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Leo Laporte A technology journalist, author and broadcast personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Web, video games, digital music and consumer electronics. |
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Amber MacArthur An experienced Web content and usability strategist, Amber is also a tech journalist who specializes in Internet, software, and gadget trends and tips. |
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Video Conferencing
Maxime, Laval, QC
Q: I would like to know if there is a software that supports video conferencing. A software like ICQ, MSN messenger. I would like to connect with two of my friends at the same time. Thank you
Of course ichat on the mac does support up to five people. On Windows you might want to try ivisit. http://ivisit.com/ - you can conference with up to 8 people. But these conferences require a lot of bandwidth - so don't be too disappointed if you don't get the quality you'd like.
Demagnetizing USB Drives
Sebastian, Montreal, QC
Q: Can data be lost on a USB thumb drive if it comes too close to a magnet?
I've used a service called Tech Restore to fix an iBook screen and they did it quickly and relatively cheaply. http://techrestore.com/xcart/home.php?cat=308 They offer door to door service in the Continental US, but you can call them to arrange shipping from Canada.No.
Sean's note: Unlike hard drives and floppy drives, flash memory doesn't use magnetism to change the state of the bits — it actually uses a small electrical current. So the answer is no, getting a USB memory key too close to a magnet shouldn't cause any damage at all.
Talk is cheap, though, so I put my money where my mouth is: I took a one gigabyte flash drive and loaded it up with data, then took it upstairs to our bulk-erase machine, which is designed to completely erase tapes and floppies by passing them under a very powerful magnet. I put the thumb drive onto the belt, ran it through, and the magnet actually held it in place for a few seconds. When I retrieved it, all the data was still there.
Now — there are other ways to damage a flash drive. Memory cells inside a drive only have so many "change states" in them before they stop working altogether—about 10,000. That's more than enough to accommodate typical usage of the drive, and you should only start to see ill effects if you're using the thumb drive as a scratch drive or as the boot drive for your operating system. You can also damage the drive if a power surge goes through your USB port and into the drive itself. Of course, some drives are just cheaply made and not up to regular use. A good rule of use is that if data is starting to get corrupted on your thumb drive, it's probably time to replace it with a more reliable model.
How To Make DVDs
Luigi, Anjou, QC
Q: When I burn a DVD with some video clips and put it in my DVD Player and my porable DVD Player I get a error that it is saids Disk Error. So I was wondering why this happeing to me and what do I do to fix it?
Sean's note: When you're trying to play back video files on a DVD player, the important thing that you have to remember when you're burning the disc is that you can't just burn the files onto a data DVD in their original format: a DVD video player won't have any clue what to do with them. Instead, you need to start the project as a "video project", so your burning software knows what format the eventual disc will take; it will then take the video files and convert them to a format that your DVD player can understand. You'll get less video onto the disc this way, but there's no point having more videos on a disc if you can't play them back.
