28 posts tagged “techtv”

Dick tried hard to resist buying another LED flashlight, but after 3 emails about it, and a further price reduction, Dick succumbed to the temptation.  The First Alert FX-1 Multi-Colour LED Flashlight uses ordinary batteries to power its LEDs which have 10 different colours.  Available in black and silver bodies.

Dick at the TWiT Cottage
After the Wine Train on Monday and a drive in a Tesla Roadster on Tuesday, Dick settled down with Leo in the TWiT studio to record this week's Giz Wizzes.  Here are the highlights of today's show.  Video from odtv.me.  Sitting in the background is FunCrunch Julie Bernstein.


Wine Train
Dick, being a train enthusiast, thoroughly enjoyed the Napa Wine Train.  Dick and Leo's party were given a private railroad car.  Dick finally met Jennifer, and they got on like a train on fire.

WebLoyalty
Dick bought his new flashlight from Buy.com, and Leo warns him and listeners about the danger of inadvertently joining the "webloyalty" programme and getting charged on your credit card.  Other websites including Fandango and Orbitz also take part in this webloyalty.  For more details, listen to Security Now! Episode 207.

Shoot-It
Listener Seth Combs finally gets his first iPhone app on to the App Store.  It's called Shoot-It.  You take your photo on the iPhone, send it to Shoot-It together with your message and addressee (for the US, the UK and Western Europe), and a proper postcard with your pic and message will be posted for you in the good old fashioned way.  It so happens that Leo has just bought the app, and Leo wonders if Seth is related to Sean Puffy Combs, aka P. Diddy.


Listen to Episode 896
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page
Find DGW Info on GizWizSearch

The Conair CleanHead Groomer is a head shaver designed for contour shaving of your scalp, or a short haircut.  It has 2 angled shaving foils, a trimmer attachment for stubble look and fade cuts (3-position taper control), and 3 comb attachments (for different hair lengths).  Cordless and rechargeable.  Dick could make good use of this, as long as he doesn't put it under his nose, as he did with the Mitey Mixer (Episode 870).

The High Line Park
When Dick went to Chelsea Piers to try out the Axius/Zeus Propulsion System (Episode 873), he took the opportunity to visit the High Line Park.  The High Line used to be a railroad in Manhattan which originally ran at street level but was later elevated because of accidents.  It became mainly a freight line and ran through a lot of the warehouses along the river dropping off freight along the way.  It fell into desuetude and was going to be dismantled, until a group campaigned for its survival and it is now turned into an elevated park.  Dick has taken some photos which you can find at Smugmug.

A Tonsure for Henry
Henry Laporte and his gang once tried the male pattern baldness look on themselves, and then went the whole hog and shaved their heads clean.

The Flowbee
Another self-help hair-cutter is the Flowbee that trims your hair and and sucks it away with a vacuum cleaner.  Leo prefers his neighbour Felice who cuts Leo's and Henry's hair in her garage.


Zoetropes
Talk of Early Choices (Episode 841) reminded Mike Troiano of a visit to a furniture store in Jamaica which had the coolest lamp.  It was a train lamp with a heat-activated zoetrope which, when the lamp lit up and warmed up, tricked your eyes into seeing images of a train moving through mountains and deserts.  Now the coolest thing about this letter is how Early Choices, a toilet seat for young children, managed to trigger memory of a train lamp.

This in turn triggers Dick's memory of the train zoetropes he saw in his younger days and reminds Leo of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope.

The Cutting Edge of Popular Culture
Dick had never heard about the connection between Henry Ford and Thomas Edison until Leo told him in Episode 870 about the latter's Last Breath.  Then just the other day, Dick saw on PBS a programme on Thomas Edison and how Henry Ford moved all his stuff to the Henry Ford Museum.  Leo knows all about what's hot and what's not.


Listen to Episode 874
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page
Find DGW Info on GizWizSearch

Clickfree's DVD Transformer is a USB dongle that has Windows software pre-installed, which searches for files on your computer for backing up and burns them on to DVDs.  You can take the software's default selections, or you can configure what files to look for and back up.  Essentially you're buying the software, but it's not restricted to any one computer.

The DVD Transformer is a kind of hybrid of previous products which Dick talked about, the Clickfree Backup Drive (Episode 629), Clickfree DVD Backup (Episode 639), and Clickfree Transformer (Episode 753).  Whereas the Clickfree Transformer backs up your data to any hard drive, the DVD Transformer backs up to DVDs.


An FM Voice for AM Radio
When Leo first started on an AM radio station, he was told that his voice wouldn't do, because he got a mellow FM voice, instead of a more in-your-face AM voice.

Living Inside Your Love
Leo recently went to a benefit concert, and met one of the artists who performed at the concert: Earl Klugh, whose Living Inside Your Love Leo had to play incessantly when Leo was on San Francisco's KKSF in about 1984 (although the song was from the 1976 album of the same name.


Backup, Backup
Leo has 14 hard drives installed in various computers in the studio, over 30 just scattered around, and even more in the rest of the TWiT Cottage.  After he lost the video recording of Episode 600, he now makes sure that everything is recorded and backed up.

Game Show Memories
Since Dick was involved in game shows other than Match Game, listeners have requested Dick to do another show in the style of his earlier Match Game Memories.  He might just do that.  A small number of Match Game Questions are still left for sale.

A Petaluma Nobody
Jim Driscoll from Atlanta, who was looking forward to Episode 7795 in his last letter (Episode 534), met recently in the San Francisco Bay area a colleague who lives in a little town called Petaluma.  Jim asked her if she knew Leo.  "Leo who?"  Jim went on to astonish her with his intimate knowledge of the Butter and Eggs Parade.


Listen to Episode 851
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

The Z Bar Desk Lamp from CCrane has 66 LED lights, using only 9.6W, giving 112 lumens focused within a 50 degrees viewing angle.  The Z shape gives it flexibility while the weighted base gives it stability.  If your desk is too cramped, it comes with a desk clamp so that it doesn't take up more desk space.

TWiT: The Early Days
Leo explains the origin of the name TWiT.  When the old gang from G4/TechTV, including Leo, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, David Prager and Robert Heron, got together for the podcast, they originally called the show Revenge of the Screen Savers.  They soon got a cease and desist letter from G4.  Eventually they asked the listeners to make suggestions for the name, and the winning entrant would get a surprise box of stuff from Patrick's garage - the "box of crap".  Entries included Revenge Of The Green Saviours, SledgeCast, Saved By The Geeks, and This Week In Geek, the last of which was closest to what Leo wanted.  In the end Leo decided on This Week In Tech, shortened to the acronym TWiT which became the name of the site and his podcasting network.

For a summary of the early episodes of TWiT (0 to 9), you can get Episode 81 of TWiT: The Early Years.  It is a collection of tidbits from the podcasts (but not a best-of) outlining how the podcast evolved in the early days, badly put together by none other than myself, which I would have called TWiTbits.

TWiT Trademark
Leo has trademarked the brand TWiT for virtually all media, including audio, video, variety show and musical.  Leo's lawyer questioned Leo about his involvement in variety shows.  Of course we do variety shows.  The Daily Giz Wiz.  What about musicals?  The Daily Giz Wiz.  The only 4 media left are vinyl, cylinder, 8-track and wire recorder.

Just don't talk to Leo or Dane Golden about TWiT and Twitter.

Leo's Life Stories
Dick and Leo have often talked about Leo's autobiography and its title, the last time in Episode 812.  Tom Pruett has 3 ideas for Leo's book, all of which lend themselves easily to TV production as well.

The PodCouple - Leo Laporte has recently lost his job at TechTV.  Despondent, he wanders aimlessly until his friend Dick DeBartolo comes to the rescue and the two do a podcast together.  The trouble is Dick is neat and tidy and Leo is a slob ...

The PodFather - An aging patriarch of an organised podcasting dynasty, Leo Laporte, wants to transfer control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant friend Dick DeBartolo.  A story of power and greed, culminating in the Toothpick Bird and Spork Episodes.

Podman Begins - Explore the Podman legend and his emergence into a force for good.  A disillusioned tech journalist Leo Laporte travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice and to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful.  He comes back as his alter ego Podman, a mass crusader who uses his strength, intelligence and vast podcasting network to fight sinister forces.  Don't forget his butler, Leo adds, Dick TheBartolo.

MAD 500
MAD 500 is out, with retrospective looks into different parts of MAD Magazine's past issues (or episodes as Leo persists in calling them).  By MAD 502, Dick will have completed 40 years of unbroken contribution to every issue of MAD.  You can get MAD 500 along with the 2 Obama-cover issues as a collection autographed by Dick from MAD Stuff.


Listen to Episode 824
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

On the MacMania geek cruise to China, Leo is going to do 4 lectures: 60 iPhone apps, 60 free Mac apps, social networking tips (including Twitter), and using the Mac Mini as a Home Theatre PC.  An icing on the cake for the Mac Mini Home Theatre is Elgato's Turbo.264 HD.  H.264 is one of the MPEG4 compression standards.  Its advantage is being able to compress videos into smaller files while maintaining quality.  The disadvantage is that playback is very CPU-intensive, and the encoding process takes a very long time compared with other compression standards.

The Turbo.264 HD is a hardware encoder, using a USB connection, to speed up the encoding process.  It accepts many input formats including AVCHD videos (e.g. from HD camcorders), QuickTime, AVI, DV, Xvid, WMV and Video_TS folders, encodes them using the H.264 profile, and outputs to a variety of formats for the iPhone, iPod, Sony PSP, YouTube, YouTube HD, 720p HD, and 1080p HD.  Leo's experience is that it can encode videos twice as fast.

The Turbo.264 HD comes with Elgato's software for the Mac, and when plugged in, detects and gives you instant access to the videos on a camcorder.  It also works with other video software on the Mac for importing or encoding videos, including iMovie, QuickTime Pro, Final Cut Pro and Elgato's own EyeTV.

For a similar USB hardware H.264 encoder for Windows, Leo has heard about the BlackMagic Video Recorder.


DGW Scheduling
Because Leo is going away in July on his China tour, Dick and Leo are recording 6 shows at a time, starting with this session.  Dick will have to come up with more gadgets for each session, and will be going off to Las Vegas for the National Hardware Show which starts on 5 May.  Hence the first recording session for May will be on Monday 4 May, instead of the Tuesday.  Dick is looking forward to bringing back an arm load of gadgets from the show.

The Hilton's Suffering
Conventions have been hard hit by the economic downturn, and the Hilton in Vegas is hurting.  Leo thinks that's because they've stopped the Star Trek attraction, which reminds Dick of how he was berated by a PR lady for referring to the attraction on TV as "The Star Trek Experience", when it was "Star Trek, The Experience".  For the full story, go to Episode 261.

Leo's Autobiography
Various names have been touted for Leo's autobiography (for a previous discussion, see Episode 665).  Alessandro Abate suggests "Just One More Podcast".  For Dick's, someone has suggested "I'll Be Here".  Leo loves and repeats the motto used in Sandro's signature: "Never Surrender Dreams" (see Episode 797).

Dick's Lust For Life
When Dick loves something, he doesn't just admire it from a distance, but wants to be part of it, and that's what he's done with MAD and TechTV, the latter of which led to the Daily Giz Wiz.  At the recent Turner Classics presentation at Barnes and Noble (Episode 783), Dick introduced himself to Robert Osborne, and now he's been invited to co-host a TCM special next year on A Night of Movie Satires.


Listen to Episode 812
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

From CES 2009, this All-In-One Charger from Hottips is designed for charging your cellphone, with a car charger, an AC wall charger, a removable USB cord, and even an emergency charger for connecting to a 9V battery.  You can order the hot tip for your own model of cellphone, available for the major brands such as Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson.  There is even a charger for iPods and iPhones.

Surviving CES and MacWorld
Dick survived a less crowded but still very busy CES, and Leo fooled them again with his keynote at MacWorld Expo.

Lose It!
Kathleen sends her best wishes to Dick for his downsizing of the Gadget Warehouse, and for Leo's downsizing, she recommends an iPhone app called Lose It.  It uses the same database for creating nutrition labels for food packaging.  Dick doesn't need it, as he exercises for 20 minutes a day, walks a lot and goes to the gym.


Listen to Episode 743
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

Back in Episode 43, Dick introduced the Iomega Screenplay, which was a multimedia player with a built-in hard drive.  The Screenplay TV Link skips the hard drive but refines the multimedia playback capability.  It has a USB connection at the back for connecting to any USB storage (FAT or NTFS formatted, which can be an external hard drive or flash drive), and for video connections, it supports composite, component and HDMI.  For the latter 2 connections, you have the further option to upscale the video from 480i to 720p and 480p to 1080i.  Most video file formats are supported, including ripped DVD .vob files.  Remote control included.

For a full review, see CNET Reviews.

Christmas Specials
There will be no gadgets on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Christmas Eve will feature Paul Minshall's 12 Days of GizWiz.  Christmas Day will feature Dick reading answers from the TWiT Army on "What are you hoping to get for Christmas?"

Autograph Collector
Dick gets hundreds of emails a day, and one of them is a letter from Michael who collects autographs, from just about anyone.  Dick has sent him his autograph, Dennis Wunderlin's and the mail lady's.


Listen to Episode 726
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

Today's gadget arrived during the recording of yesterday's episode, and Dick and Leo play "What's In The Box?" again.  It's Belkin's Powerline AV+ Starter Kit.  The set uses the HomePlug technology to set up a network within your house using the power circuit, for sharing internet connection.

The Starter Kit consists of 2 Network Adapters.  Plug the first adapter (which has only 1 ethernet port) into a wall outlet and connect it to your router.  Plug the other adapter (which has 3 ethernet ports) into a wall outlet and connect up your computer or other devices into any of the 3 available ethernet ports.  Your internet connection can then be accessed on such computer or devices (such as AV equipment or game console).

Data transfer is encrypted using 128-bit AES.  The rated data transfer speed is 200 Mbps, useful for areas of your house which are difficult to reach by WiFi or ethernet cables.  The transfer rate is claimed to be good enough for "HD Movies".

There is another, cheaper, model called the Powerline AV Starter Kit (without the + sign).  Same specs but both adapters have only 1 ethernet port.

Match Game Moments
Last Saturday Dick appeared live on Stickam for his Match Game Moments.

An Oasis of Laughter and Silliness
Aaron B has been a fan since the early 1720's when Dick and Leo used to bellow at each other about the latest innovation in quills.  Life is a rollercoaster but through thick and thin Dick and Leo have provided him with an oasis of laughter (and silliness, adds Leo).  He saw the R2D2 Soy Sauce Bottle on the Star Wars Shop and felt compelled to share it with Dick and Leo.  It's also available on Amazon.  The soy sauce pours through the Holo Projector.


A Sea Captain
Dick was once told by a psychic, who detected the salt spray in Dick's beard, that he had been a sea captain in a previous life.

Christmas Schedule
Leo is off to France for Christmas, but they will be pre-recording some shows which should cover much of Christmas.

Dick briefly mentioned this new Casio watch in Episode 694.  Part of the G-LIDE (or Glide, for surfing?) series, the G-Shock GLX 5600 series are designed as surfing companions.  Water-resistant up to 200m, shock resistant, 29 time zones (48 cities), displaying Tide Graph and Moon Data (presumably relevant to surfing and boating), automatic electroluminescence backlight display with afterglow, and all sorts of timer functions, alarms, sleep and snooze.

The Ears of Alfred E Neumann
At the Alfred E Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner on 16 October 2008, President--Elect Barack Obama quipped, "It is often said that I share the politics of Alfred E Smith and the ears of Alfred E Neumann."  The similarity in the ears has often been noted, and you can find morphs between Obama and Alfred on YouTube, here and there.


WTHII 0810

For last month's WTHII, Dick had to tape over the product to hide its name.  It's the QuakeAwake, an earthquake detector that was intended to give you a little more time to run for cover or safety, as Leo suspects.  An earthquake generates 2 kinds of waves, "primary waves" and "shear waves".  Primary waves travel faster but cause no damage, while the shear waves travel more slowly but are the shock waves that give rise to the real destruction.

By sensing the primary waves, the QuakeAwake takes advantage of the time lag between the 2 types of waves and sounds an alarm before the shear waves arrive, giving you up to 30 seconds' advance notice, in some cases, of an earthquake (as "themepark" in the chatroom found out).

The QuakeAwake is installed with a switch mounted on a load-bearing wall.  The switch will only be shaken by vibrations coming from the foundations of your building or house, the detection of which will trigger the alarm.  Read about it in a 1991 article in the New York Times.

The winner was Todd Wittenmeier who gave the closest answer, a motion detector.

Dick in Michigan?
Mention of Kate Botello in Episode 689 reminds Jeffrey Hackett of his first-time meeting with Kate and Leo when they attended a special ZDTV event in Taylor, Michigan (on 6 November 1999).  He still has the ZDTV Cube autogaphed by Kate and Leo.  A video of the event is available on YouTube.  Now that he's met Leo, when is Dick coming to Michigan?

Security Theatre
Security was tested at various airports recently, with the help of security expert Bruce Schneier.  TSA's protective measures are no more than a "security theater", according to the article "The Things He Carried" in the Atlantic Magazine.

Little Golden Hood on Audible
Join Audible - and get Little Golden Hood narrated by Leo (which is a free download anyway), or Paula Poundstone's "There's Nothing In This Book That I Meant To Say".  Dick's favourite quote from her is "I was such a lonely child that I created 2 imaginary friends, and they would play only with each other."

The Humanety
Geek celebrities including Veronica Belmont, Geoff Smith, Felicia Day, Gary Vaynerchuk and Patrick Norton are taking part in a project by humanety.com, offering a half-hour Skype video chat on auction to the successful bidder.  The money will go to the charity named by the celebrity.  Dick is taking part and his charity is going to be his own favourite, the Animal Haven, a no-kill shelter.  Dick's auction starts today, 30 October 2008.  "Humanety, we're all in this together."


Ballooning Inventory
Earl of Southfield, Michigan and proud member of the TWiT Army has among others 2 copies of Good Days and Mad (hardcover and paperback), a GizWizBiz Inka Pen, a Plantronics 650 headset, 3 Open-X's, a Flip Ultra.  No Titanium Spork yet but may soon be added to his ballooning inventory.  Purveyors of these gadgets should be begging for sponsorship of DGW.  He's even bought items mentioned on TTTT.  That should be proof enough.

Earl has been listening since Episode 1, and a long-time fan of the Screen Savers from the Kate and Leo days (not the Titanic pair, but Kate Botello and Leo Laporte).


Listen to Episode 689
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page