Sorry if you landed here looking for the latest "Wise Guys" show page...the company's web department decided to move things around a bit. Here's where to find stuff:
The Wise Guys answer your tech questions and bring you the latest news about technology and your lifestyle. The Wise Guys are here for everything you want to know about the Des Moines community, computers, your money, electronics, and lots more! The Wise Guys are Dan Adams, Ross Peterson, and Brian Gongol.
If you have a question you'd like to hear a Wise Guy sound off about, e-mail Dan Adams at dan@radiowiseguys.com or Brian Gongol at wiseguys (at) whoradio.com.
With the pending release of Vista for home users, we're trying to figure out what super-neat features are un-missable in the new edition that we should be tripping over ourselves to get the upgrade. So far, we aren't really seeing any.
Imagine spending 30 years campaigning for a new, safer road -- and then being the first to crash on the new highway.
What if we took all the innovation and creativity that goes into building Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts and put that into finding solutions to our country's energy problems? We could do it by offering big prizes for big ideas. Awards for innovations -- called inducement prizes -- have led to a lot of innovations, like getting Charles Lindbergh to fly solo across the Atlantic. The National Research Council agrees.
A couple of links in case you need to set up a website:
Sites like MyGreatBigFamily.com offer services for people to set up family websites
Have a talk with your kids -- don't get into situations that could be offensive. Digital cameras, Facebook, and Google make this a very transparent world.
Ross is back from the Girl Scout Cookie Munch-Off he attended last week. He didn't win, but we did learn that Thin Mints are the best-selling cookies the Girl Scouts sell.
Save yourself lots of pain and suffering: Set your computer on a limited-access profile. Your computer really needs at least two different accounts: An administrator-level account that's allowed to install and uninstall programs, and a limited-access account, which you should use for most of your web browsing and other computer purposes. The reason? If you happend to accidentally download a virus or receive a Trojan horse by e-mail, it's much harder for that crooked software to do anything bad to your computer if you're running it on a limited-access account. It's like the difference between being the boss and being an employee: If you're an employee, you can still do a lot of work, but you can't hire and fire other employees.
China blew up a weather satellite this past week...and there's lots of reason to believe they may be thinking of using cyberwarfare to screw with us if push ever comes to shove.
Ross shares Smart-Kit.com as his source of useless information for this week, including whether you should change your pick if you're ever on "Let's Make a Deal." Which seems like a pretty unlikely proposition.
Here's how to get Firefox, and a direct link to the latest version of Firefox (in case you don't need those step-by-step instructions). The old (pre-2.0) versions of Firefox left all of your tabs open at the top of your browser, which meant that if you had more than seven or eight pages open, you'd only get to see an icon and maybe a few letters describing what was in the tab. Version 2.0 changes that, and automatically collapses open tabs (beyond the first few) into a single tab at the right-hand side of the tab bar.
If you want to open Word files without paying for Microsoft Office, try OpenOffice, which is an open-source program (meaning: free to you) that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a database utility -- as well as a PowerPoint-style program, too.
This week's Security Update includes links to the latest Microsoft Update, the new version of AVG Anti-Virus, and the newest updates to Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Can you clean your keyboard by putting it through the dishwasher? Some people think so, but we wouldn't necessarily recommend it -- especially if it's a nice keyboard. If your keyboard is really dirty, unplug it, flip it over and bang some of the dust and debris out, then hit it with some compressed air, then (if it's still too dirty for your liking), try cleaning it with some rubbing alcohol.
Crooks! Liars! Thieves! The bad guys are using more image spam than ever before. That's when they don't send you a message with text that says "Buy cheap Viagra online"...they just put it inside a picture and send you the picture.
Microsoft's new Windows Vista will be ready for most users to download by the end of the month, and so far, reviews are mixed, at best. The new operating system really doesn't appear to offer much in terms of new features. Much like getting into a pool, it's probably best to let other people be the first ones to try this thing out. It's really just a life-cycle update, not a revolution.
Scientists are trying to tell emergency planners to use Google Earth and other tools that are already widely-available to help save lives in emergencies.
For some introductory and intermediate-level instructions on how to use your computer, check out Brian's how-to page.
You can get around some of the newly-identified security flaws in Microsoft Word by using OpenOffice, which lets you open Microsoft Word files and save files to PDF. You can get a bunch of other different free and open-source programs that we like from Brian's site.
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