The iPhone turns one year old right about now. It took a little longer than Brian expected for the clones to appear...they're really only gaining ground now, about 12 months after the release, rather than the six months Brian had predicted.

Bill Gates has signed off as a full-time employee at Microsoft. He started the company in 1975, and now he's going to spend his time giving away his money.

Macs have a reputation for being pretty secure, but they're not impervious to attack. A new Trojan horse virus is attacking Apple computers.

30 years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, a full 1% of all US births are test-tube babies -- that is, they're in-vitro vertilized.

A caller asked about upgrading from a Sony Clie to a new smartphone. The Clie runs the Palm OS, so the easiest upgrade would involve moving to one of the current generation of Palm smartphones. (Smartphones, by the way, are phones that double as PDAs and Internet browsers). Incidentally, there are lots of sites on the Internet (like PDAPhoneHome.com) where you can go to get ideas and advice from fellow users.

Listener e-mail of the week:

I enjoy your show very much and wish you guys had a different time slot as I don't get a chance to listen every Saturday.

I have Microsoft Works Suite 2006. I am very happy with it and it has worked well for my needs. However, I have an e-mail that was sent to me with an attachment. This attachment is a very large list that was made on a Microsoft Excel program and I can not open the e-mail to view and edit the list.

I have done a search for Microsoft Excel but I am not sure what product to buy. Is there much of a difference between Excel Home Edition and an Excel Office Edition. This attachment that I can not open may have been made on an Office Edition. My computer has a spreadsheet program so I really do not need Excel except for opening this e-mail and any future e-mails.

- Brenda

Good news for Brenda (and you, too): You don't need to buy Excel to open an Excel spreadsheet. First off, Google Documents opens many Excel spreadsheets reasonably well, and the service is free. Or you can go to Brian's list of great free programs and download OpenOffice, a free office suite, which includes a spreadsheet program, a word processing program, and a presentation program, among others. Or, of course, you could always call up the person who sent you the file in the first place and ask them to convert it before sending it to you.

Other people talk about all the bad things happening in the world, but we like to focus on the positive -- like the new UV-blocking sunglasses Brian picked up in a drugstore the other day. The improvements in things like UV-reducing lenses, laser eye surgery, and even genetic research on blindness are all making life better for all of us.

A caller asked about using modems and blacklists to screen out telemarketing calls for his small business. While there are services and programs that can help with the avalanche of calls small businesses get, Brian's advice (as a small businessperson) is just to use a standard caller ID service as an early-warning system for fake or blocked numbers (like 000-000-0000) which tell you that a call is likely to be a waste of your time, and then to give the annoying calls 10 seconds to state their case before you simply hang up. The amount of time you'd waste in programming numbers into a blacklist or trying to set up a modem to filter your calls probably wouldn't be worth it unless you're getting scores of time-wasting calls a day. Or, if you're really pressed for time, if you see "Number Blocked" or one of those nonsense numbers on the caller ID, you can always let the call roll over to voice mail. Junk callers almost never leave messages, but legitimate customers and clients will.

If you're a novice looking to convert old home movies to DVD, here are a couple of recommendations:

• Get a DVD recorder with a VHS slot built-in. This will make your work easy and save you the trouble of figuring out lots of new cords and programs. Don't bother trying to put your movies through a computer before burning them to DVD. Direct conversion is lots easier.
• Don't go cheap on the DVD recorder -- good-quality converters are available in the $200 to $350 range, and if you try to cut corners by getting the cheapest thing you see, you risk regretting it later. Most stores have staff who can direct you to a reasonably good recorder in that $200 to $350 price range.
• Record to the 2-hour speed on your DVD. Most DVD recorders will give you a range of speeds to record at; the smaller the time they can record, the higher the quality. Most old home movies are no better than about the 4-hour quality on DVD, so if you record to 2-hour quailty, you won't find yourself regretting later that you didn't save every bit of quality that you could.
• Buy brand-name, archival-quality recordable DVDs. You can get them for less than $0.50 each, and you'll appreciate the quality in the future.
• Don't bother setting a bunch of chapters on your DVDs unless you only have a couple of movies to record. If you have more than about 5 tapes to record, you'll get burned out setting all of those chapters, and then you'll quit recording those DVDs before you've saved your entire library. Much better to have a complete library of home movies on DVD without chapter settings than an incomplete library on DVD with a bunch of VHS tapes crumbling to dust in boxes somewhere.
• Store those DVDs in a cool, dry place away from sunlight.

We received a call about saving old vinyl records to CD, which we'd love to show you how to do, but that will require a brand-new how-to page that will take us some time to put up. Check in with us in the future.

Online extra: GPS jamming isn't a new rock phenomenon -- it's a sign that Communists can't stand the idea of people finding their way on their own. Oh, and that they know how useful GPS navigation is to our national security.

On this, the first day of summer, we thought we'd make it about barbecue.

Local barbecue expert Steve "Woody" Wasson of Woody's Smoke Shack (2511 Cottage Grove) joined us in-studio and gave us some tips on selecting a good smoker/slow cooker, like the offset and bullet, and included some good information on temperature and safety.  Oh, and he fed us a terrific lunch!  Thanks Woody!




Judith Fertig of BBQ Queens joined us for some tips on making your backyard barbecue well rounded.

A podcast including a selection from this show is available!

Dan's been scanning CraigsList for motorcycles, and thinks he's uncovered a scam. The seller claims that Dan needs to pay first and he'll get a cycle for $13,000 under market value.

John Kennedy was the youngest person elected President, though Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest person ever to become President. He was 42 when he took over the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley.

If you've been searching for Geo Metros on eBay, hoping to escape high gas prices, you might want to think again. Many of today's small cars get gas mileage that's just as good, and they add lots of safety features that cars from 15 years ago didn't have. Federal authorities actually noted specific concerns about some of those small older cars.

It should be noted, though, that at least one team competing for the Progressive Automotive X-Prize is using a Geo Metro chassis to develop their entry. This X-Prize, which is yet another great example of an inducement prize, is there to encourage the development of a 100-MPG production-ready vehicle. They're hoping to see cars ready for a competition by next year.

A computer programmer has developed a "walled-garden" Internet browser called the ZAC Browser for his autistic grandson and released it to the public. The intention is to control the browsing options available to the child, as well as to manage the number of tools and features that are available to the child to use.

Listener e-mail question of the week:

Hi Guys,

I am thinking about purchasing a new computer as there are times that I can write faster than my present computer works. I have Windows XP now and have been happy with this program and will probably stay with Microsoft. The question is that I was told not to purchase the new Microsoft system as there are too many problems with it. Do you believe that it has any more problems than any of the rest of them and are they being fixed by Microsoft? Thanks for you help.

Shirley

Having used Windows Vista for a few months now, I (Brian) can confirm that there are a few bugs yet to be worked out, but I can also say that Vista seems to be getting better faster than Windows XP did. XP was first released in October 2001, and it really never worked quite right until XP Service Pack 2 was issued in August 2004. That meant nearly three years of ongoing frustrations for a lot of first-wave XP users. Vista, on the other hand, was a real pain when it first came out about a year ago, but Microsoft has been releasing lots and lots of updates for Vista ever since, and it's probably as reliable now as XP was after Service Pack 2.

So...in other words, don't be afraid of Vista. It's not perfect, and it still doesn't seem to have been worth the hype, but it's probably nothing that should hold you back from buying a new computer if you need one. Just expect a long period of downloads -- especially as you go through the sizeable Vista Service Pack 1.

Little-known fact: Judge Wapner was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for his service in World War II.

With all the attention (much of it long overdue) being paid to energy issues, perhaps the short-lived Captain Power television show and action figure lineup will make a comeback.

The band The Gorillaz, which only sort-of exists at all (all their videos are animated, and their live appearances are holographic), will be putting on an opera in Charleston, South Carolina, over the next couple of weeks. Whether it will turn out to be anything like R. Kelly's completely ludicrous "Trapped in the Closet" (which he billed as a hip-hopera) is still up to question.

The new plan to charge passengers for every checked bag on American Airlines isn't just going to be a nuisance. It's also probably going to make travel a little less safe. People are going to end up carrying more luggage with them, which will in turn increase the burden on security checkpoints and likely result in more mistakes.

The folks behind the One Laptop Per Child campaign say they're going to get rid of the keyboard in their next generation of computers, which they say will reduce the cost and improve the computer's reliability.

Google says it's speeding up Gmail access by cutting out redundant code and chopping out needless queries to its servers. It's hard to say whether there's been any obvious effect, but it's interesting to see that Google is finally acknowledging the inevitable: It is now so large that it has to take actual physical limitations into consideration with its products and services, even though they're dealing with bits and bytes.

On that subject, we talked a little about Google.org, the semi-philanthropic arm of Google. There's a separate Google Foundation, which is a tax-exempt charity. Google.org, on the other hand, is taxed like a business, and it's investing heavily in energy research. That's why Brian stands by his previous assertion that Google's motivations are hardly altruistic. The company needs three major inputs to make money: Computers, smart people to program and run those computers, and electricity to keep everything going. Computers keep getting better, faster, and cheaper all the time, so those costs are going down. Employees' salaries really can't be cut very easily, so those costs will continue to be largely out of Google's control. But the cost of energy is certainly going up, and Google wants to keep a lid on that cost however it can.

And good luck to them, too. By no means is this a criticism of Google for taking credit for its actions. If they can find ways to save on energy costs, or to produce more of it cheaply, then we all benefit.

We got onto the subject of the economic stimulus checks that everyone's been receiving lately. It should be noted that most people are probably going to use those checks to pay down debt, which is a perfectly good thing to do. And it's certainly what politicians expect many people to do, since that's exactly how taxpayers behaved with the last "stimulus" checks. But if you don't need to pay down debt, it would be very wise to put some of that "stimulus" money to work with something that will save energy in the home. Here's a short list of ideas, many of which could be bought with a single $600 stimulus check:

• Light-blocking blinds, window shades, and curtains
• High-efficiency lighting
• Heat pumps
• Storm doors
• Extra insulation for the attic
• Whole-house fans
• Heat pumps and high-efficiency HVAC units
• High-efficiency water heaters
• Programmable thermostats

Now you can text-message us in the studio at 515-745-7887. Right now, it's for our access only -- but if listeners like it, we might encourage other WHO hosts to try it too.

We've talked many times before about the ways in which the Internet changes our notions of privacy. One author offers some very sharp observations about how the Internet completely overturns the notion of controlling one's reputation. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter whether you maintain your own online presence or not -- practically anything you do, as long as someone else is there or can see it, may find its way online.

A question came in via text message about relaying Internet access via WiFi routers. The problem is that the listener is trying to send the signal two miles, and WiFi signals generally only go a few hundred feet outdoors. The best answer may be to bury your own cable, since you'd probably need some repeaters to make it a full two miles, which would require getting power to different places anyway.

Google celebrated the 48th anniversary of the laser with a funky logo this week. It was invented in 1960 at the Hughes Research Library in California. The laser has led to a bunch of technologies that we wouldn't have otherwise, like CDs, DVDs, and eye surgery. The list goes on and on -- we use lasers in home security and construction surveying, too.

While we're still waiting on the personal jet pack of the flying-car future, we already have a jet wing and flying-squirrel skydiving suits.

Speaking of flying, the British air authorities think that the January crash at Heathrow was caused by fuel that had nearly frozen in the Boeing 777's tanks.

Dan predicts that the CD and DVD will be obsolete in 10 years. Brian thinks it might take a few more years to do away with the DVD, but probably not that many. The rapid improvements we've seen in flash drives -- sizes rising and prices falling -- probably make it likely that we'll use fewer and fewer CDs in the not-too-distant future. That, of course, brings up the question of whether USB flash drives will be the leading form of portable memory or SD cards. Both, of course, are a lot more convenient for most purposes than CDs.

A caller asked about a common problem: Getting broadband Internet access in rural areas where DSL and cable aren't available. She was using T-Mobile's wireless broadband service, but was having problems getting fast download speeds. Fortunately, other options like service from competing providers (like Verizon, for instance) are available, as are options like satellite-delivered Internet access.

A text message came in from Marshalltown, asking what software we would recommend for Web authoring. Dan likes Adobe's Dreamweaver, but it's costly -- around $400. Brian prefers to build pages using HTML, which is easy to learn and can be combined with cascading style sheets (CSS), which let you create a layout for your site with ease. In fact, there's even a long list of free CSS templates that you can use to get started without having to design the page yourself. Or, if you're a Firefox user, you can get the Seamonkey package, which includes an HTML editor.

Listener e-mail question of the week:

I would like to create a survey to send to select individuals for a one time event. I have tried an e-mail format but the tabs do not hold. I have a newer laptop with Vista system and Microsoft Student Word 2007. My concern is what will work for the survey that would be easy for others to input information for answers. Some questions will be multiple choice, some yes/no and others provide space for them to provide their opinion. What would you suggest?

Thanks
Carol

If the survey has to be completed electronically, you'll have to build a form from scratch and put it on a website. You can't really forward an online survey form by e-mail. Or you can use SurveyMonkey, which does the programming work for you. If you're trying to distribute a form that you want people to print out and return to you, you'll want to create it in PDF format. The best way to do that is to either create it using OpenOffice and export it directly to PDF, or to use PDF Creator. Both OpenOffice and PDF Creator are free.

Another question via text message:

What's the most accurate self-updating GPS system that doesn't require the purchase of new current maps?

While this isn't something we have a lot of personal experience with, we're not really aware of any source for free automatic GPS updates. There are lots of lists of software and map files that different sources have put up on the Internet, but we can't verify whether they're any good or not. Use them at your own risk.