Tech Talk on Future Radio 96.9FM
Discussions from the world of computers and technology on Future FM 96.9's Community Chest. Broadcast Mondays between 10:30 and 11:30.
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Episodes
Sunday Jan 06, 2008
Sunday Jan 06, 2008
Appearing on Friday's Community Chest rather than Monday's, Dominik Lukeš is telling Thordis Fridrickson about the top 25 stories in technology that made an impact in 2007. The discussion is punctuated by tech-related songs.
1. Web 2.0 sparks another bubble
2. Facebook's rise to power: APIs, Beacon, questions about people ruining careers by posting too much for prospective employers to find
3. Social networking - Google and Open Social
4. Mobile phone news: iPhone - HTC Touch/Vox/Kaiser - Android
5. Radiohead, Madona and the recording industry
6. DRM-free music - iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Amiestreet,
7. Jammy Thomas v. RIIA
8. Online video continues to grow amid lawsuits and US writers' strike - YouTube, Joost, iTunes
9. BBC iPlayer (also in Podcasting news - BBC Launches Archers, Newsquiz)
10. Net neutrality: Broadband providers throttle bandwidth and internet slowdown predicted?
11. Google buys Doubleclick and privacy is dead
12. Lost personal data: TK Maxx, UK Government, US institutions
13. Outages: Skype, Windows Genuine Advantage, Virgin Broadband, San Francisco office building, Rackspace
14. Vista, Leopard, Ubuntu - Failure, Questionable, Making strides
15. Cheap laptops: OLPC & Eee PC
16. Office 2007 introduces new approach to wordprocessing but is challenged by online services (ZoHo, Google Office) and OpenOffice
17. AMD lags behind Intel whose Core 2 reigns supreme
18. Amazon Kindle
19. Halo 3 - Guitar Hero, Rock Band
20. Wii vs. Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
21. HD TVs cheap but without proper content
22. Format War - BlueRay and HD DVD
23. Botnets - Estonia gets attacked, Spam - PDFs in Emails
24. 47% of people have Googled themselves
25. Word of the Year Woot
The songs played were:
Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton
Here Comes Another Bubble by The Richter Scales
Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday
eShop Shuffle by James Forman
Don't Download the Song by Weird Al Jankovic
The Internet Love Song by Bob Ricci
Met on the Internet by Betty Curse
Computer World by Kraftwerk
Tuesday Dec 18, 2007
Tuesday Dec 18, 2007
Tim referees a debate between Dominik and Clare Packer of VisitNorwich.com on the respective merits of online and offline shopping before Christmas.
Last TechTalk of the year will happen on Friday, 28 December from 10am-12pm and will consist of a tech news round up of 2007 accompanied by music on tech topics.
Tuesday Nov 27, 2007
Tuesday Nov 27, 2007
Dominik shares tech gift ideas with Tim. Here's the Top 5 list:
EEE PC: ultra portable and ultra cheap laptop from Asus
Digital photo frame
MP3 player filled with tracks or including a subscription to a music service like eMusic or Amiestreet
Domain and a website (GoDaddy or 1&1)
Printed photo gift - T-Shirt, Calendar, Mug, Key ring, Fridge magnet (Snapfish, Photobox, Tesco Photo, Jessops, and many others)
Don't forget to check out some free software, too:
Firefox
Free AVG
Picassa
Irfan View
Open Office
Tuesday Nov 27, 2007
Tuesday Nov 27, 2007
This week Dominik brings Tim and Ross the good news of the Amazon Kindle. Then he recommends installing Firefox to replace Internet Explorer and take advantage of tabs and the amazing keyboard shortcuts.
Monday Nov 12, 2007
Monday Nov 12, 2007
This week Dominik explains Tim why he should not buy the iPhone and why he should donate to the OLPC initiative through LaptopGiving.org.
Next up they talk about how to make sure your new computer is safe.
Step 1. Uninstall all 'crapware' - use PC Decrappifier.
Step 2. Install a free antivirus such as AVG.
Step 3. Go to your Security Center Control Panel and make sure your windows updates are set to automatic. Firewall and antispyware should be enabled on new computers by default.
That and smart behavior should produce enough security while online.
Sunday Nov 11, 2007
Sunday Nov 11, 2007
Dominik tells Ross and Tim about buying a new computer. What to look for and what to ignore. The big announcement about Google's Open Social platform also gets a mention. In the process, Ross and Tim find out more than they ever wanted to know about what an API is.
Sunday Nov 11, 2007
Sunday Nov 11, 2007
This week, Ross debates Dominik and Tim on the merits of two social networking platforms My Space and Facebook. But first Dominik forces them to listen to some news about the new release of MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). MacOS costs money but Ubuntu is free for anyone to try out. They even ship free live CDs so that you can try Linux on your computer without installing it.
Monday Oct 22, 2007
Monday Oct 22, 2007
This week substituting for Tim MacWilliam, Dominik tells Stash Kirkbride everything about hackers. Most importantly:
Hackers are not necessarily evil and often they make the e-world go round (see Wikipedia entry on hackers)
There is a difference between White hat and Black hat hackers
Hackers are not antisocial and they regularly gather at conferences; the one mentioned was What the Hack
You can hack more than just your computer: see Lifehacker.com and Parenthacks.com; there is even palate hacking...
As for hackers penetrating even the strongest security, quite a bit of it is done through what is called Social Engineering.
You can become a hacker by adopting the hacker mind set of being interested in how things work and how to make them do other things
One of the simplest and most important hacks that everybody can and should learn is URL hacking. A fun little URL hack on Google is adding the &imgtype=face at the end of the URL that comes back from an image search on Google. Compare the two results: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en vs. http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en&imgtype=face. Another useful hack is to shorten the long URL that comes from Amazon searches when emailing it your friends: e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/dp/1847182275 instead of http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/ dp/1847182275/ref=sr_1_1/202-1838462-5575848?ie=UTF8&s=books& qid=1193065714&sr=8-1.
And in the middle of it we played Code Monkey, a song by Jonathan Coulton, and talked a bit about distribution of music online. Thanks to its Creative Commons license we were even able include this particular song in the podcast.
Monday Oct 15, 2007
Monday Oct 15, 2007
This week, Ross, Tim and Dominik were joined in the studio by Future Radio's production manager Dan Nyman to talk about the differences between Mac and PC.
Here are some Mac vs. PC links:
An exhaustive feature comparison of OS X and Windows XP (MacOS comes out slightly ahead)
A performance comparison of OS X and Windows XP (XP is ahead)
Comparison of OS X Tiger to Windows Vista (a draw)
A collection of Mac whines by Mac enthusiasts
Listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast to hear more about the joys of Apple and the Windows weekly podcast to hear about the world of Windows
Later on Dominik and Tim talked about some more news such as The Archers being available as a podcast now, Radiohead releasing their latest CD online and George Harrison's catalog being available on the music download services.
Tuesday Oct 09, 2007
Tuesday Oct 09, 2007
This week Ross is visiting Slovakia and Tim and Dominik discuss High Definition TVs and video players. First some news:
Amazon starts an MP3 download service
Woman in US loses court case with RIAA for sharing music
What we discussed about HD TV:
What is HD? Resolution of monitor 720 or 1080 vertical pixels
Why buy or not buy an HD TV? Not enough HD video sources! Sky HD and some cable.
Differences between plasma and LCD?
Why not buy Blueray or HD DVD yet? We shouldn't encourage the format wars!
For regular DVDs on an HD TV you need an upscaling or upconverting DVD player.