Dr. Bill Podcast – 56 – (09/30/06)
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Netcast Show Notes:
The “Shamelessly Commercial Edition” of Dr. Bill! Since we did the podcast earlier this week (on Tuesday.) SciFi Friday and Dr. Bill’s discovery that EvokeTV.com is GONE! Venture Capitalists and Kevin Rose (a true geek!) How about giving the EvokeTV folks some money?!?! A new version of Wine is out… what it is and why we care! Why Wine is not an emulator… but it is… well, OK, it is not… OK, well never mind! Dr. Bill says, “Dewd” again! Sigh. Batteries keep exploding! Toshiba and Lenova recall their Sony batteries. Sony batteries must really STINK! Leo Laporte wants to trademark “netacast” and then release it to the world for the term to cover “podcasts” since Apple wants to claim the term “podcast.” Check out “Viidoo” and tell me what you think! IPTV… hummm? Let me know if it really IS “geeky” enough! And, NOW, ThriftyWare.com! Check it out… and spread the word!

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Check out “Viidoo” and tell me what you think! IPTV… hummm?

Viidoo – The Home of WebTV

It appears to convert TV into flash video and display it via the player. I can’t find a FAQ, but it seems pretty cool. Will it “win out” over other versions… I don’t know. But it is interesting!

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Leo Laporte in his speech at the PODCAST Expo 2006 has suggested podcasters change the name of what they do from “PODCAST” to “NETCAST” in the belief this is a more accurate name than Podcasting.

read more | digg story

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Sony batteries must really stink! Whoa!

Lenovo Recalls 560,000 Sony Batteries

“In conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, both IBM and Lenovo announced that they were calling for the voluntary recall of approximately 526,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sony. Lenovo had announced earlier this week that it was investigating reports of issues with laptops containing batteries from the manufacturer. The two companies become the fourth and fifth computer makers behind Toshiba, Apple, and Dell to recall Sony batteries due to overheating problems. Altogether, nearly 6.8 million laptops have been affected, although in fairness Toshiba’s recall of 340,000 had to do more with a defect in the laptop manufacturing itself.”

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NO… not the liquid variety of Wine… the “Wine Is Not an Emulator” type. The software for Linux that allows you to run many Windows apps. Cool!

Latest Version of Wine

“This is release 0.9.22 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

What’s new in this release:
– The usual assortment of MSI improvements.
– Several bug fixes to the various common controls.
– Pixel shaders enabled by default in D3D.
– Various improvements to the build process.
– Many translation updates.
– Lots of bug fixes.”

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I loved EvokeTV… a way to see your TV listing and interact with them via a calendar. It was awesome! But now it is gone… unless they find a venture capitalist… will someone step up? I want my EvokeTV!

read more | digg story

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Dr. Bill Podcast – 55 – (09/26/06)
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Netcast Show Notes:
Better late than never! The podcast was delayed because Dr. Bill had a wild and geeky weekend that made it impossible to do the podcast on Saturday! Weird Al Yankovik’s “White and Nerdy” song… and how the allusions in it are familiar to Dr. Bill! A quick scan of the tech news that occurred last week. Laser beams to replace wires? Light emitting T-Shirt! (Watch the Video at the link in the blog!) Two VERY serious Windows security problems – ALERT! Get Linux/UNIX text manipulation on Windows! Our Geek Software of the Week… and optimizer for the Windows Registry! Our winner in the Dr. Bill Contest! Congratulations to Bob Kessler from California! Stay tuned for Saturday’s REGULAR podcast!

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Every month, where I work, we have a “Maintenence Weekend” in which we have to get all our “off-line” computer work done. This past weekend was our Maintenence Weekend! I was totally “geekified” all weekend and had ZERO time to do the Podcast. In fact, I had to move six Dell 1850 servers from one computer room to another, and get them all online and operating in production… among other things!

Sigh! However, worry not! I shall do the Podcast as soon as is humanly possible! (I don’t want anyone going into withdrawl!)

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You defrag your hard drive (don’t you?!) Well, you should! You should also defrag your registry! What?!? You say that you don’t know how to defrag your registry? Well, then, you need this week’s GSoTW!

NTREGOPT: Defrag Your Windows Registry

From the NTREGOPT FAQ:
“Similar to Windows 9x/Me, the registry files in an NT-based system can become fragmented over time, occupying more space on your hard disk than necessary and decreasing overall performance. You should use the NTREGOPT utility regularly, but especially after installing or uninstalling a program, to minimize the size of the registry files and optimize registry access.”

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So… there you are using Linux… you are using “cat,” and “sort,” and “tail” happily! Then you move over to your Windows box, and, “Ack!” You get frustrated not having the same power to control your text files there!

Or, in scenario two, you WANT to be able to sort a text file, and eliminate duplicate lines while doing so. Sigh! What to do?

Get the TextUtils for Windows!

GNU TextUtils for Windows

Download the file called, “textutils-2.1-1.exe”, and click on it to install the GNU TextUtil for Windows utilities. Then, go to “Start -> Control Panel -> System and click on the “Advanced” tab. Click on the “Environment Variables” button at the bottom of that screen, and then highlight the “System Variable” called “path” and click on the “Edit” button. Add this string to the very end of the line that is there:

;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin

Note the “;” (semi-colon) at the beginning of the string! Click “OK,” then “OK,” and then “OK.” Now, you can use the command below, for instance, to solve the second scenario I used an example above:

sort file.txt | uniq > newfile.txt

This will take the contents of “file.txt” and sort each line, then eliminate duplicate lines, and then output the new data to a file called “newfile.txt” … how’s that for cool and geeky!?!

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