About Bose Corporation
Based in Framingham, Massachusetts, Bose was founded by Dr Amar G Bose in 1964. Bose Corporation is an American specialist in high-end audio systems. Bose is world’s leading manufacturer in home theater speakers and professional audio market. It manufactures variety of model for home theater system including its own patented Wave radio system. [...]
I’ve bought a new HD video camera which records in AVCHD. When I looked at the Pinnacle editing software supplied with it, I read that the minimum requirements include an Intel quad core processor running at 2.66GHz. I have consulted PC World, Dell and HP, and none has a home computer running at this speed. What can I do?
Richard Cooke
JS: AVCHD is one of the high-definition movie standards used by Blu-ray and HD DVD and allows for pictures that are 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. It is a highly compressed format, to save space, but as a consequence it requires a great deal of processing power to reconstruct the original image. What the camera salesmen don’t tell you is that just displaying 25 of these large images a second is beyond many PCs, unless they have accelerated graphics. Editing them can be a nightmare, and a common approach (taken by Apple’s Final Cut Pro, among others) is to transcode them into something that is easier to handle. The Wikipedia page on AVCHS lists some of these converters.
Editing native AVCHD is not, of course, beyond reach. However, such powerful PCs are generally not off-the-shelf items, but assembled to order. First, pick your Intel Core 2 Quad processor from Intel’s spec sheet: the Q6700 is the cheap 2.66GHz chip, but there’s a newer, better 2.83GHz version, the Q9550. Next, look for a PC with that Q number, 4GB or 8GB of memory, and 64-bit Windows Vista. An example is the Mesh Xtreme X9550GTX with a Q9550, 8GB of memory, a terabyte of hard drive space, Blu-ray player and 24 inch widescreen monitor displaying 1,920 x 1,200 for £1,199 inc VAT.
On its own, Pinnacle Studio 12 will run OK on a 1.6 GHz Dual Core processor with 1GB of memory, so the problem is down to the videos you want to edit. You could reduce the PC hardware requirements by reducing the size of your videos. Instead of shooting 1,080p, for example, you could use 1,440 x 1,080 or go down to 720p (1,280 x 720 pixels), like broadcast HDTV. However, my experience is that editing MPeg-2 movies is a pig on a fast Pentium, and I’d expect editing MPeg-4 Part 10 (ie AVC) to be much piggier even on a quad core PC. I’d want more power, not less.
I run a small business from home, and send a regular newsletter. I have a TalkTalk phone and broadband package. I now find that I am unable to send more than about 20 newsletters in a block.
Annie Hall
JS: I can’t find any mention of this on the TalkTalk website, but internet service providers usually limit the number of emails you can send at once, to discourage spamming. However, I’d have thought 100 was a more reasonable number than 20. You could try contacting TalkTalk for help, but ISP email services are not a selling point but an overhead that I suspect most would rather be rid of. Larger companies, including the Guardian, often use outside services such as cheetahmail.com and jangomail.com to send out promotional emails. You could try a local supplier such as Subscribed: there must be lots. These companies tend to be hostile towards anything “spammy” as it could affect their business.
What are your top tips for maximising the life of rechargeable batteries?
Richard Brown
JS: Different kinds of battery require different approaches, so it’s a bigger topic than it sounds. However, BatteryUniversity.com provides comprehensive coverage and a handy summary in table form. With the increasingly common Lithium-ion (Li-ion) types, the main advice is not to discharge them more than once a month: try to recharge them when they are on 20% or so. Alas, they are only good for a limited number of cycles and age even if not used. They may need replacing after 18-24 months or 350-500 cycles, but can last longer. It’s always worth checking the device’s manual for information and advice.
Is there a way to search blogs by location?
J Bourtoni
JS: Not really. There are blogs from all over the world sitting on the same servers run by American companies such as Google (Blogger) and Microsoft (Spaces), and there is no easy way to tell them apart. However, there are sites you can try, such as Blogdigger Local, PlaceBlogger.com, feedmap.net and Globe of Blogs. Bloggers who want to be found geographically can make it easier by submitting their sites. In the longer term, there’s a 10-year plan involving 74 nations called Geoss, for Global Earth Observation System of Systems, which should encourage more location awareness. So should Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle.
· Alec Williams was transferring data from an old PC. John Davies says: “I bought Transfer MyPC from Dell to move all my old data across. It did the job very well.” Windows Vista has a built-in program, Windows Easy Transfer, and you can download Windows Easy Transfer Companion to move programs.
· Cathy Matheson wanted a laptop for her son, who is going to study architecture. On the Ask Jack blog, Webweasel said: “As a recently qualified architect, I would wait and see what the facilities are like at the university in question. I would not advise buying any hardware or software until your son is a student, as generous discounts are available.”
· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
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You would think that anyone taking an objective look at the RIAA would recognize what a complete disaster the organization has been over the past decade. It’s fought off every new innovation in the marketplace (remember, it tried to kill off mp3 players as illegal), alienated a huge number of its biggest customers and failed to do much to actually get the industry in a position to capitalize on new distribution and promotional methods created by the internet. In other words, it’s done plenty to hurt the industry while doing almost nothing to help it. You would think that might make folks in similar organizations think twice about hiring execs from the RIAA, but perhaps not.
The Entertainment Software Association — basically the RIAA for video game companies — has apparently hired a high level RIAA exec. And not just any high level exec, but the guy who was in charge of the RIAA’s disastrous litigation efforts. The ESA hasn’t been as widely reviled as the RIAA or MPAA (or even the BSA), but it has had its run-ins with folks in the past. And, of course, it was just about a year ago that the ESA’s boss was whining that he wished more countries copied the DMCA. No wonder Davenport Lyons is having a field day suing people for file sharing video games. It appears that the video gaming industry is looking to follow in the footsteps of all the RIAA’s mistakes.
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We recently mentioned that a big supporter of DRM stopped by in the comments to insist that DRM was here to stay despite plenty of evidence of its gradual decline in the market. Well, now the EFF has pointed out more evidence of the death of DRM. It wasn’t that long ago that the RIAA was pushing for laws that would require DRM on any streaming music offering (yes, streams, rather than downloads). Since many streaming services simply stream straight MP3s, it’s possible to record them, or to simply copy them from their “hidden” places on your hard drive. Yet, the EFF has noticed that even the big services that have officially licensed music from the big labels are using plain MP3 streaming, which would suggest that even the RIAA isn’t insisting that its partners use DRM on streams.
Of course, this raises a second important question. If these services are officially allowed to download MP3s to your desktop, is there anything illegal in then keeping the files? Most of these services work by effectively downloading the plain MP3 into a slightly hidden folder (it’s not really hidden, they just don’t make it clear where it is). Considering that it’s a legal, RIAA-approved service downloading a plain old MP3 to your hard drive, it’s difficult to see how they could claim copyright infringement if you were to keep that file, right? Of course, considering how much the RIAA is trying to charge these sites, they may not live all that long anyway.
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Ever since it launched, people have waited for the RIAA or its member record labels to go after Muxtape. The site allowed individuals to upload MP3s that they had and create a streaming “mixtape” of music. It was actually a pretty cool way to hear new music from individuals you trusted — just like sharing mixtapes back in the 80s. You might think that, perhaps, the recording industry would recognize how successful mixtapes were back then in promoting certain bands, and wouldn’t freak out about an online version. But, of course, this is the RIAA we’re talking about. While the details aren’t clear, Muxtape has shut itself down, claiming that it needs to get some stuff sorted out with the RIAA. There is always the possibility that it’s doing this to get extra attention, but if we take the company at its word, then it seems likely that the usual pattern is happening. An RIAA label is demanding some ridiculous license fee, and threatening to sue if it doesn’t get it. If it’s a label like Warner Music, it’s probably also demanding equity in the company. Either way, it will be interesting to see if Muxtape ever comes back, and what the details of its “resurrection” will actually be.
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Not many shops stock 150 million products. Cafepress not only manages this amazing feat, it adds around 45,000 new ones every day. This is only possible, of course, because the products don’t exist until someone orders them. Your T-shirt, poster, cap, bag, book, mug or whatever is produced and shipped on demand.
But that is only half the Cafepress story. The other half is that its business is based on that old Web 2.0 standby, “user-generated content”. Instead of buying a T-shirt printed with someone else’s design, you can create your own. And if it’s really good, you might even make a bit of money by letting Cafepress sell it to everybody else.
If you fancy trying your hand, you can set up a small business using Cafepress to collect the money, produce the goods, mail them out, and handle customer service. All you need is access to a computer and some graphics software that can save your design in, for preference, the PNG (portable network graphics) format. The site provides web space and has a Learning Center to help you get going.
Cafepress, founded in a garage in 1999, has now grown to the point where it has more than “6.5 million independent shopkeepers and members in addition to syndicated and corporate stores”, including geek favourites Dilbert and Wikipedia,
But I don’t expect most people are in it for the money. Cafepress products started to take off as promotional items, sold from websites such as MP3.com. Its speed of reaction also proved ideal for people who wanted to capitalise on events both on the web and in the real world. If you picked up an “internet meme” such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you could soon buy the T-shirt.
Presidential elections are a great time for sloganeering and cartooning, and therefore also for Cafepress. If you have a point to make, you can get it on your chest. Barack Obama must be worth a fortune.
Cafepress has steadily expanded its product lines. It now prints designs not just on T-shirts, shorts, tank tops and thongs but on stickers, badges and magnets, a variety of hats and bags, baby bibs and even housewares. That category takes in mugs, aprons, wall clocks, tiles, pillows and pet bowls. Cafepress also prints books and manufactures CDs.
One problem with the site is finding stuff, but you can search for keywords or browse by topics such as Animals & Wildlife, Military, Music & Instruments, and Religion. There’s also a Careers & Professions section that runs from accountants to writers, with a rich set of offerings for computer programmers.
Another problem is that Cafepress hasn’t expanded beyond the US. It mails products overseas, but this adds to the price. There are discounts for shipping two or more of the same item, but this increases the risk of customs clearance and import charges. This will no doubt get users searching for local sites that take a similar approach, such as spreadshirt.net and creativecraving.com in the UK.
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How do I stop them?
John Kirkham
JS: You can’t, but they should be sorted into your spam folder. If not, create a rule to do this. These emails are not really from CNN, though they are a good imitation. Click a link in the latest version, My Custom Alert, and it takes you to a Russian website, where you are asked to download a malware version of Adobe’s Flash player (adobe_flash.exe). This installs a Trojan downloader which runs a service called CbEvtSvc and connects to a remote host. Your anti-malware software should remove this. If not, try running SuperAntiSpyware.
I have used Nikon Fotoshare to send photos by email. It was very quick and easy. Nikon is now offering My Picturetown. This is very slow to upload, and I cannot find out how to email the photos.
Robin Hood
JS: Fotoshare is an online photo album. Nikon plans to close it on September 10 and will then delete all the photos people have uploaded. MyPictureTown.com is similar but has drag-and-drop uploading and is claimed to be easier to use. There are a great many alternatives, including Photobucket (owned by MySpace), WebShots (American Greetings), Flickr (Yahoo), Picasa (Google) and Windows Live Photo Gallery (Microsoft). SmugMug is good but not free.
They all have their fans, many of whom use more than one, so now there is framechannel.com to manage multiple services. There are even more sites that cater for people who want to upload one or two images, such as Imagevenue.com. You can use them without opening an account or signing in. When you upload a photo, these sites usually provide several links to cater for web pages and different types of message board.
Unfortunately, many of these sites make their money by displaying popup adverts, and some may even try to install malware. The best rule is to copy the “direct link” and email that instead of the photo. Avoid any links that contain the letters php.
I have installed the BBC iPlayer, but every time I activate it, a program called Kontiki pops up.
Denis
JS: When you download TV programmes using iPlayer - as distinct from watching streamed versions online - they are downloaded using Kontiki. This is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, which is also used by similar services such as Sky by Broadband and Channel 4’s 4oD. Kontiki seems to load and use your bandwidth, even if you are not using iPlayer: use the Windows Task Manager to see if Kservice is running.
The BBC has a page that explains how to stop it running on startup and when you are not using iPlayer. You can remove it altogether using the kclean.exe program. However, if you do, any Kontiki-based programs such as iPlayer will stop working.
I have a not-that-old HP OfficeJet 6110 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier which I’ve recently replaced. It works, but is a little streaky on some printing. I’ve been trying to get rid of it in an ecologically sound way, but to no avail.
Chris Rowbury
JS: You could offer it on eBay, noting the fault and offering it as for “spares or repair” and probably “collect only”. Otherwise, try Freecycle.
· Paul Niemiec wanted a cheap way to digitise cassette tapes, and I suggested using the open-source Audacity software. John Blackburn suggests the shareware CD Wave instead: “This software is simpler than Audacity and has the very useful (and, indeed, important) feature of being able to split the music into tracks, either automatically or with manual assistance. CD Wave will save the resulting tracks as WAV, MP3, OGG or FLAC files. WAV is for making audio CDs and MP3 is for the car. FLAC files are lossless, as you say, and are about half the size of WAV files.”
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Sony has unwrapped some new BRAVIA Theatre Systems with those dinky little speakers that promise - despite their mouse-sized proportions - to roar like lions.
The new DAV-IS50 replaces the first system with tiny speakers, the DAV-IS10, promising a total of 450Watts of power, enough to really cheese off the neighbours.
The diminutive glossy black control centre is just over 21cm wide by 10cm tall and houses a slot-loading DVD/CD/MP3 player with surround-sound processing and an RDS FM/AM radio tuner.
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Is there a cheap device to copy cassette tapes direct to PC?
Paul Niemiec
JS: You don’t need one. Using the traditional method, all you need is a cassette deck, a cable to connect it to your PC’s sound card, and Audacity software, which you can download free. You can find instructions on the Lifehacker blog. Obviously you will get better sound if you start with a good-quality cassette deck, but for less critical purposes, a Walkman-style portable will do. If you are using a hi-fi cassette deck, the connecting cable will probably have two phono plugs at one end and a 1/8in mini-jack at the other (often called a Y cable). If you’re using a portable device, it will probably have a mini-jack at both ends. For preference, plug it into a line-out on the portable, rather than the headphone socket. If not, turn the volume down or it will be too loud.
Lifehacker suggests digitising the sound using the LAME MP3 encoder. This is a good but “lossy” compression system: it sacrifices some detail to save a lot of storage space. If quality is critical, however, you should capture the sound as a WAV file, and store it using a lossless format such as FLAC. You can still make compressed MP3 or AAC versions for everyday use. The process is basically the same if you buy a specialised recorder such as ION Audio’s Tape2PC deck, except it connects to the PC via a USB port.
An even simpler and cheaper approach is not to use a PC at all. In this case, all you need is an MP3 player that has a direct encoding (line-in) feature, plus a stereo line-in cable (sometimes called a Direct Encoding Cable) costing about a fiver or less. Players with the line-in feature include the Creative Zen V+, iAudio X5, MPIO HD200, iRiver X20 and many more.
I live in Bournemouth, which apparently is about to become the UK’s first “fibre city”. We’ve had the offer of free installation, but what’s involved?
Barbara Oldham
JS: Bournemouth will be England’s first “fibre city”; Dundee will be Scotland’s. Basically, H2O plans to deliver 100Mbps broadband by routing fibre-optic cables via the sewer system. It has already wired council offices, the Bournemouth International Centre and Pavilion Theatre. FibreCity will also need to connect to homes, and says this will be done by cutting channels just 20mm wide and 100mm deep to a cable-style box on your wall, so it should not be too disruptive. There is not much info beyond that because FibreCity will only be the carrier. It will sell capacity to cable TV and broadband suppliers etc, who’ll try to sell you their services.
Have you tried the Microsoft spellchecker in Outlook Express, on the word “Obama”? Oops.
Martin Saunders
JS: The spellcheckers in Hotmail and Microsoft Office (Outlook Express does not have one) had not been programmed to recognise Obama, and therefore suggested the closest match in their dictionary: Osama. (Next closest is Bema.) Microsoft is fixing it …
Have you any advice for cleaning CDs and DVDs?
Denys Vaughan
JS: They are usually best left alone unless they skip or cause other problems. If they need a clean, you can blow the dust off then wipe them down with a damp lint-free cloth. Distilled water and microfibre cloths are recommended. The main thing is to wipe gently from the centre to the edge. If a bit of grit scratches across the disc, the hardware error correction will probably deal with it. If you scratch around the groove, you may lose lots of bits in a row, and the error correction will not be able to cope.
If the disc is so dirty that it needs more than water, isopropyl alcohol is the solvent recommended on the web.
I recently bought a hard disk recorder to timeshift TV. Can I assume the hard disk works like a PC hard disk and needs a periodic clean-up?
Jim Curran
JS: Yes, hard disk recorders work much like PCs running Windows Media Centre or MythTV, and sometimes have defragmentation problems. The manual may offer an “optimise” function such as Sky+ Planner rebuild, which will at least do a tidy-up and could recover some storage space. If you can connect a PC via a USB port, you may be able to see the DVR’s hard disk as an external drive. If it uses the FAT file format, then standard Windows utilities should work on it - but at your own risk! DVR disks are subject to failure, the same as PC hard drives, and should therefore be regarded as temporary storage. Anything you want to keep should be burned to DVD.
· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
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When Chinese search engine Baidu first went public, some folks pointed out that the main reason why people used it a lot more than Google was that it had an MP3 search engine, which let people find music to download. Google, being afraid of copyright infringement lawsuits, chose not to have such a specific search engine. Of course, once it had gone public, Baidu attracted the attention of record labels as well, and was quickly sued. However, Baidu eventually won that lawsuit — which does seem like the right decision. Baidu, as a search engine, isn’t making any copies of the file itself at all. It’s merely linking to where those files are, and it’s difficult to see how that’s copyright infringement.
Of course, the record labels aren’t known for giving up easily, and they simply sued again. However, it appears that Google has seen enough of getting beaten handily in the Chinese market by Baidu, and that initial ruling in favor of Baidu and has apparently decided to set up its own MP3 search engine on its Chinese site. The report notes that Google is first looking to get “approval” from the recording industry, though it’s not clear what sort of approval is sought or needed. If it’s going to be an industry approved search engine, it’s unlikely to do what Google needs it to do. That is, it will most likely be quite limited and locked down, meaning people will just stick with Baidu’s.
At the same time, it’s still difficult to see why a separate search engine is really necessary. What’s wrong with just doing a search with specific parameters included? In fact, some have already automated the process.
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