On today's basketball-shortened show, we covered five big topics:

(1) Facebook's IPO (my advice: Don't get suckered in!)

(2) Saving a laptop with a broken screen (you can usually plug in an old monitor or a television screen with some inexpensive cables, allowing you to still see what's on the hard drive)

(3) What happens when a 9-year-old gets set loose on iTunes (among other things, they can rack up $400 in download charges)

(4) How to get a computer ready for sale (be sure to remove the physical hard drive from the computer before you give it away)

(5) What it means to put things on "the cloud" (basically, imagine all of the programs that you'd otherwise install on your computer instead sitting on computers at the server farm out by DMACC West -- so you can get to them from any computer in the world)

Every one of these deserves more attention than we could give them in today's shortened show, but I hope we were able to help out a few good listeners. Send your questions to us anytime by email at wiseguys@whoradio.com.

Thanks for listening!

- Brian Gongol

Here are the podcasts from yesterday's Wise Guys show:

Segment 1: How Twitter could be saving live television

Segment 2: Why you shouldn't use websites promising to fix your PC

Segment 3: Yahoo's co-founder has quit the company

Segment 4: Facebook knows a lot about your politics

Some links from today's show I think you'll enjoy:

- How Twitter saved live television

- The announcement that co-founder Jerry Yang has quit Yahoo

- Facebook knows your political opinions

- A correction to part of an answer I gave about MagicJack: It does require an existing broadband connection

We had a good discussion about using smartphones without a data plan, and also about how to keep your computer running smoothly. I can't recommend going to any of the "fix my computer/speed up my computer/quicken my PC" types of sites, since it's just too easy for crooks to set up those pages and take advantage of you. We've gone to great lengths to document our best advice for taking care of your computer so that you don't have to go elsewhere.

Questions? Send them anytime to wiseguys@whoradio.com.

Thanks for listening this week!

- Brian Gongol

So, you didn't know I was on the air on Friday, filling in for Simon Conway? That's OK. You can listen on-demand anytime:

Hour 1

Hour 2

- Brian Gongol

I'm filling in today for Simon Conway, so we're taking tech questions on the air this afternoon. Call in (515-284-1040), text (515-989-1040) or e-mail (wiseguys@whoradio.com) and I'll do my best to help. We won't have another regularly-scheduled Wise Guys show until January 21st, so get your tech fix now!

Here are some of the links discussed on the air this afternoon:

- Where to get updates for Garmin GPS units

- How to get free course materials from MIT

- For the listener with the Roku that has to be restarted all the time, check out the Roku support page and see if you need to update the firmware. You'll need to be able to plug in the Roku to a computer, but it probably came with a USB cable allowing you to do that.

- One listener asked about how well he could trust Wikipedia entries. The short answer: Take anything you read there with a grain of salt, but the more technical the issue, the more likely it is to be honestly-written. Political and historical articles are much more likely to contain fake info.

- By the way, here's the Wikipedia article on planking that Andrew just confessed to editing back in the day.

- A caller described a run-in with a fake antivirus program. You can help protect yourself from those crooks by running your Windows computer on a limited-access account.

- For the caller having trouble with script errors on FarmVille, there's a good chance you need to update Java on your computer. Don't worry -- it's free! 

- A slight deviation from the technology question, but here's how the Republican Party selects its Presidential-vote delegates from Iowa. It's not necessarily based upon who wins the caucuses.

- A caller wanted to know what MPEG-4 meant. It's a standard for recording video on digital cameras.

- To the caller with a problem running Outlook, it sounds like you're running into a problem shared by other users earlier this year. You may need to get a service-pack update, it appears.

- Brian Gongol