ON COMPUTERS : Blog Talk offers Net time to radio-show wannabes
Posted on Monday, August 25, 2008
We wrote about Blog Talk Radio when it started two years ago. Anyone and everyone can host a radio show for free, simply by registering at the Web site: BlogTalkRadio. com. After you register, you get a phone number to call and a woman with a wonderfully cultured British accent tells you what time is reserved for you to call in your broadcast. When that time arrives, you phone in and are “on the air.” Well, virtually anyway. The broadcasts are carried over the Internet. Blog Talk has grown enormously since we first reported it, now sending out more than 4, 000 Internet broadcasts. Most are by people talking about nothing in particular. We even posted a “broadcast” of high-tech news and column highlights awhile back. But we never kept up the broadcasts, being frustrated by the awkward nature of the call-in procedure. The instructions you get for recording your broadcast kind of threw us for a loop, but they’ve made some improvements.
ARTRAGE IS ALL THE RAGE We have two drawing tablets, and boy, are they fun.
What makes them fun is the software: ArtRage 2. This is a full graphics program, capable of very professional-looking work. In fact, a New York subway artist who calls himself “Velendria” uses his laptop computer, a Bamboo tablet, and the ArtRage software to draw portraits of fellow passengers as he rides between home in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan. He has about 500 sketches on display at Flickr. com, one of the biggest image-sharing sites on the Web.
ArtRage 2, for Windows or Mac, sells for $ 25 at ArtRage. com. The small Bamboo tablet is by Wacom and sells for $ 63 at Amazon. com. The ArtRage software worked just as well with our other larger drawing tablet, the G-Pen M 609, from GeniusNet; we found it at Amazon for $ 75. (You can get a smaller version for only $ 37. ) The tablet comes with Ulead’s PhotoImpact software. This is a great program, though not directly a drawing program like ArtRage. We’ve used PhotoImpact for many years for photo editing, and it has some drawing tools as well.
FREE PHOTOSHOP Most of the people who buy Adobe’s popular Photoshop program use only about 10 percent of its power. That’s too bad, because it’s an expensive program (around $ 650 ), and you can edit photos (the primary use ) with many programs costing a lot less. In fact, you can even get Photoshop itself for a lot less: How about free ? The free version is called Photoshop Express, and you can get it by going to Photoshop. com / express. There’s no manual, but we recently got a little book called “The Adobe Photoshop Express Beta Pocket Guide” by Jeff Carlson. It’s $ 10 from Peachpit Press, at Peachpit. com. The pocket guide covers all the important points in using Photoshop for editing: highlighting, popping the color, soft focus, tinting, sketch outlining, etc. (Here’s another footnote from the early days of computer tech history: Bob recalls that Peachpit Press started in the founders’ kitchen, and he used a Xerox copier to print the books. )
FREE ANTI-SPYWARE Spybot Search and Destroy is our favorite free program for ferreting out and removing spyware from your computer, and it just came out in a new version. Scans are much faster, and the spies lurking in your machine are removed automatically, instead of having to be selected for removal individually. Spybot works with all Windows versions from Windows 95 on up to Vista. It also works with some versions of Linux. Vista comes with a built-in anti-spyware program called Windows Defender. But in a recent study done by Webroot (Webroot. com ), the Defender missed 84 percent of spyware and other malicious code. Webroot is itself the maker of antispyware software and related utilities, but these are not free. Its Spy Sweeper program is sold by subscription, starting at $ 30 a year.
NORTON TUNEUPS Symantec has a group of remote control tuneup services you can buy to speed up your computer and get rid of useless junk stored on your hard drive. The services are sold under the Norton brand, which is owned by Symantec. (Norton, by the way, is named for Peter Norton, a former Buddhist monk, who developed the first program for recovering accidentally erased data from PCs. Symantec purchased it from him. ) You don’t have to own any Norton utility programs to use the tuneup service; you call them up and they use remote control software to look over your computer. Costs run $ 30 to $ 70, depending on how extensive you want the cleanup to be. Everything they do, you could also do yourself with just a few simple routines. It’s not hard, but many people would just as soon not bother and prefer to use a remote cleanup service instead.
We tried the $ 70 service on Joy’s Vista computer and the technician found that her computer was already running pretty cleanly and there was little to do. We had high hopes that this new Norton service would make the computer run faster, but the reality of the matter is that the Vista operating system is just plain slow. The best way to speed it up is to add more memory (RAM ). This particular computer has a gigabyte of RAM, because that’s the way it came when we bought it; the Vista operating system was added later. Two gigabytes are what a Vista user really needs.
Symantec has an incredibly clunky Web address for reaching the right screen if you want to use the tuneup service. A simpler way is to just do a Web search on the words “Norton Premium Services.” This takes you to the right place. NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the “On Computers” Web site: www. oncomp. com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol. com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp. com.
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