Daniel Voyles

In part I, we learned about some free and completely legal ways to watch TV and movies. In part II, there was some long explanation, and a brief bit of some information about how to watch your shows that are not well-defined. The laws contradict each other, so you are on your own down that path.

Now, I will explain the completely illegal ways to get your shows. Please know that I do not suggest doing anything illegal, but feel that you should know about these methods so that you can avoid them and any trouble that comes with using them.

The first, easiest, and most common illegal way I see of getting music, shows, and movies is LimeWire. There are legal reasons for using Lime, but the use of it is not for those reasons. Lime is used mostly to illegally ‘share’ music and other files across the Internet.

People like to claim that they are only ‘sharing’ these files with their friends or, really, complete strangers across the Internet. That, is a lie. Not about what they’re doing, but pretending that it is legal. People are taking material that they do not own the copyright for and giving it away to others. They are also downloading material illegally from other LimeWire users. Along with the illegal files comes a big risk for viruses, also something I see a lot on PCs people ask me to fix.

Up next is Bit Torrent. Torrents are similar to LimeWire, except that they are used more in legal ways, such as sharing legal discs to install Linux and other free information. Unfortunately, a lot more people use torrents to illegally download movies, music, and more from others. So, Bit Torrent is covered under this illegal section.

How torrents differ from regular downloads is that it downloads from many different users in ‘chunks’. It operates on the idea that the more you ‘share’, the better/faster you can get files. It works out well for everyone because the more people share a file, the faster it downloads for everyone.

After downloading files illegally, the most popular way to steal (yes, it is stealing) material is to rent it from the video store, borrow a CD, or find another way to get a digital copy and rip it or copy it onto your PC.

People have mentioned several times that they rent a DVD when it comes out, rip it, and keep the copy they made on their PC. Once again, this is completely illegal. These people rent a piece of copy-written material, not own it, and make a copy (that may be legal if they owned it).

There is no salvation for those who rent a DVD or borrow a CD to copy it. Ripping most anything without owning a copy yourself is stealing from those who put it out there for sale.

As always, there are exceptions: if something has been released under a license that is free to distribute, like some written works and all Linux distributions. These materials are different than most things, and are the exceptions.

Generally, if someone downloads material that is copyrighted, they are breaking the law. If anyone is ripping material that they don’t own a copy of, they are also breaking the law.

This is the simple version, but gives a decent overview. As always, this is not legal advice. Do your own research.

In the first entry of this series, I explained some of the legal ways to get your television shows legally. I feel bad that I forgot to mention Netflix. You can watch some movies instantly using their service.

Now into the hazy world of ‘questionable’ ways to get television, music, and movies. What I talk about here and how you feel it applies will depend on how you interpret it. The reason for this is that the laws in our country are designed to deal with tangible and firm things like printed books, records, and actual reels of film. These laws were written before computers were common and before written, recorded, and filmed material could be transferred all over the world within minutes.

Many laws have been written to try to close the gap between written law and technology, but they mostly fail miserably. Most prominent of this legislation is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA was written by Congress, therefore it was written by people who are generally ignorant of technology (in my opinion) and who are heavily influenced by lobbyists. Lobbyists are paid by companies like RCA, Paramount, Sony, etc. So, who do you think the DMCA favors? Correct.

With that history out of the way, we can move forward with our review of the blurry area: copies of compact discs, DVDs, and other material you own. When you buy a CD, you do not get unlimited rights to do whatever you want with it. You only get a copy that you can listen to, or watch if it is a DVD.

Now, like with an article in a newspaper, there is such a thing as ‘fair-use’ that lets you use pieces of the article for parody, discussion, etc. However, you cannot reproduce the whole work without permission. That is just plagiarism. With a CD/DVD, you are allowed to make a ‘backup copy for archival purposes’ as long as you own a legal copy of the original work.

Here is the ironic part: you cannot make a backup copy of the CD/DVD if it has any kind of copy protection, according to the DMCA.

So, it is legal to have a backup according to law, but you cannot make that copy. Kind of twisted isn’t it? To my knowledge, there is no significant challenge to this contradiction so that we can know what is illegal and what isn’t.

I have gone over all of this explanation to say that if you can legally make copies of DVDs and CDs, then you could rip them to your laptop or desktop computer. Once they are on your hard drive you can watch them any time you like and not have to worry about the discs becoming scratched or lost. The discs will be safely stored in your closet.

With more and more television shows being released on DVD as complete seasons and some complete series’ runs, you could easily pick up your favorites, rip them to your PC and watch them at your leisure.

For that matter, you could find a site to download recordings of your favorite new shows and keep them on your drive. Networks say that this is illegal, and we geeks say it is no different than using a VCR to record from TV like many people did less than 5 years ago.

Use your own judgment, as I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Tread carefully and read up before you make any decisions about whether to rip anything or download episodes of shows.

In a word: maybe. The most deciding factor will be if you have a broadband connection to the Internet. If you don’t know, broadband is loosely a cable, satellite, or DSL connection. Sometimes, you can even use a wireless connection from some local providers. If you are still using a dial-up connection, you are not going to want to try watching video, but you probably knew that.

Finally, you need to look and see if there are shows that you like available online. There are many, many different ways to watch your shows and movies online. To be fair, I will talk about the legal, hazy, and outright illegal ways to watch them. Hazy and illegal will be covered in the next two columns. We are in NO WAY advocating anything illegal, but you should know about them so you can avoid them.

My personal favorite site to watch shows on is Hulu.com. Hulu has a very good looking site with a lot of content to watch. If you like Fox, NBC, or Comedy Central television, you should give them a shot. There are a few commercials in some shows, and some without. The good news is that there are less commercials than a regular show (4 on average). Hulu even has movies to watch, mostly older, but totally free.

Hulu has just launched a player for you to download to your desktop. It is brand new as I write this for you, so I don’t have a lot of experience with it. If it is anything like the site, it will be smooth and easy to use. Please go check it out and let me know what you think via askageek@register-news.com .

Another site I recommend is TV.com. I have not used it much, but it has been good when I checked it out occasionally. TV.com is owned by CBS, however it has shows from different companies. Go see if it suits your taste.

A slightly different way to watch shows and discover new material is Miro (getmiro.com). Miro is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It truly is available for any operating system you use. Miro is a Bit Torrent (I’ll explain later) and netcast client. It will download torrent files and netcasts for you while you surf or watch other shows in its player. There are videos of all types – gardening, news, talk, etc. available for you to subscribe to in the Miro directory. All of these subscriptions are free, so go see what you want to watch/hear.

To clarify for anyone who may not know, a netcast is a video or audio show produced for download over the Internet. Netcasts are also referred to as ‘podcasts, vodcasts (video)’, and other terms. There are good and bad, just like television and radio. Torrents are downloads that pull from a lot of different places to get you the download faster. They work really well, and I will explain them better under ‘illegal’, even though they are not.

The last legal way I can think of to watch free TV is to go to the station sites and watch your favorites there. Not every station, especially cable stations, offer their shows online. A good deal of them do, so you should go look around and see which ones are out there that you like.

For years and years the major publishing companies have controlled how we and our children are educated. Paying an outrageous price for books has just been a fact of life with these corporations doing what they can to educate, but at a profit. From the books your kindergarten teacher used to the overpriced Linux books you buy in college,  this problem never seems to end.

Until now.

Frankly, I have been wondering why schools keep blowing through budgets by buying these overpriced novelty items. With the advent of the Internet, free operating systems, Linux running on oooooold PCs, free ‘Course Management Software’, and willingness of people like me to help schools – WHY?

Honestly, I can’t answer that question. I can offer some possible reasons, but I’m not the one making decisions at our schools. Perhaps too many educators are stuck in the rut of using the same way things have always been as their methodology. Perhaps the colleges don’t want to give up their revenue stream, as hypothesized here.

When I took Cisco courses over the past couple of years, there were no printed texts. Every bit of the curriculum, save for hands-on, was online. There is very little reason that schools could not move to the same format. The books are available if need be, but access to the world wide web negates that need.

Yes, I know that not everyone has a PC at home. However, quite a few do have one that they goof with quite a bit. Shouldn’t they have the ability to use it to study as well? Even without Internet access, CDs could be burnt, library access is available, and there are study halls.

Maybe I’m too much into wishful thinking, but it seems we are due for change. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

El yay. I finally got my AAS degree in the mail today. I now have proof that I spent two years fine-tuning my IT skills with official curriculum. Rend Lake definitely has a great program in my opinion. The instructors go out of their way to help you learn material.

While at RLC I picked up quite a bit of knowledge about networking, VoIP, and LAN/WAN design. While most of my Windows support experience was at my job/internship, that’s normal. Most of IT is basic knowledge with a lot of real world experience thrown into the mix.

It was a strenuous path to keep going sometimes, but well worth the trip. I met a lot of great people in the program too. Most of us are still in contact via the various social networks. Perhaps we can all have a reunion at some point.

I have to say that I’m kind of proud of myself for attaining a degree. Yes, I know an Associate degree isn’t a huge accomplishment, but it’s what I’ve got and I worked hard for it.

Now if I could just get this job thing worked out…

This is a reprint of an article from my Ask a Geek column in the Mount Vernon Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you like it.

You’re sitting in front of your computer after booting into the operating system and cleaning out your extra startup junk. Now what do you do?

If you are like most people, you either start a web browser or email program. Even if you open a web browser first, most everyone I know goes to check their web-based email. I think that we still get excited at communication with others, even if it’s just letters on a screen. Just like people get excited when they get a package in the mail, we get excited at email from friends and family.

So what do you use for email? There are a great many programs that would like to be your email handler: Outlook Express or Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera Mail, and others. Each of these have their positives and negatives. Some are expandable, heavy, light, built-in to browsers (Opera) and everything in between.

Everyone has their own preference about how they like to access their email, and deciding on a client may require you to try out a few different applications before you figure out what is right for you. I’ll give you my opinions and some overviews here, but try them out and see what you like to use.

Outlook Express (Mail in Vista) is the free client that Microsoft includes in Windows. It is effective at downloading your email and keeping together for you. OE is not a grand program by any means, but it will download email from Hotmail (now Live), which is a big plus if you use that service. Otherwise, it is an extremely simple program that does not do much for you.

Outlook is Microsoft’s professional email program, and rightfully so. I am not a fan of giving Microsoft money, but their Outlook software is excellent. Outlook can keep track of your email, mark it for follow-up, keep track of tasks, and archive your email in files so that you can store them however you need. All of this it does out of the box, and many companies make plugins for Outlook so that you can do even more. Put simply, if you have the money, this is an email program that you should check out.

If you don’t have the money to invest in Outlook, I strongly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird (http://mozilla.com) as an alternative. Thunderbird is a free and open-source email program with many add ons that help it be more productive. Out of the box, Thunderbird is a lot like Outlook Express, but it is expandable by the many add ons available. The great thing about this is that you can add in only what you want or need instead of taking it all in a giant lump like with Outlook. Realize that if you take Thunderbird for a spin, it is not quite as polished as Outlook, but Thunderbird 3 is due soon and promises to be much improved.

There are some quick takes on a few email clients. Each of them has their own unique way of handling email, and one may be more suited to your tastes. I would suggest trying them out and finding what is best for you. Let me know what you prefer.

This is a reprint from my Ask a Geek column that appears weekly in the Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Once your computer has booted into the operating system, most people think it is just sitting there waiting for you to tell it to do something. This is not quite the case.

Many programs are already active and doing things you may not even know about. For example, your antivirus and firewall (you do have both, don’t you?) start automatically with the operating system. That is great and they are protecting you just as they should, however there are other programs that you might not even be aware of that do the same thing and slow down your system.

Adobe, RealPlayer, iTunes, Google products, etc. all install onto your system and are free to download. Unfortunately most or all of these programs also make a setting in your operating system that automatically starts them without your input. They do this under the logic of ‘checking for updates’ or ‘quick-starting’ so that you don’t have to worry about these tasks. Unfortunately every one of these tasks will eat up memory (RAM) and processing power that your computer should be using to do whatever YOU want it to do.

The easy way to see this problem is to look in the lower-right corner of your screen by the clock. Almost every one of those little icons is eating up power that will make your PC run slower than it did before. The sneakier of these programs will not even have an icon in the corner, but will run ‘in the background’ without any easy way to see what it is doing.

Personally, I dig into the Windows’ registry and delete these items so that they don’t start automatically, but there is an easier solution for anyone to use: CCleaner (http://ccleaner.com). CCleaner has been mentioned here before to clean out temp files and help clean out your PC, but it will also clean out these ‘autostart’ or ‘startup’ entries so that you can have back the power that your computer has been robbed of without your knowing.

When using CCleaner, you do so at your own risk. It is generally safe to use so long as you read what you are doing, and it even offers to make a backup before performing tasks so that you can restore if you break anything. Still, you can break things if you are careless.

When cleaning out startup programs, everyone will have different choices to make about which programs to remove or keep. For example, you should keep the startup entries for your antivirus and firewall, but probably not Adobe or Apple Update. Some entries will not really say what they do or what program they are associated with in any way. It is advised that you DO NOT DELETE those entries. It is safer to leave something there than to delete it and then have to go back and fix it later.

When you go to download CCleaner, they ask for a donation. No donation is required, but they ask so that the development can continue. If you can, drop them a buck or two if the program helps you. Thanks to Ms. McClintock for reminding me about this fact via email.

This is a reprint that originally appeared in my ‘Ask a Geek’ column for the Register-News. This is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Your computer is stupid. Yes, for all the wonderful tricks you can accomplish with it, your computer only understands two things ’1′ and ’0′. On and off. Yes or no. Computers at their simplest are binary switches that do a certain thing in response to 1, and another in response to 0. That’s it. There’s your explanation of how a computer works. Everything that you accomplish with a computer is based upon those ones and zeros.

The first part of your computer to use those ones and zeros is the Power On Self Test (POST). When you power on your PC the first thing you usually get is a tiny beep before anything happens most people understand. That beep is your POST completing successfully. It signals that ‘all systems (or pieces) are go’ and the computer can start loading information from the next part.

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is the second phase of your computing experience and may be completely hidden from you. As noted above, your computer is stupid. The BIOS contains simple commands that tell your hard drive, monitor, and everything else connected to the computer how to ‘talk’. You could almost call it a ‘translator’ for making everything communicate.

Once the basics are out of the way, your BIOS points to a ‘bootloader’ that then points to your operating system – Windows, Apples’ OSX, Linux, or even BSD. At this point, most of you will see your operating system’s loading screen showing the Windows or other logo.

From there you will be taken to your graphical user interface (GUI) where most everyone is used to interacting with their PC. This is where you open your email, surf the web, write on the Register-News forum, or perform any other task you need to get done.

When you add a printer to your PC, you must usually install drivers. Drivers are instructions to tell the operating system how to talk to the BIOS so that the printer or other device will do what you ask. So, the path of communication goes – Program > Operating system > Driver > BIOS > Device. I warned you that the computer is stupid, and that long trip to print a report or picture proves it. Four steps to accomplish one task. Still, I think we all can agree that computers make our lives much simpler and easier.

There you have a simple explanation of how your computer talks to itself. There is a lot more ‘behind the scenes’ action, but hopefully this will get you a working understanding of how your computer operates on the inside.