Google Science Communication Fellows Workshop
Joining the Conversation
Presented by Chris Messina
June 14, 2011

About the Speaker
Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate
Chris Messina is a well-known advocate of the open web, starting as a leader of the community marketing of the launch of the popular Firefox web browser in 2004. He is a board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations, and plays an instrumental role in advancing OAuth and safer online computing. A frequent speaker at technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo and SXSW, he has been quoted in The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, ReadWriteWeb, and Wired. In 2008, Chris received the Google Open Source Award recognizing his community work on initiatives like microformats. He also co-founded the coworking and BarCamp communities, and is credited with introducing hashtags on Twitter. He currently works at Google as an Open Web Advocate and resides in San Francisco.

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Block Flash Content Loading On Websites

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The Internet was conceived as a medium to efficiently enable point-to-point conversations. However, the main source of Internet traffic today is easily duplicable and location-independent content. In this talk we will focus on three aspects of latency and costs for P2P-assisted content distribution using analytical models supported by real-world measurements.

Our first focus in this talk is on utilizing awareness of demand for a piece of content in the interest of efficient resource usage. Suppose that we can use a centralized server and/or a P2P network for content distribution. What would the latency experienced by users look like? We use the Bass model of demand evolution to compare a hybrid of peer-to-peer and a centralized client-server approach against each method acting alone. Can we determine how to combine server and P2P methods so as to minimize the latency experienced by users while maintaining low server utilization?

In the second we focus on developing ISP-friendly P2P content distribution. P2P content distribution often increases transit cost to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as peers exchange large amounts of traf?c across ISP boundaries. This ISP oblivious behavior has resulted in misalignment of incentives between P2P networks—that seek to maximize user quality—and ISPs—that would seek to minimize costs. Can we design a P2P overlay that accounts for both ISP costs as well as quality of service, and attains a desired tradeoff between the two?

In the third we briefly consider the use of P2P networks for real-time streaming. In such P2P streaming systems, each peer maintains a playout buffer of content chunks which it attempts to ?ll by contacting other peers in the network. The objective is to ensure that the chunk to be played out is available with high probability while keeping the buffer size small. Our question is: Can we determine a policy that minimizes the buffer size for a given target probability of skip-free playout?

Srinivas Shakkottai received the M.S. (2003) and PhD (2007) degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University in 2007, and is currently an assistant professor at the Dept. of ECE at Texas A&M University.

His research interests include content distribution systems, wireless ad-hoc networks, Internet economics and game theory, congestion control, and the measurement and analysis of Internet data.

Srinivas is the recipient of the National Merit Scholarship, and the Young Scientist Fellowship, (Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India), and the International Programs in Engineering Fellowship at the University of Illinois. He also recently received the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Young Investigator Award.

Srinivas Shakkottai.
Google Tech Talks
November 19, 2009

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Check your private info

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Keep your Firefox compact

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Archive of all default router info

Need to reset your router? Veronica gives you a tip on how to find your default username and password to make that process easier on today's Tekzilla Daily.

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In this session we will discuss the specific challenges of using the Maps API to create content targeted at the mobile audience. Topics will include: devices round up, mobile networking primer, strategies to deal with latency, display and user input constrains.

Susannah Raub, Ken Hoetmer

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The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox.

Nitin Mangtani, Cyrus Mistry, Chris Mertens, Robert Zanin

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The old OpenDNS Stats system was built when we were doing 1 billion queries a day and had far outlived its usefulness. Playing hot potato with load on overworked servers all struggling to keep up gets old after a while, doesn’t it? This gave me the opportunity to start from a blank slate and build the system we need to serve us at 8 billion queries a day and scale to 16 or 24 billion. We considered writing another set ofPHP shell scripts, we considered working with Hadoop and we considered non-MySQL data storage options. I’ll explain why, in the end, I chose a custom map-reduce-esque implementation in PHP and C++, using MySQL for persistant storage.

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Aptimize Software presents the world’s simplest latency simulator. An open-source browser add-in that simulates the effects of network latency. Simple and easy to use – designed for “non-experts”, developers, operations and business people to quickly see how fast or slow their website will be over the internet or across the WAN.

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On May 5 and 6, 2009, in Mountain View, we brought together Googlers and leaders from academia and the corporate world for a 2-day summit to discuss the state of the global Internet. The goal of the summit was to collect a wide range of knowledge to inform Google's future plans--from product development and market reach to users' expectations and our ability to keep the Internet open yet secure.

More than 30 speakers and moderators led discussions around 8 topics: Networks; Wireless and Sensor Technologies; Security; Standards; Applications; Democracy, Law, Policy and Regulation; Search and Cloud Computing; and The Future. Eric Schmidt, who offered some remarks, expressed optimism that the challenges we face with governments' walling off access to the Internet can be overcome technologically by building networks that are transparent, scalable, and open.

Google Internet Summit 2009 Future Session. The panel speakers for this session are Chip Elliot, Nick McKeown, and Paul Saffo.

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On May 5 and 6, 2009, in Mountain View, we brought together Googlers and leaders from academia and the corporate world for a 2-day summit to discuss the state of the global Internet. The goal of the summit was to collect a wide range of knowledge to inform Google's future plans--from product development and market reach to users' expectations and our ability to keep the Internet open yet secure.

More than 30 speakers and moderators led discussions around 8 topics: Networks; Wireless and Sensor Technologies; Security; Standards; Applications; Democracy, Law, Policy and Regulation; Search and Cloud Computing; and The Future. Eric Schmidt, who offered some remarks, expressed optimism that the challenges we face with governments' walling off access to the Internet can be overcome technologically by building networks that are transparent, scalable, and open.

Google Internet Summit 2009 Network and Statistics Session. Panelists for this session are Alan Mauldin, Tom Leighton, Stephen Stuart, and Greg Chesson.

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On May 5 and 6, 2009, in Mountain View, we brought together Googlers and leaders from academia and the corporate world for a 2-day summit to discuss the state of the global Internet. The goal of the summit was to collect a wide range of knowledge to inform Google's future plans--from product development and market reach to users' expectations and our ability to keep the Internet open yet secure.

More than 30 speakers and moderators led discussions around 8 topics: Networks; Wireless and Sensor Technologies; Security; Standards; Applications; Democracy, Law, Policy and Regulation; Search and Cloud Computing; and The Future. Eric Schmidt, who offered some remarks, expressed optimism that the challenges we face with governments' walling off access to the Internet can be overcome technologically by building networks that are transparent, scalable, and open.

Wireless and Sensor Technologies Session. Panelists for this session are Craig Partridge, Larry Alder, Sumit Agarwal, Kevin Fall, and Deborah Estrin.

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Come hear how to structure Silverlight applications to support a sometimes connected scenario, and learn how to avoid the common pitfalls of implementing network detection.

Peter Smith

Peter Smith is a new Program Manager at Microsoft in the .Net Networking group but an long time networking developer on a diverse set of applications ranging from networked simulations and statistical programs to occasionally-connected, self-updating catalog programs for a popular gaming company.

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Author: Anthony Eden

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Want access to your files stored at home? How about hosting a home web server? Static IPs are expensive, if you can even get one. We set up Dynamic DNS instead!

'Back in the day' if you wanted to run a web server, email server, or FTP server from home you needed a static IP... and they often added quite a bit to the monthly bill from your ISP.

Dynamic DNS, however, lets you use a DHCP assigned address -the kind you probably have at home- just like a static IP address. That means if you have a broadband connection and sign up for a free account at DynDNS you can run a website or FTP server straight from your home.

We show you how to set it up on this episode of Systm, along with a quick and easy way to share files you and your friends can access through any browser: HFS, the HTTP File Server!

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Keep an eye on your young'uns

On today's Tekzilla Daily, Veronica shows you how to make the most of Vista's built-in tools to help make sure your offspring don't veer too far off track in their computing habits

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Summary
In this interview recorded at RubyFringe, Jay Phillips talks about VoIP, Asterisk and how his framework Adhearson makes it easy to write voice applications.

Bio
Jay Phillips is an innovator in the spaces where sophisticated VoIP development falls apart and where Ruby rocks. As the creator of Adhearsion and its parent company Codemecca, Jay brings new possibilities to these two technologies through his work on the open-source Adhearsion framework.

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Dealing with domains and hosting and all the server setup stuff isn’t usually the most comfortable stuff for web designers. In this screencast I walk though my regular process and share many little tips of how I like to handle it. I use a real live domain name that I recently purchased on Go Daddy, point it to my Media Temple hosting and then switch the email handling to Google Apps.

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An MMORPG project is challenging for any development team, let alone a distributed team of "amateur" volunteers. This talk will explore the internal design of the FOSS MMO project called PlaneShift, and how that design was influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of the team structure and the community. Topics will include server design, network topology, NPC AI and management and player security, among others.

Speaker: Keith Fulton
Keith Fulton is the CTO at ChoicePay, Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma which is an electronic payments company. In his spare time, he has been the principal architect on the PlaneShift project since 2001, along with dozens of other contributors. PlaneShift has over 500,000 registered accounts and maintains a small, tight-knit community of players, fans and developers. The game is entirely written in C++ under the GPL.

Google Tech Talks
October 16, 2008

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Social interaction has become implicitly expected of modern web-based applications. Desktop applications, however, have yet to overcome the technical barriers of peer discovery and message passing without the use of centralized servers. This session explores common peer discovery paradigms, examples of peer-aware Ruby application code using the Journeta P2P LAN library, and approaches to overcome common architectural issues of distributed event-driven systems.

About Preston Lee
Preston Lee is a founding member of OpenRain.com: a Web 2.0 start-up bringing small businesses online with dynamic, interactive web applications. He has provided senior engineering leadership for Apollo Group, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., and similar facilities for other Phoenix-area companies where he has become recognized for bringing a thoughtful balance of technical, business and customer focus.

While not on the job, Preston is active in over a dozen local tech communities and enjoys woodworking, music production and filing frames on his digital SLR. He can be read regularly and contacted via his blog at http://prestonlee.com, or company website at http://openrain.com.

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Why is route calculation done at both layers 2 and 3 of networking? Is one better? Do we need both? This talk explains the historical accident by which bridging was conceived and the properties that make it attractive, as well as dangerous, today. The talk discusses new work being done in IETF known as TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links), which combines the advantages of bridges (layer 2 forwarding devices) and routers (layer 3 forwarding devices). Although the basic idea is fairly simple, certain properties of bridges, such as their ability to create partitioned VLANs on a layer 2 cloud, make the design challenging.

Speaker: Radia Perlman
Dr. Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Sun Microsystems, working on network and security protocols. She invented many of the basic algorithms that make today's network infrastructure robust and scalable. Her current research interests include assured delete, making large networks robust against Byzantine failures, and replacing bridges/switch with technology which is upwardly compatible, but more robust, flexible, and scalable. She is author of "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols", and coauthor of "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World", which are widely used both as textbooks in universities and for engineers to learn the field. She holds over 90 patents, a PhD in computer science from MIT, and an honorary doctorate from KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She recently was given a lifetime achievement award by Usenix, and named SVIPLA (Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association) Inventor of the year.

Google Tech Talks
April, 24 2008

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Veronica gets online at 15,000 feet courtesy of Virgin America. Is the Core i7 a better deal than the Core 2 Quad? Is buying refurbished technology inviting trouble? And how to run CD apps off a netbook PC. All that plus your questions on this episode of Tekzilla.

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History has shown that access to the internet advances many facets of life including education, economic growth, and health care. Currently, only approximately 20 percent of the world population has access to the internet, which is mainly focused in North America, Australia, and Europe. More specifically, Africa being the most unconnected continent in the world has only 5 percent of its population utilizing the internet, whereas 70 percent of the population uses the internet in North America. It is predicted that these unconnected areas of the world will soon be serviced via land lines in the coming decades. However, no short term solution to this problem currently exists. The students from the Space Systems Engineering program at the University of Michigan have worked on designing a low-cost system that fulfills this "gap" in internet connectivity. This presentation will focus on their proposed solution to delivering such capabilities to the rural populations of Africa. In addition, upcoming technologies will be discussed that will impact similar missions in the future.

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Zurbuchen
University of Michigan Dept. of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences Associate Professor
Director, College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurial Programs Ph.D., M.S., University of Bern

Google Tech Talks
April, 22 2008

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1UP's Garnett Lee joins us! Buying PCs: $700 desktops and $4000 Gaming Rigs! Xbox 360 Update. Replace NetStumbler. Remote Access Windows from OS X. DirecTV Hacks. Faster GPU vs. Faster CPU, Better WiFi Tool, Vista Drive Encryption!

Tom needs help finding cover art that isn't on iTunes, especially for the DVDs he's ripped for use on his iPhone and Apple TV. We haven't found an automated program we love for OS X... though we have been playing around with TuneUp Media and MediaMonkey on Windows. You could try Album Cover Finder 6.5 on the Mac... or Album Art Thingy 1.9. Frankly, Patrick still thinks going manual is the way to go, even if it takes forever!

Angel in DC plans on spending $3000 to $4000 on a gaming PC and wants to know what offers the best bang for his buck. Frankly, we're not sure a $4000 gaming machine is worth the money!

Zachary's looking at a $700 Dell Inspiron 518, and he's got a choice between a Quad Core with integrated graphics and a Dual Core with a Radeon HD 3450 for the cash. We help him decide what to buy.

Advertisement: Veronica Loves Brain Toniq, "the world's first think drink!" Zero caffeine, no processed sugar or chemical preservatives, just "fuel for the cranium, making it highly effective for increasing mental clarity." Want to try it out? Do us a favor and order it online at www.braintoniq.com. If you use the coupon code R3 you'll get a discount, and you'll help support Tekzilla!

This week's Freebie download pick is inSSIDer, an open source WiFi network scanner that runs on XP and Vista. We've spent a lot of time with NetStumbler, but this one is our new favorite for troubleshooting WiFi installs and tracking down open WAPs when we're out and about.

The easiest way to capture gameplay from the Xbox 360 and the PS3? Kieran from Ireland wants to start a video gaming show. He's also looking for a how-to on homebrewing a PSP!

Garnett's favorite tool for capturing video into Final Cut and Premiere is BlackMagic's Intensity.

Alexander's Dad wants to play PC games on an old PowerMac G4 over a network! It's probably easier to move your gaming machine, but you can try out Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2... or something like Q emulator, which will let you run an older version of Windows on that Mac. You won't be playing any 3D games, but 'time waster' style games should work just fine!

This week's "Website We Just Can't Get Enough of!" is a classic: Homestar Runner Dot Com, the world of Strong Badia, Population: Tire, where you'll meet HomeStar Runner, Strong Bad, Marzipan, The Cheat, and the rest of the gang. Just try to get past the legendary Strong Bad Emails!

DirecTV DVR help: What are the USB, Ethernet and eSATA ports for? Randy wants more storage on his DVR!

"Is there a way to password protect folders in Windows Vista without using a separate program." You're looking for BitLocker Drive Encryption, Shaun, but it only comes in Vista Ultimate, Vista Enterprise, or Windows Server 2008. If you don't have one of those versions of Vista, we'd use TruCrypt instead.

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Intel's Core i7 = The New Fast. Simplify Media streams audio better. Dump Cable for the Internet? Better Search for Windows. DVI-D vs. DVI-I.

If you're thinking about buying a new PC... and you're looking for the Fastest Processor Evah... hold off until Intel's Core i7 CPU is an option! Loyd Case has a great Core i7 writeup over at ExtremeTech.com

Yup, Circuit City is closing down 155 stores... one lesson from the CompUSA liquidation: bring somebody with a cell phone that can check prices before you buy!

Last week we told you about Orb.com, our fave tool for streaming audio and video from a computer at home to anywhere -and just about anything- you can get a net connection... and we got a zillion emails asking why we didn't suggest Simplify Media, which stream audio from Windows, OS X and Linux machines to another computer or iPhone.

With all the online availability of basically ANY TV content, is this the end of set-top DVR boxes like TiVo dead? No, Matt, they aren't dead yet... at least not for Veronica and Patrick... there's still a lot of great TV out there that's tough to find on the web.

Advertisement: Be like Veronica: drink Brain Toniq, "the world's first think drink! It contains exactly ZERO caffeine and zero processed sugar, and contains NO chemical preservatives, just fuel for the cranium, making it highly effective for increasing mental clarity."If you order it online, please use the coupon code R3 at BrainToniq.com... you'll get a discount, and it'll help support Tekzilla!

Freebie Download Pick! This week's pick is Everything, a "...fast folder and file name search engine for Windows." Searches that used to take minutes will take seconds, it's a tiny app that doesn't suck down resources, and best of all, it's easy to use!

InvisibleSHIELD? Sure, Joseph, Patrick loves 'em for screen protection on his iPhone and just about anything else with a scren, tho, like many Tekzilla viewers, he's not so happy with their full wraps.

Want to spend a bit less on your screen protection? Last time Patrick mentioned invisibleSHIELD on Twitter he got a flood of tweets about BestSkinsEver.com. They claim to use the same material, and while they don't offer a the same lifetime guarrantee they charge a -lot- less than Zagg does! Think $15 for the invisibleSHIELD face cover vs. $5.99 from BestSkinsEver.

If you only need mobile Internet access for a few weeks, you could rent an EVDO modem from Rovair, Dana, instead signing up for 2 years. Thanks for the tip on wireless Internet rentals, Greg!

Advertisement: we're planning another Tekzilla GoToMeeting meetup where you'll get a chance to chat with the production staff that makes Tekzilla happen. You can get ready by signing up for a FREE 30 day GoToMeeting trial account at GoToMeeting.com. Just click on the “TRY IT FREE” button and enter the promo code Tekzilla!

This week's "Website We Just Can't Get Enough of" is WorldPress.org, a site that gathers news stories from various national and international press outlets from around the globe, from grass roots state-run news agencies. Chances are you won't find these stories at your local news stand... or news channel!

Lewis wants some options for hosting his podcast, "and also if there are any free options to start with, before moving to a paid service." Veronica loved this question, Lewis... it's her experience running her Sword and Laser sci-fi book club podcast production showing!

For totally and completely free hosting, Veronica's top choice is OurMedia.org, which uses the InternetArchive to serve files.

SpinXpress is a free program that helps you to upload your media and give it all the right attributes, Lewis, like creative commons licensing, tags, and descriptions.

If you'd like a little more reliability than a free site (mostly it's waiting to upload your files, not the actual hosting that's a problem) but don't want to pay an arm and a leg, check out Libsyn, since they offer free badnwidth, you just pay based on the amount of space you need.

Advertisement: Looking to build an amazing website from scratch, without learning tons of code first? Then check out Squarespace, it's powerful enough to run a retail website, but incredibly easy to work with. Signup using the code Tekzilla and you'll get 10% off for the lifetime of your membership!

DVI-D and DVI-I... why are there two? Well, Nate, nobody but the Digital Display Working Group really knows why they came up with a digital only connection (DVI-D) along with a digital and analog connection (DVI-I), but we can say that getting VGA from DVI-D is a major pain.

Steve needs a cheap component video switch so he can connect his Xbox 360 and his PS3 to the TV...

Gefen's 4x4 Component w/Audio Matrix will run you over $600 on the street... so that's out. We'd go with the $23 ATLONA 4 Port Component Video Switch w/ IR Learning from our fave source of cheap HDMI cables: MonoPrice.com. Judging from the customer reviews, it should be perfect w/ 720p viddy, tho some folks claim it induces a bit o' fuzziness in 1080p video.

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Kindle discount! Watch podcasts on your TV, AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint for Mobile Internet. Print What You Like!

Want to get a Kindle on the cheap? According to PCMag.com, you'll get a $50 discount of use the code "OPRAHWINFREY" by November 1st!

Want to watch podcasts directly on your TV? We have lots of ideas for you, David!

Warren's looking for a way to stream his audio collection from home when he travels, whether it's to the office, or to an Internet connection much farther away. If you've got a PC, then you should check out Orb. You download it to your computer, and then select the kind of media that you want to share with yourself (or others) on the go. It's free, and you can stream to almost anything: a Mac, a phone, or even a gaming console.

But there are other options, such as Jinzora and Avvenu. Jinzora is a bit more complicated, because you're actually setting up a home web server. Avvenu enables you to stream your library to your Windows Mobile smartphone.

This week's Freebie Download Pick: VirtuaWin. Do you feel like you're running out of available desktop space in Windows? Do you envy OS X's Spaces or Linux's multi- console function? VirtuaWin is an open source tool that allows you create multiple virtual desktops that allow you to expand your desktop as much as you need.

"I am about to take a 10,000+ mile road trip around the U.S. I would like to have internet access wherever I go. Which service has the fastest connection and best coverage - AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint." Sounds, epic, Erik, we've got a reccos for you... and watch out: if you go over 5GB of downloads, it could get VERY expensive.

How much video RAM do you need when you're upgrading your video card? Honestly, Anthony your issues will resolve more around the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) you pick, since that will determine your VRAM size and type!

Website We Just Can't Get Enough of!" This week's pick is PrintWhatYouLike.com! This site helps you to take the web page you want to print, and modify it to just have what you want on paper. This is great, especially when there's no printer-ready version. No more being stuck with three pages of full-color ads and other crap that you don't need!

Yi emailed from Jakarta... he's giving a thumbs up for the Asus Eee Box as a do it all home server and says: I use it for BitTorrent, http downloads, hamachi, as an FTP server, and even run Folding@Home on it" and adds "I love it. It's cheap, very quiet, don't take much space, and it comes with 2 years warranty!" Thanks for the info, Yi!

We got a dogpile of responses on Ethan's search for a new router. They can pretty much be sorted into three piles. The biggest pile said get a router than can run DD-WRT or the Tomato firmware.

A much smaller pile said build a router out of an old PC... SmoothWall, M0n0Wall, Untangle and the Astaro Security Gateway each had their fans.

The smallest pile -two letters- suggested a pair of routers. Jamal says the Linksys WRT600N Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link if money is no object, while Clark wrote in to say the Apple Airport Extreme is worth the apple tax!

JD's having mysterious problems running 3D programs like 3DS Max and Maya in Vista! The good news it's not a refresh rate issue... the bad news is you might have to update both programs... here's a like from Autodesk on how to implement workarounds for some of your problems.

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Supercharge Task Manger, Replace MS Money and Quicken, Router Request, Analog TV for HDTVs and your PC, PS3 Universal Remote.

You are correct: no matter what the credits say, Veronica is not Robert.

Lots of folks in the audience use WiFi for their Home Theater PCs and media extenders... it's only Patrick's crazy friends that have gone back to Ethernet.

No, we don't want to get into the whole "Why... why do the new Macbooks not have firewire" discussion.

SDHC (and CF) memory card performance? Thanks for the tip on Rob Galbraith amazing test page, Peter! Head over to http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

This week's Freebie download pick, MKN TaskExplorer 5, comes from our very own intern Daniel Fukuba... MKN TaskExplorer 5 turns the Windows Task Manger up a notch, providing detailed info about each process, including performance and memory graphs, DLLs loaded, threads, and access token... it provides intuitive graphs showing not only the CPU usage history, but it's Kernel time and DCP time as well. It's got widgets, and power users will love it!

Will an Eee Box have enough power to run a BitTorrent program, share files and play video? Yes, Donavan!

What's the best way to hook up a new computer to an Standard Def TV? Most newer products pretty much ignore SDTV...

Speaking of SDTV, getting NTSC TV, aka regular old analog cable into an HDTV with no S-video input is a pain!

You could spend $700 on something like an ATV-3900 video up-converter, which will take the input from your TV and output it to HDMI... if you don't mind leaving your PC on, you might want to try a TV tuner for the PC itself, like one of the Elgato devices, or a WinTV. And they'll run well under $200!

This week's "Website We Just Can't Get Enough Of" is OC remix dot com ... a website dedicated to showcasing custom arrangements and remixed versions of your favorite video game music. This non profit site was created by David Lloyd, AKA DJ Pretzels, as a place to the appreciate, preserve, and interpret the different styles of video game music.

Matt in Bayonne emails, "I'm a little stumped on universal remote controls. I would love to find one that will power all of my units, including my HD projector, HD DVR cable box, surround sound and a PS3 for Blu-ray"

Patrick's a big fan of Logitech's Harmony remotes... the new Harmony One gets the most attention, but the 720 comes in around 60 bucks cheaper... $130 at Amazon, and has most o' the features, including the nifty color LCD screen.

Adding a PS3 to a universal remote is a pain... it uses a Bluetooth based remote control. Tekzilla viewers have nothing but love for the IR2BT and Nyko PS3 adapters... OK, nothing but love and one gripe. You won't be able to power the PS3 on and off, or couldn't last I heard.

Ethan's looking for a new wireless router to replace the one that cam with his FiOS install... he could build a Windsurfer parabolic booster and slip it over the nubby antennas on the back of the router. (Amazing what they did for WiFi in Patrick's old house.)

You could also build a IPCop box from an old PC. If Verizon gave you a router compatible w/ the Tomato firmware, we'd install that... yo ucan learn more about installing the Tomtato firmware on episode 71 of Systm.

We'd love to hear what everybody in the Tekzilla crew is using/wish they were upgrading to on the wireless router front... please email your faves to tekzilla@revision3.com... and put 'router recco' in the subject line!

Any suggestions for an open source replace for Microsoft Money or Quicken? Veronica sure does, Stephen!

Check out "GnuCash", "jGnash" and "KMyMoney". If you've already been working with Quicken or MS Money, and want to import files to one of these programs, you have to make sure that they support QIF and OFX formats.

Alternately, you can get "on the cloud" with online money managers, like Mint.com or the newly free Quicken Online.

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CNET's Lori Grunin helps us answer your tough digital camera questions. Can too much RAM slow your PC? A free utility that lets you run Windows from a CD. Domain forwarding 101. Which is the better media PC: Xbox 360 or HTPC?

We got a lot of users who wanted to share their solutions to the multi-monitor/KVM question we had last week. A great many of you wrote in about Synergy and its remote desktop interface allowing you to control a number of machines with a single keyboard, mouse and monitor.

Looking for a Windows rescue disk that actually runs Windows? Then check out BartPE. This emergency boot disc creation tool not only lets you run Windows off a CD, but with plugins, also adds any user installed software apps.

Joe had a question about picking a home media center. Should he go with an Xbox 360 or just roll with a HTPC? Garnett had some pretty astute observations about each, and threw in some additional points about gaming with either one.

Frank had a peculiar problem with his system. When he added 2GB of RAM to his system to bring up the total RAM size to 4GB, it got slower. What's up with that!? More RAM = slower system speed? Veronica and Garnett explore the possible culprits.

We got CNET's Lori Grunin on to talk digital cameras, specifically the digital camera questions we asked you to send in. So if you wanna see if your question got picked or just want to know more about digital cameras, check out Veronica's one-on-one with CNET's digital camera expert.

Kwang had a question about forwarding multiple domains to the same address and a further question about the difference between an A record and C name.

The final question was from David who wanted to know about getting the best sound out of a Mac Mini so that all the expensive audio playback equipment he has can be used to the fullest.

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NAS vs. FTP. AngryAliens. What's the best way to use headphones with your to your PS3 or Xbox? TeraCopy moves files faster. How many screen can you attach to your monitor? Can I use a Solid State Disk in place of RAM?

Think Comcast's new 250GB cap is low? Viewers from around the world emailed to tell us they live with 50-60GB caps!

SpinRite! We received a few dozen responses to answers we gave on last week's question about burning in hard drives... pretty much all of 'em said Hey! Why didn't you recommend SpinRite???

Freebie Download Pick: TeraCopy. Greg sent this idea in and said, "TeraCopy is a great program that speeds up the copying of files on Windows. Perfect for moving music to an external drive!"

More than a few of you have been clamoring for a review of Axiotron's Modbook... the Macbook that's been converted to work like a Tablet PC. We've got the review on the show!

iTunes 8: Genius auto creates playlists, Genius Sidebar tries to sell songs on iTunes, nifty new browsing modes.

The New Nano goes back to 1st/2nd gen form factor (no more fatty nano!), adds the accelerometer from the Touch/iPhone for shake to shuffle... 24 hours music, 802.11b/g networking, a built in speaker... starts at $149 for 8GB.

Nick's looking to use headphones with his PS3, which, of course, doesn't have a headphone jack. We go over his options, which will work with the Xbox 360, too!

Want to send us a video question? All you need to do is record yourself in front a video camera asking a question no longer than 15 seconds. Then up load them to YouTube, and email us the link with "Video Question" in the subject line. No attachments, please!

This week's "Website We Just Can't Get Enough of" is Veronica's new fave time killer: AngryAlien.com. You won't actually find very many "angry aliens" here, but what you will find bunny rabbits, as they reenact (in 30 seconds) some of our favorite movies from Fight Club to Jaws, Goodfellas to Jurassic Park!

Bastiaan in Belgium wants some help adding more screens to his monitor. From extra cards to USB video adapters, we've got some ideas for him... and, yes, you can control muliple computers with one keyboard and mouse. You just need a KVM switch!

What's the difference between a NAS server and vanilla FTP server? We'll tell you all about it on the show, Trey!

Isn't an SSD just as fast as the RAM in your computer? If so, why do you need RAM in a computer that has an SSD for storage? Fun question, Joe... there are some big differences between the RAM in an solid state disk and the ram your CPU uses to run your OS and applications!

Jon's 22 inch monitor has an HDMI port... can he use it with his PS3? Sure, if it supports HDCP, the copy protection built into pretty much everything designed to play Blu-ray disks.

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Veronica's back! Track monthly Internet usage across all your devices. Should you burn in a new Hard Drive?

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1UP's Garnett Lee, Lightning vs. Xbox 360, Benchmarking our Badass Gaming PC with 3DMark Vantage and Crysis, Free Video Conversion for the PS3

Garnett's the Executive Editor over at 1up.com... a particularly fabulous gaming review, preview and, well, all around gaming website... he gives us a heads up on the titles that he's playing right now.

Benchmarking? We give you benchmarking results of the long awaited benchmark numbers from our Nvidia Bad Ass Gaming PC.

Eee PC 901 with the Atom processor? Elliot out in Glendale is getting 5 hours with Ubuntu and -no- power management. Excellent! (Tho it might be the battery size more than the Atom processor that's bringing the long battery life. Thanks for the heads up!

Freebie Download Pick: Wiki Taxi, which lets you access the full contents of Wikipedia without an Internet connection. It's Windows only, the abridged Wikipedia database takes up 25 MB... the full, up-to-date version of Wikipedia is 8.5GB!

Patrick in Kansas wants to know if connecting to the Internet via a 3G card is risky. Truth is, it's probably safer than your connection at work, but every Internet Connection has it share of risks; all you need to do is download something from a nasty website. Run a firewall like Comodo and good anti-virus/anti-spyware!

Lincoln sent in a video question; he's looking for a good free solution to convert his videos into something his PS3 can play. Garnett recommends Video 9 for transcoding video, and he's got ideas on how to get the video to your PS3, from thumbdrive thru Ethernet, powerline and WFi.

Hot tip: Start off with a small clip to tweak settings before you to commit to larger video. You'll find out if your video looks good in minutes instead of hours!

This week's "Website We Just Can't Get Enough Of" is Ikea Hacker, a site that archives user submitted projects that show you how to re-purpose and Mac Gyver many of Ikea's products in a variety of different ways. For example, the tv unit that was converted into a terrarium, or the photography light tent made from a trash can. There's tons of material here to inspire you, check it out!

Benchmarking our Badass 3D Gaming PC: we look at 3DMark Vantage and Crysis! We're hoping to run some dual core vs. quad core and memory benchmarks before we ship this puppy out to its lucky winner.

Our Netflix sponsored Movie Pick of the Week is WarGames... as Tekzilla viewer but you can get a free trial by signing up at today www.netflix.com/tekzilla Maurice. He writes: I have a Dell XPS 420 with 4GB of RAM, a Q6600 processer, one optical drive and three hard drives. It only has a 375 watt power supply. I would love to upgrade the graphics card to an ATI 4850 to do some gaming. Does my machine have enough juice to handle it? Will removing some of the hard drives help? If not, is the power supply a standard one that I can switch out?

Maurice wants some help picking a good power supply for his gaming PC... and he's wondering how big a power supply he needs... new 3D graphics GPUs and multiple hard drives = big power supplies, especially if you want to 'futureproof' your purchase.

PS: Don't skimp on your power supply!

Do you need a switch for a half dozen computers at home, Mark? Probably not, but Ethernet switches deliver better performance than hubs, and, well, they're cheap. In fact, hubs are getting hard to find on the shelves of our local computers stores... when you can find 'em, they're cheaper as dirt.

Ben has an arcade with 17 XBox 360s... and lightning zapped the local power... "when we turned them back on they all had a red ring, but only one stopped working for good. So was that a different kind of red ring? Please tell me i don't have to replace all 17, that would really not be good." Garnett's got the scoop on decoding the four quadrants of 'The Red Ring' on your Xbox 360... and llamma.com has a great rundown on the error codes and how to read them....

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Provide tech support for friends and family from miles away! Which is the better smart phone: the iPhone 3G or Nokia's N95? How to catch up with all your RSS feeds on your mobile phone! What the heck is causing your machine to run at 100% all the time? And how does the Bad Ass Gaming PC handle games like BioShock and Crysis?

We got several replies about a question we had in Episode 45 about getting replacement OS install discs for Dell machines stating that Dell does indeed give users replacement discs for their machines. All they need to do is call customer service or submit a support request through the website.

Our freebie download this week is SiSoft Sandra Lite. A great benchmark and diagnostic tool for you Windows XP/Vista machine.

Veronica and Pat share their opinions between the Nokia N95 and Apple's iPhone 3G. It's a battle between 5MP camera phone goodness and a slick touch screen interface.

Want to provide tech support for friends and family without driving out to their house? Then you need remote admin tools. While Windows XP and Vista have these already installed and free to use, Microsoft's particular implementation can be a bit confusing. If you want open-source options check out VNC. Although solutions like RealVNC cost money others like TightVNC are free. If you just want something that even a computer neophyte can use check out GoToMyPC. The downside is that you'll need to fork over $20 a month for a subscription.

Need a way to check out how your website looks in different browsers? Then surf on over to this week's website pick: Browsershots.

Just got that sinking feeling when all your honeymoon pics on your media card bring up an error message on your PC? Well Veronica and Pat cover a couple of options for recovering that info without relying on the supernatural, including VirtualLab Data Recovery.

And if your CPU continually runs at 100% in Windows, the problem may lie with a bug in Windows – surprise, surprise – and the answer may lie in this Microsoft support page.

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Our Badass Gaming PC Is Assembled! Replace Lost Windows Disks. Rescue Scratched CDs/DVDs. A Better Microphone For Your PC. Play DOS Games in Vista and XP. How to throttle your high speed internet bandwidth so everyone can get an equal share.

Playing DOS games in Windows on today's machines can be a tricky affair. You can try Windows XP's compatibility mode, but running a DOSBox will probably work better. If you're a fan of the old LucasArts games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle check out the ScummVM project.

This week's Freebie download pick is a pair of Free Non-Destructive Disk Partitioning Tools! We've spent the most time with GParted, great free tool for "creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them," but a general hue and cry on Twitter led us to the most fabulous PartedMagic, which packs a set of useful tools around GParted!

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Is there any point to encrypting P2P? Boxee.TV. Keep Your Notebook from Overheating, Can I upgrade my motherboard without re-installing Windows? Free Software. Weasels in our Pants!

Veronica Belmont... although according to last week's credit my name is also Roger Chang.

Ready to win our Badass Monster Gaming Machine? (Sponsored by Nvidia!) We'll have the full details soon; our build a PC segment will be delayed a week as the parts we order wind their way thru the Internets. Our apologies for the delay!

CJ's angry with Patrick! He says, "Patrick is sorely misinformed if he believes that a quad core gaming system doesn't benefit from the two extra cores." Sorry, CJ, just because boutique builders can get folks to drop cash on quad core CPUs doesn't mean they help much on gaming. Check out Look at ExtremeTech's Core 2 Quad vs. the Core 2 E8500. We're building dual core for now... then, when quad core chips get cheap (and there are heaps more game that pop with quad core) we'll upgrade!

This week's Freebie Download Pick: Notepad Plus Plus a nice clean text editor designed for coders that supports syntax highlighting for languages like C, C#, C++, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Perl, and PHP. (If you're hard core enough you can define your own language syntax!) and packs auto-completion, bookmarks, split screen editing, a hex editor... and quite a bit more!

Zac wants to know which media center software he should on his Mac, and wants to know what we think of Boxee. Veronica's got a full review of this slick (and social) replacement for Front Row that works with the Apple Remote.

Want to add music or sound effect to Skype calls? So does Eric.

We want your questions on video! Just record yourself asking a question no longer than 15 seconds, upload the video to YouTube, then email us the link with "Video Question" in the subject line. (No attachments, please!)

As an added incentive.... Veronica will be giving away Boxee invites to 25 people at random who email us with VMAIL questions!

This Week's Website We Can't Get Enough Of: GetHuman.com, one of the crappiest looking and most useful websites we've ever talked about. GetHuman allows you to figure out which combination of phone buttons will connect you to an actual living, breathing person that can answer your questions!

James emails from the UK with some serious concerns about P2P privacy "It's become quite clear that the government are teaming up with ISPs in order to punish anyone caught using filesharing programs; I've heard that DNS configuration, and encryption can be quite valuable in protecting yourself online, but I'm unsure where to start."

First off, we'd love for the Tekzilla Crew to email us with their ideas about how to protect yourself online... second, we've got some questions about how useful it is to encrypt P2P traffic, but encrypting email is quite useful. Tor is great for hiding your tracks when you're online.

As far as DNS goes... yes, you can use OpenDNS to help secure yourself, and here's some more info on that: Secure and Speed Up Internet Surfing with OpenDNS. BTW, Dan Kaminsky is -the- source, his website , DoxPara Research is chock full o' useful info,

Yes, the Pirate Bay Wants To Encrypt The Entire Interent. Good luck with that.

Daniel wants to know if he can upgrade his motherboard and CPU without reinstalling Windows.

Is that notebook burning your lap? Xander asks "Exactly what options do us laptop owners have when it comes to keeping our cool - besides moving to a colder area? I've heard about laptop cooling stands, but how well do these function?" We've got options for Xander

Macbook/Macbook Pro users should check out SMC Fan Control... anybody know of a good Windows fan control utility? Email us: Tekzilla@Revision3.com.

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Cleaning Electronics. 1.5 TB Hard Drives. Share your EVDO Internet connection. The best way to back up your drivers. Fix GPU Overheating. XBox 360 Updates! What -is- the point of Twitter?

Where's Veronica? She's at E3 checking out the new games. She'll be back hosting Tekzilla next week; we've got Roger Chang out of the control room and hosting today!

Xbox 360 Fall Update: you'll be able to install Xbox games onto the hard drive to speed up loading, Netflix Movies and LIVE Primetime (TV shows and movies from NBC, SciFi and more!)

Seagate has announced 1.5TB Hard Drives! (750GB drives are under $100 now.)

Backing up your drivers before you rebuild your Windows machine... we've got some ideas to make John's life easier, 'cause we hate tracking down drivers.

Tekzilla's Gadget of the Week: CRC QD Electronic Cleaner. Patrick uses it like an alcohol soaked q-tip in a can to clean particularly cruddy electronics.

Mark wants to share the Internet connection between the EVDO modem on his notebook and his iPod touch, other computers, a PS3, XBox360 Elite, and Wii.

No problem. You can turn on ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) XP Vista in Windows (and OS X).

Devin's checked out Twitter and has one thing to say: "I don't get it." Neither did Patrick till he checked out an alternative Twitter client (like Twhirl. And, as Roger puts it, "you need a group of friends online with you. Like any social network, if you don't have people to bounce ideas, comments or topics off of it can be pretty boring."

Want to hang with us on Twitter? Come hang with Roger, Veronica and Patrick. It's weird, but we like it.

If you don't want to be the router for your friends and gadgets, you can buy an EVDO Router, such as the D-Link DIR-450 or Cradlepoint's CTR500 Cellular Travel Router.

WiFi upgrade fun: 802.11n wireless router vs. an 802.11g notebook? Rob, you'll need an 802.11n WiFi card for your notebook for it to work, and, yes, it should boost the distance and speed you can connect from.

Got a question? Send us a video! All you need to do is record yourself in front a video asking a question no longer than 15 seconds. Post the video on YouTube and email us the link with "Video Question" in the subject line. (No attachments, please, post 'em on YouTube!)

Website We Just Can't Get Enough of: Pandora.com. It just might be the last music website you'll ever need... all you need to do is enter the name of an artist you enjoy!

Rob wants to protect his new phone... I can't wait for the Golden Shellback Splash Proof Coating to become a product I can buy. It's a it's a waterproof polymer that coats your electronics inside and out. As in your gear will operate underwater!

More traditional bombproofing for a an iPhone 3G? Patrick uses an InvisibleShield to protect the screen on his phone. OtterBox makes pretty bombproof cases... now we just need a YoTank for the iPod.

The dual 4850 GPUs in David's gaming PC "give up and reboot" whenever he does any heavy gaming, with temps hitting 90 degrees. Roger's got tips for dealing with overheating and power issues n your PC. Think fans, dual vs. single rails, and... well, watch the show.

Turns out there's a $20 plugin for Toast 9 Titanium that'll play Blu-ray disks on OS X... here's the spiel from Macworld. Thanks Kyle!

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Prevent Notebook Theft at College. ExtremeTech.com's Jason Cross answers your Graphics Cards questions. Answer Email Automatically. HoverIP. The Home of the Underdogs. Macbook Pro vs. Blu-ray.

What's the best graphics card for $200? Should I upgrade the graphics in my notebook? Is running a pair of cards in SLI worth the money? How fast is the 9800 vs. the 8800? I don't game... what kind of graphics card do I need? Will external GPUs be worth trying? You sent in a ton of great graphics card questions, ExtremeTech.com's video card mavin Jason Cross joined us to bring you the answers!

"I'm confused about the correct way to charge a battery. About half the sites I read say you shouldn't charge much, and let the battery run down, while the other half say the opposite, that you should charge often and not let the battery run down. Which way is correct?" Good question, Michael! If you don't want to kill that pricey Lithium Ion battery in your notebook, phone, iPod or whatever, follow our guidelines for charging your battery!

"Is there an email or IM service which will let me send sms text messages from my computer?" Sure are, Maxwell, and since most of the online text messaging services are web-based, it doesn't really matter whether you're on windows or mac. Veronica tested a couple, just to see what was out there and found that text'em worked best... plus it's free!

This Week's Freebie Download Pick: HoverIP, any easy way to access to all your network settings scattered around Windows XP in one easy to use control panel.

We received a few concerned emails about last week's Freebie Download AVG Free Anti-Virus, specifically, the built in Link Scanner function, and it's ability to spike traffic to unsuspecting websites... AVG has issued a patch that disables the more aggressive scanning done by Link Scanner, and says "Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us."

This week's Website We Just Can't Get Enough of: the Home of the Underdogs, a "Tribute to the best underrated PC games of all time" that preserves and catalogs the early history of PC Gamging... right down to hosting the code for games that have fallen out of copyright and helping you run games designed for 8MHz PCs on today's 3GHz processors!

Nate wrote in "I respond to a lot of e-mails every day and most of my responses are the same. Is there a program for OS X that will allow me to reply to similar e-mails without re-writing or copying and pasting the entire email?" Veronica reccomends the legendary TextExpander, $30, which you can use to fill out forms, enter signatures, or even save whole paragraphs you can paste in when you type a short abbreviation.

Anybody know of a TextExpander-ish tool for Windows? Please email a link to: tekzilla@revision3.com and we'll share it on the show!

Jeff wants to know what the deal is with playing Bluray on his brand spankin' new MacBook Pro... there isn't a Blu-ray playback option built in!

Veronica wants to see more of your lovely faces on Tekzilla! So please please please... keep sending us your video emails. Remember make the questions no longer than 15 seconds, up load them to YouTube, and email us the linke with "Video Question" in the subject line. AND NOOOO ATTACHMENTS.

Will the security ports built into Jacob's notebook keep it from walking away if he leaves the door on his dorm room open. (No AC otherwise!) Yes... as long as the thief isn't real determined. It helps to plop it in a drawer out of site to keep 'theft of opportunity' temptation to a minimum!

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A great point and shoot camera that does video, tools and techniques to bring spring cleaning to your hard drive, Roger compares some great free FTP clients: there's more difference than you might think!

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YouTube Hacks. Free Firewall. Notebook battery upgrades. HD netcams? Separate feeds for the daily and weekly episodes!

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Your picks: DVD Backup Tools. Inkscape: A free Illustrator Alternative. Computer Speakers That Sound Great. A Print Server that Works, Rock Band on the Wii, Ethernet and power-line Interference, CompUSA Stores Are Gone.

Quite a few of you use DVD Decrypter for ripping copy protected VOB files to your drive.

DVD43 a free tool that works much like AnyDVD was big on your list.

A -ton- of you use either DVDFab's free DVDFab HD Decrypter, DVDFab Platinum.

Thanks everybody for writing in! We had a love hate relationship with 'em, but it's a little sad that CompUSA's retail stores are dead. CompUSA.com lives on, tho, the URL is now run by Tiger Direct.

While we're in a deathwatch kind o' mood... Analog Cell Service is dead, too. OK, technically, "cellular telephone companies will not be required to provide analog service" as of February 18, 2008... watch out for your older OnStar or alarm system cell service!

Inkscape: How does this free alternative compare to Adobe Illustrator the industry standard vector graphics editor... and just what the heck are vector and raster graphics? Our very own Pixel Princess, Stephanie Chu, aka Revision3's Interactive Designer, is here to give us the scoop!

AppleTV = 1000 rental titles by March 1st? Not even close, says Macworld's Christopher Breen.

1UP.com's very own Garnett Lee joins us in the cohost slot!

DoD wipe? As of November 2007, the Department of Defense no longer accepts 'successive over-writes' as a means of sanitizing drives... what they will accept to wipe drives makes for an interesting read

Thanks for the heads up, Ed... btw, we agree w/ Ed, who said "I don't think users who wipe their drives clean have anything to worry about unless they think the NSA is after them :-)" Damn skippy!

BJ from Deptford, NJ is looking for a recco on computer speakers for listening to music. If money is no object, you might consider home stereo speakers (shielded, please, if you have a CRT) and a decent reciever... or Garnett's new fave sound source, the $400 Razor Mako 2.1

We found some great options for a little over $100... the Klipsch Promedia 2.1 deliver a ton of quality sound (with a rockin' low end) for as little as $120... if you don't want to deal with wiring a subwoofer (and don't need the big bass that comes with one) Creative's GigaWorks T40 are definately worth a listen.

Scott from Sound Bend, IN can't understand why there are wireless and wired print servers.... and would prefer to buy a print server that works, please. We understand that pain. Most of the networking gear in Patrick's house carries the Linksys brand, but he had a miserable experience with their wireless print servers. (He says don't buy any print server you can't return, and try to find out if the mfg supports your printer!)

Apple's Airport Express does a pretty good job for PCs and macs... and The iFelix unofficial Airport Extreme and Airport Express Printer Compatibility List is a great resource put together by folks that use it as a print server.

Will EA release a version of Rock Band on the Wii? Yes, Benjamin, it's due to hit the shelves later this year... using Wiimotes!

Mike's new Ethernet line dies every time he tries to run it thru the wall... but laying it on across the floor, it works fine. Sounds like he's got a power line running parallel to it in that wall. You need to cross power lines at a 90 degree angle!

No, Greg, converting your 320 Kbps MP3 files to Apple Lossless won't increase the quality, but it'll almost always increase the file size. Try re-encoding those disks directly to your lossless format!

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Rip any DVD with AnyDVD, MP3 Player Reccos, Game Developers Conference, HD picture frame antenna, Spoof a MAC address, get kicked out of school. Wondercon!

... and he's got the scoop from the Game Developers Conference '08 (The PC Gaming Alliance was big news, sort of... and where is Sony's Home for the Playstation??? )

Antennas Direct's hid its newest HDTV antenna inside a picture frame... Jim Louderback put the PF7 Picture Frame Antenna thru the paces and found it does a great job sucking down analog HDTV. It's cheap, too!

We love the comic books, so our producers Roger and Serafina took a trip to Wondercon, and came back with quite the collection of video.

Can't rip that DVD? You need some stronger tools.... AnyDVD is the bomb at gettting around copy protection on Windows.

On OS X, the folks at Handbrake have a step by step guide for dealing with disks that won't rip: you'll need Fairmount, DVD2OneX and this page!

Yahya wants a recco on a portable music player... that delivers excellent sound quality, and maybe that isn't an iPod. First off, make sure you've got quality audio files to listen to... and a decent set of headphones. (Garnett's convinced the player is the least of your worries.)

Patrick's spent a bunch of time with the Zune and it's quite good. We've also heard good things about Creative's Zen V Plus, the oh so stylish iRiver Clix Gen 2 is a great (if pricey) follow up to the most excellent iriver Clix. If you're looking for video playback, too, the editors at Cnet are big on the Archos 605.

Several folks want to buy Patrick's old Xbox 360 HD DVD drive.... can anybody beat $7.37?

Why does an HDTV cost more than the same sized LCD monitor? Good question, Christopher.

Free file o' the week:

Quick Media Converter lets you drag and drop video into 13 different formats, including PSP, iPod and web friendly formats!

Turning a vertical PC case on its side and running it that way hurt it? We wouldn't worry, Benedict. Patrick's run most of his PCs in horizontal mode with no ill effects. Just don't cover the vents. (They do take up more desktop space, that way, tho!)

Dave, Michael and "B" wrote in with ideas to help Jesse get his Xbox 360 connected to the his dorm's ResNet... and Eric sent a warning that spoofing a MAC address can get you kicked out of school. (It got him tossed!)

What's a good program to format you computer Naevek? Whatever comes with the OS, Windows or OS X will work fine for partitioning a drive.

If you want to do a 'non destructive' partition, ie, you want to change a partition without wiping all the data from inside it, Paragon's Parition Manager is the gold standard, tho GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor is an excellent Open Source alternative. (FYI, here's a great guide to modifying partitions with GParted)

No matter what tool you use, we recco backing up your data before you resize a partition... just in case.

Now, Naevek, if you're looking to format and wipe a drive before you, say, sell the computer it's inside of, our favorite tool is Darik's Boot and Nuke... it should be more than enough to protect your identity... tho Wikipedia says that as of November 2007, "overwriting is no longer a DoD-acceptable sanitization method for magnetic media".

Converting FLAC files to MP3 files? No problem, John. We use dBpoweramp, tho you will have to pay for MP3 support... ya know, since you're using a Zune, you might want to go with WMA instead of MP3... you should be able to do that for free in dBpoweramp.

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More on Router Firmware, EL, Wiring Robots, Wardriving, Data Sanitizing... and your ideas for future episodes: growing pot, building lightsaber replicas and DIY headphone amps!

Wardriving seems to be a favorite of viewer Justin. He's been sending, no, flooding, our email servers with requests to do an "...episode of Systm on Wardriving", so Patrick has Wardriving in 60 Seconds for Justin. ;

Patrick just wishes he'd remember to suggest InSSIDer instead of NetStumbler for Wardriving on Windows... it's mucho more functional on Vista and offers some nifty features.

Patrick out in Wisconsin wants us to build a Cantenna... nothing wrong with that, but we recommends he check out EP 45: Practically Free WiFi Antennas... where we went over 3 low cost but better than stock DIY options for boosting Wi-Fi reception.

Nick was so enamored with our build a combat robot episode a few months back he wants a wiring diagram for that very design. Thankfully Dave is here to share his wisdom on the whole thing and why it's a lot simpler than you might think.

Michael had question about an alternative method to erasing your hard drive that we didn't cover in Episode 74. Is it a sure fire winner or does it a few flaws that could potentially leave him susceptible to data thieves?

Danny had a question about the noise generated by the electroluminescence sheet we used in Episode 70 and Andrew had a related question about how to go about installing an EL sheet into the back of Macbook.

Of course in every batch of email we get there are always a few that could be considered eccentric or even "odd". But since we're all about equal opportunity we decided to put in a few of the more colorful email requests we received.

Brandon is quite excited about having us dedicate a show to growing pot... in a DIY hydroponics setup... in a secret 'geek friendly' hidden room behind a false bookshelf... wired with all the connectivity any geek might need while hiding out. Pat and Dave are amused and explain what may or may not keep them from attempting it in the near future.

Finally, Thomas wants us to show him how to build... a lightsaber. Not some cheap knock-off that looks like a lightsaber but a real honest to gosh replica of a the prop lightsabers used in the Star Wars movies.

Coincidentally, Dave just happens to be one of the world's biggest Star Wars fans and freaks on the planet. How freaky? Let's see: Homemade Storm trooper armor? Check. Hand built life-size R2D2? Double-check (he has 2). Replica lightsabers? Big check... he has a complete set based on the same parts the original prop makers built for the original Star Wars.

If you guys are interested... this is one we'll do soon!

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The simplest DIY media server. Ex Machina. Using the Xbox 360 HD DVD with your PC. Find Music: Songza and Songbird. Cheap Notebooks, Buying Online, is WiFi 802.11n done yet?

Looking for music on the web? We've got nifty tools for you to check out!

Songbird is billed as a "Desktop media player mashed up with the web." We think of it more as a media browser. Built on the Mozilla application framework (the code underneath Firefox!), Songbird skims web pages for downloadable audio files when you load them, can play your local audio, and thru plugins, even manage your iPod. (And this just scratches the surface.)

Songza is pure music search. And playback. And one click posting to your website. You can even build playlists. We just can't figure out just exactly where it searches... tho we suspect it plays the audio tracks from files found in Google Video searches... you can't download the songs you find to your desktop, but there's a lot of stuff being played from YouTube thru Songza!

"Any ideas when or if Draft n will become standard?" Sure, Scott. The 802.11n spec has one last IEEE vote in early 2008, then should be finalized and on the shelves around September 2008. The years of staring at Pre-N and Draft-N on boxes is almost over... Wi-Fi Alliance certification has already begun.

Certification would be nice, since we've bought Draft n products off the shelves recently that wouldn't work together.

Do you need 802.11n? It's not going to make your Internet connection faster (not unless your existing Wi-Fi network is saturated with too many clients... rather unusual for a home setup) but, in theory, it should give you four times the bandwitch of 802.11g... which is nice for transferring big files across your network. (Gigabit Ethernet stomp it, speed wise, tho you'll have to run a cable!)

The ground has been doing the earthquake thing here in San Francisco, so we sent our fearless producer Neha Tiwari to the Berkeley Seismological Lab to get the latest on earthquake science.

Nintendo fans have a whole new Mario experience: Super Mario Galaxy will probably be the biggest title on the Wii this season... and with 40 galaxies, gorgeous art, and a whole new style of play, it's living up to the hype.

Ex Machina, Heather's producer pick this week is one of Patrick's favorite comics, too. Penned by Brian K. Vaughan, the series follows the exploits of retired super hero Mitchell Vaughan, who was elected Mayor of New York City post 9/11. Are all his powers -the ability to communicate with and control machines- gone? Not exactly...

"Power Down": is the latest trade paperback in the series... if you're starting from scratch, you'll want Ex Machina VOL. 1: THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS.

Code Red is where Jessica tells you about her latest obsession... this week it's FFFFOUND!.com, a neat little place on the Internet where you can post and share your favorite images. The service also has the ability to recommend images it thinks you'll like based on your interests. This isn't another Flickr clone. The makers call it "an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!" Jessica agrees.

John needs a cheap notebook, he's a "full-time student living off water, sunshine and take-out" that needs to talk with his family overseas. We've got ideas, from a Nokia's $250 N800 Internet Tablet to the name brand notebooks showing up at CompUSA for $650 with 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drives... we're talking Sony and HP here, not no brands.

That said.. John, we know you don't trust posting your credit card info on the web... but, like Jessica said, it's time to get over that. If you like to shop local and support local business, that's awesome, but millions of folks shop online safely every day. And US federal law limits the liability of card holders to $50 in the event of theft, regardless of the amount charged on the card.

Why didn't we recommend a used notebook? Did you see that pile of parts Patrick had at the beginning of the show? That was a used notebook... make sure it works before you hand over any cash!

Yes, Andrew, you can use the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player as the HD DVD drive in your computer/Home Theater PC... if you want to play movies, you'll need Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra, $99, which can also play back Blu-ray movies, if you have a Blu-ray drive. (Only the Japanese version of Intervideo's WinDVD has HD DVD playback.)

One catch: you'll need an HDCP compliant graphics card and monitor to get the full HD resolution out of those pre-recorded movies. (Tho we hear you can get around that with a copy of SlySoft's AnyDVD. Email us if you're curious.

You'll also need a powerful system to play back HD DVD or Blu-ray movies. Run CyberLink's Blu-ray/HD DVD Advisor before you drop the cash on the software!

As Jessica pointed out, this isn't much of a bargain. You're paying $180 for the drive and $99 for the software (not to mention the whole HDCP ready graphics card question). You can buy Toshiba's HD-A2 for $230 at Walmart and lots of other stores. Sure, it's not the latest HD DVD Player (there's no 1080p out), but it does a pretty good job.

The online shoe store Jessica and Patrick mentioned? It's called Zappos.com.

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Senior Support Engineer Maile Ohye explains the background and implementation considerations for using IP delivery on your site.

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Google co-founder Larry Page and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin discuss the FCC's white spaces vote and Google's vision for wireless broadband connectivity at the Wireless Communication Association International conference. The event, moderated by WCA President Fred Campbell, took place on November 6, 2008 in San Jose, California.

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Your router gets a major upgrade with the free Tomato Firmware: monitor bandwidth consumption, boost your WiFi signal, make major QoS tweaks, track the results with shiny graphics... and more!

I'd like to give you a project suggestion for Systm: show us the proper method for upgrading an older wireless router with ddwrt firmware.

Frank in Tulsa

Great idea, especially since Patrick's long suffering Linksys WRT54G has been a touch flakey after the last firmware upgrade.

We just want to make one change: DD-WRT is great, but we're more into the Tomato Firmware upgrade... it's a tad less polished looking, but has slightly better quality of service contol than DD-WRT, allows boosting your your WiFi output, and has amazing bandwidth monitoring tools, which are great to keep in mind in wake of the new Comcast cap!

It runs on Linksys' WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers, and, as Wikipedia puts it, is "based on the GPL sourcecode released by Linksys, but includes proprietary binary modules from the chipset manufacturer Broadcom. Portions of the code are licensed under the GNU General Public License, but the source code for the user interface is under a more restrictive license which forbids use without the author's permission." Which is to say, it's Open Source.

You can download the Tomato firmware at polarcloud.com/tomato.

The Tomato Firmware Wiki is incredibly helpful.

Here's the Tomato FAQ if you're curious.

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Cut and past your way to better WiFi reception? It costs pennies and takes the fabrication skills of a kindergartner... then bend a 6dBi Omni and a 10dBi directional out of copper wire!

It's the infamous Ez-12 Parabolic Reflector, hosted at FreeAntennas.com.

Here's the EZ-12 template link.

Omnidirectional Antennas = radiate signal 360 degrees...

A panel mount or surface mount female N connector and 300mm of solid core copper is the heart of the Home-brew Compact 6dBi Collinear Antenna a slick e found on MartyBugs.net.

Directional Antennas = generally concentrates your WiFi in a single direction.

We went to the Seattle Wireless most excellent collection Antenna HowTo for the SardineCanAntenna a biquad you can build with or without an N-connector, at least at the antenna end! (just search WiFi Biquad to find a host of construction ideas!) You don't have to use a sardine can, just about anything will work as a reflector, even a pressed CD... it just needs to be metallic and around 150mm in diameter.

There are quite a few more WiFi antenna designs out there... these are just some of our faves!

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If it's got a 386 processor and 32MB of RAM, and you can find a pair of Ethernet cards, you can turn that Junk PC into a serious Firewall to protect your network.

We walk you thru the installation on this episode of Systm: It'll keep your network seriously safe.

But don't take our word for it: InfoWorld gave it a Best of Open Source Security Award for aka a 'Bossie' for Best Firewall and PCPro gave it Five Stars in their review.

It's essentially a stripped down and focused Linux distribution that does nothing but stateful packet inspection, Snort intrusion prevention, IPSec VPN, and plug holes bad gals on the Internet might use to get on your network).

The main trick in setting up IPCop, after, of course, you've found an old Intel/AMD/Cyrix/Via/whichever machine that still runs, is securing a couple of compatible Ethernet cards... check cards against the IPCop Hardware Compatibility List before you buy 'em!

You can download it here... we prefer the ISO version you can burn to a bootable CD-ROM, it's called "ipcop-1.4.18-install-cd.i386.iso"

Check out the documentation before you start, and definately take soem time to check out the laundry list of IPCop Add Ons you can use to customize your IPCop installation with various filters, servers and (sweet!) OpenVPN.

Check it out!

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We've got half a day of wiring to build the Wireless Access Truck out of an EVDO modem, a Wilson Electronics Cell Phone Booster, a 12V Mini ITX PC and a WiFi adapter... Hit it.

"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it."

OK, so the Illinois State Police aren't after us. Yet. But we love that flick.. and it always reminds of us taking road trips.

Which reminds us of a recent road trip where we had three notebooks four people, and one EVDO modem... what we needed was Wireless Access in the truck. Or, as we're calling it, the Wireless Access Truck. (Props, by the way, to the StompBox, an achingly similar project we found about three hours before we started taping this show.... the onboard live tracking in that machine is way cool, tho we're going for something simpler than Tar's Pebble Linux implementation!)

We'll be removing the spaghetti wiring from Patrick's beloved truck in the next episode, dropping in the components to the Wireless Access Truck, and seeing what sharing WiFi feels like at highway speeds.

Before that we wanted to walk thru the components we're bundling together... and marvel at the simple fact than an iPhone, Blackberry, or any of laundry list of phones out on the market can do what folks wanted to do with CarPCs back in the day, like play MP3s and run mapping software, but they do it in a smaller package, and with wireless access, to boot.

We're also amazed at how cheap EVDO routers have gotten. From a few hundred dollars a few years ago, you can now pick up a home router for an EVDO modem for well under $200, such as Kyocera's KR1 Mobile Router or D-Link 3G Mobile Router DIR-450. We even found one that promises to work with an USB EVDO modem, the CradlePoint PHS300 Personal Hotspot.

Of course, Systm is about getting your DIY on, so we rustled thru the parts bin in Patrick's garage and found an 800MHz Mini-ITX machine that runs on 12V. (That means no annoying 12V from the car to 120V via an inverter... the $25 we paid for it is just a sweet bonus.)

We'll plug our EVDO modem into that box and run Internet Connection Sharing on it via Ubuntu or Windows XP.

The EVDO modem is going to get a serious boost when we're out in the emptier regions of I-5 thanks to a 3 Watt amplifier, the Mobile Wireless Cellular/PCS Dual-Band 824-894MHz / 1850-1990MHz Amplifier (801201) from Wilson Electronics. We went with a more expensive wireless booster, but we'll use the http://wilsonelectronics.com/ViewProductB.php?ID=31 instead of a chocolate bar antenna to share the boost with cell phones and the modem.

Next week we'll be wiring up Patrick's truck which is in desperate need of some high amperage power into the cab (he regularly runs 2 50W race radios and has a 900W of power amplifiers on the way) with proper wire gauges and fusing... we'll go over that week, along with seeing how well the our DIY WAP works out on the highway!

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