Glenn is on the way to the Airport during this show
and will call in! We Hope.

Favorites of 2008! JKDEFRAG Defragmenter
TimeMachine of Apple's Leopard/OS 10.5 (By the Way- Avoid 10.5.6 Update for Now..)
BELARC PC Inventory Program
SPEEDFAN Hard Disk SMART Troubleshooter
CCLEANER- Venerable Cleaner of Crap off PCs!
Spybot AntiMal/Spyware Software (Home Page)
AVG Free Anti Virus
Thunderbird and Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com
Best Hacker Entertained Software: UBUNTU Linux

Best Gadget: iPhone! Without a Doubt!
Closely Followed by the Intel iMac.
Most Interesting Evolution: Cloud (Virtual) Computing VWZ
WORST. Vista, All the Way. Can anyone say anythign good about it..?
Worst Descendants: Symantec Products like Internet Security, 360, etc.. UGH

Neat Websites: http://www.daxo.de, http://www.drop.io

Projections for '09!
Digital TV Mandate: http://www.dtv.gov
Switch Over Date is that of Claire of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Television and more
THANKS Alan Stahler for that one!

the AT&T / iPhone Thing, the cell IMEI serial number (International Mobile Equipment Identity) issue & Privacy

and Some on iTouch.

More as the Spirit of the Electron and Zen moves us!!!..

THANKS to Alex for Site Transcriptions suring 2008! So much apprecdiated!

Paul n Glann

Additional Notes

TimeMachine is backup software for the Mac, see above.
It's a good compromise between being easy to use & comprehensive
Periodically check to be sure that you can restore what has been backed up.
With TimeMachine applications are backed up by default and in many cases they can be restored by dragging & dropping. Applications don't usually need to be backed up and you have the option to change this setting.
For a backup drive Best Buy has a 1TB drive for $89.
For the PC there's syncback lite, a free program.

Paul's favorite web app is Joomla which zen.kvmr.org runs on.

Glenn uses Jabra BT500.
Jabra VC5050 has external speaker and rechargeable thru the car adapter.
Note: I may have misheard those model numbers.

One of Glenn's "most fun" tech gadgets is a GPS with text to speech.
Paul hacked into Glenn's Nokia & replaced the GPS software it came with, putting in IGO8.
Current GPS (and cell phone) units tend to include Windows Mobile ver 5 running in kiosk mode.

KVMR is switching to an all digital studio.

GPS & cell phones can be made to launch software other than GPS or phone applications. Paul converted one to a PDA with IGO8 navigator.

About 25% of the iPhones are hacked so they don't have to be used with AT&T. A note on their web site claims AT&T is entitled to charge you the $30 you would have paid if you hadn't hack the phone.

Every cell phone (except a radio telephone) has an IMEI (see above) number that identifies what type of phone it is. Even if you have the EDGE service turned off or don't have the data plan, AT&T can detect you have an iPhone without the service plan and, theoretically, charge you the $30.

Paul thinks Windows Vista is the worst software in 10 years.

A caller can't get DVD Shrink to launch.
Paul uses DVD Decrypter from mrbass.org.
But the caller needs to edit out the extra material to get the content to fit onto 1 burnable disk.
So. use Nero Reencode. The free version may not include the reencoder part (the transcoder) which recompresses the mpeg frames to fit onto a smaller disk.
Listeners are invited to give other solutions.

The same caller subscribes to Netflix and wants to view streaming movies on his TV.
A monitor cable box can be used but that affects the quality.
The Roku $99 wireless device bypasses the computer entirely.
Get a video card that, ideally, has HDMI output to connect to a digital TV. Then the software drivers will let you choose TV or monitor output.
There is also a Roku unit that lets you listen to radio streams.
Rumor has it that some Tivo units will do what the Roku does.

Blender is a suite free tools for 3d graphic creation.

A caller wants to know whether cell phone GPS works thru cell towers or directly with the satellites.
1st & 2nd generation phones work with the cell towers and they can expose your location to your phone company because there is a 2-way communication with the towers. And, out in the wilderness, you may be out of range of towers and won't be able to get a location.
3rd generation only receives data from satellites and is more accurate.
Also, don't depend entirely on GPS units. They can be affected by weather and geographical features.

A caller has a Dish Network DVR that went bad and he wants to extract the recordings from its disk drive.
If it's an IDE drive, you can try hooking it to a computer thru an external USB hard drive enclosure.
Though you may not be able to recover the data, you may be able to tell if the drive is working. If that DVR is a version of Tivo, there are hacks that may allow you to get to the data.
You can send the drive to a data recovery service, but that's expensive.

If you use an antenna to receive your TV signal, and don't have a digital TV, you'll have to prepare for digital TV or DTV. Go to www.dtv.gov to get up to 2 $40 coupons for converter boxes.
People in areas with marginal reception may lose channels because DTV is less tolerant of weak signals.