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The following are the show notes for the June 9th, 2005 edition of the Chris Pirillo Show.

Today’s guest: Jake Metcalf of 8Bit Joystick

Aside from 8Bit Joystick, Jake also runs Democracy for Pudget Sound.

Jake worked at a laser animation (lasariums) company then moved to Advance Online, a dot-com that specialized in online training simulations. He now works at a Navy base developing interactive training programs as a civilian contractor.

Regular or Decaf?

Scott spilled regular coffee on his laptop, and blamed it on his wife ;) The laptop in question was on at the time, but now gets the error code “I9990305 – no hard drive found” on boot up.

There’s a good chance that there is a short, but nothing is certain, so you may want to get a bootable Windows CD, or a LiveCD distribution of Linux, such as Knoppix, and check to see if the laptop boots up. If not, then there is a serious problem beyond the hard drive.

If the hard drive is not at fault, you may want to try to connect it to another laptop, or get an enclosure that allows you to connect the laptop to a regular PC so that you may perform a backup of your data.

Recommended resources:

• Any community (message board/chat room/etc …) that specializes in hardware.
• Notebook Forums
• Google Groups
• Tom’s Hardware
• PCPitstop.com

(As an aside, Scott, try making a pet door out of duck tape instead of your keyboard covers.)

Podcasting 101

Charlie wants to know what resources are available to do what Chris is doing (podcasting/streaming audio).

Recommended software:

• Audacity – and open-source, cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and Macintosh) audio editing tool.

Recommended hosting:

• LibSyn – $5/month
• OurMedia.org – A free audio/video/graphics hosting service. It is still in Alpha development, however.

For live broadcasting, Chris recommends Windows Media Encoder, and Jake Metcalf recommends Shoutcast.

Also, for your reading pleasure, Lockergnome offers the Podcasting Starter Kit.

Overheating GPU

Ian in St. Louis has a graphics card problem. His computer displays lines through the screen. It turns out that his card fan was not running. That issue has been fixed, but the lines remain in place. He had tested to see if the monitor was at fault by using an alternative output device, but the lines were no longer present. Also, since he is now forced to using a low-end graphics system, Ian wants to know what settings would help increase his frames per second in World of Warcraft.

We highly recommend getting a new graphics card. Some circuitry has probably fried itself for the lack of cooling (in his case, the culprit is most likely a memory unit). His old card, the GeForce 4 Ti, can be had for as little as $35.

As for World of Warcraft, try:

• Turning all of the settings down to minimal and disable video settings where possible (including shadows, vertex buffers, and highlighting).
• Set the game to run in the lowest resolution possible (800×600).
• Disable any background processes that may be running. Dead-Eye.net has a nice listing of what can be disabled on your machine without causing instability.
• As an aside, try turning off the sound. This may sound silly, but if you’re using an on-board processor there’s a good chance that the video and audio are both going to be processed by the CPU. Disabling the sound may boost performance in some rare cases.

Podcasting Professionally

Matt Hartley, another great Lockergnome contributor, wants to know what equipment a podcaster should buy when they are just starting out.

The basic answer is that this all depends on your budget. You can spend as little as $10, or as much as $10,000. Remember: Garbage In Garbage Out.

Jake Metcalf runs his podcast on $50 worth of equipment, while the Chris Pirillo Show could not be produced without the funds brought by sponsorship.

Jake Ludington stresses that getting the audio levels correct is a key component to professional podcasting. -6db to -3db is ideal for recording voice. Anything over 0db is too loud.

Recommended hardware:

• If you will be recording from your PC, don’t bother spending additional money on a high-end consumer sound card, because they are optimized for playback, and not recording.
• Condenser microphone with a phantom power supply.
• Shure Model WH20TQG headset
• PRO-8HEx Headset Mic

Slightly Used Jeber for Sale

Jeber (pronounced jee-ber), administrator at the Lockergnome Problem Solvers is looking for work in southern California. You can read up on him and his antics at Furballs

Mac->Windows Networking

Lance Heath wants to map some drives from Macintosh OS X to Windows.

Recommended resources:

• MacScripter.net
• MacWindows.com
• OSXHints

Jake Metcalf uses his iPod as a portable drive, or just e-mails himself the files.

Image Management Software

• iPhoto Diet removes duplicate photos.
• Picasa is a free photo management tool from Google.

Windows 98 Problems

Rodderboy (Ricco) from IRC has a Windows 98 SE machine that keeps popping up the End User License Agreement.

Recommended solutions:

• Try Linux.
• Boot into DOS via a floppy disk, and run scanreg: scanreg.exe /restore
• Buy a new machine it’s time to upgrade anyway, Ricco.

CD Buzz

Swordofdestiny, another IRC chatter, has an HP pavilion desktop machine that gives off a loud buzz when CD’s are inserted into it.

Download Nero’s Info Tool and check the speed of the drive. Modern CD drives are so fast that they will often generate a ton of noise.

Chris recommended a speed throttling program. We don’t have any additional information on this. If you can contribute to this section, please click on the edit button and add your wisdom.

DOS Games

While not technically a question, Jake Metcalf brought up the point that classic games run much too fast on modern hardware, and, in some cases, do not work properly because of driver issues. I have found that DOSBox works wonderfully with 90% of the DOS games out there.