on them. How can he get better quality documents? Leo says that it depends on the software you’re using. There’s a utility called “DeScreen” in some scanner software. A third party program called VUESCAN is a good utility for boosting contrast to get high quality document scans. Also check out ScanTips.com.

Scanning photos

Watch Saul from Redondo Beach, CA Comments

Saul has switched to a digital camera. What can he do with the negatives from his old rig? Leo says you can scan them yourself, but that’s time consuming. But to pay someone can be very expensive. So sort out what you want to keep first. Scanners like the Epson Perfection with a negative function would be ideal. But like Leo says it’s very time consuming. And then clean it up through Photoshop. And with 500 rolls of film, Leo advises using a service like ScanCafe. They’ll not only scan the images, but they’ll clean them up as well.