Ask DACS
September 2013

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef

Ask DACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem. The answers below include my own post-meeting research.

Q – The CD-DVD drive in my computer disappeared from Windows. I heard there is a registry tweak to fix this. Does anyone have any info on this? This is Windows 7 and we think it disappeared after a round of Windows Updates. A Microsoft “Fix-it” did not fix it.

A – The discussion at the meeting involved more questions with no solution. Questions included: Does the drive appear in the BIOS? Can you boot from the drive? The drive does not show in either Device Manager or in Drive Management. Suggestion: scan for new devices in Device Manager.

A Microsoft “Fix-it” is a wizard found on the Microsoft Support website that solves a single specific problem.. These small programs perform required repairs “automatically”. They are programmed to check that you are running the appropriate Windows version but it is best to read the description carefully to be sure it applies to your situation before trying to run it on your computer. If one exists for your problem, you will find it by searching on your favorite search engine (I use Bing for this) and looking for Microsoft Support in the search results.

Post-meeting the member found that it did show in the BIOS and the machine can boot from a bootable CD. He also happened uppon a solution. Using Drive Manager, he changed the drive letter for the “recovery partition” from drive-d to drive-r, simply to force a change in the registry drive settings. On reboot, the CD-DVD drive reappeared as drive-e, as if by magic. This may or may not correct a similar problem on another computer and, unfortunately, does nothing to solve the mystery of why it disappeared.

Q – Has anyone tried to hack their television? I (as in your moderator) bought a Samsung “smart” TV (model UNxxF7100zzzzz, xx is the size in inches, the zzzzzz part is not relevant). The key part of the model is the 7100 which defines it as an upper/mid-level LED smart TV. I believe it runs Linux.

A – Discussion at the meeting centered on smart TV capabilities. A member asked if the set has an Ethernet jack or Wi-Fi. It has both but the networking implementation has some weird limitations. For instance the field for the WPA2 encryption key (pass-phrase) is limited to about 15 characters (at the meeting I said the SSID by mistake). This drove me nuts trying to enter the key using the remote control by “thumbing” on a virtual keyboard. I’d get part way into the key and the window would close. It seems that Samsung thinks a key of about 15 characters is long enough! When I got the RJ-45 jack installed in the wall wired and working, the key length issue became moot. Another question was what does an Internet connection get you? Smart TV’s can run apps, just like a smartphone or tablet. In this case, the apps come from Samsung instead of the Google Play Store. The apps include such things as Netflix, HBO Direct, Hulu, YouTube, etc. There is also a browser, but not all smart TVs have a browser. As I wrote this, I checked the browser string passed to websites: “Mozilla/5.0(Smart-TV;X11;Linux i686) Apple webkit/535.20+ (KHTML, likeGecko) Version/5.0 Safari/535.20+”. For comparison, the string on my main computer running Win7 and Firefox is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0” Compare these and you can start to guess what the string means. To eliminate the need to thumb around a virtual keyboard, I bought a Samsung Bluetooth keyboard made for their televisions. It works but there are many issues which make it difficult that are beyond this discussion. The TV is also able to play video content shared on a computer using DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) which can be enabled in Windows Media Player. My interest was spurred by recent news articles about how newer TVs are hackable and those that include a built-in camera can be used to spy on owners. Samsung makes an accessory camera ostensibly to make “video calls” using Skype.

Q – Has anyone tried a Chromecast?

A – No one at the meeting had tried using the Chromecast device. Chromecast is a digital media streaming adapter developed by Google. The device looks like a USB thumbdrive but plugs into an HDMI port on an HDTV. It connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi, costs $35, and enables you to use various devices to find content which is then displayed on your television. Read the descriptions on Google and Wikipedia for more information.

As I investigated my television, I found that Samsung has similar technology where I can use a Samsung app on my Asus tablet to find content on the Internet and then transfer this content to the television. Samsung calls this “Screen Sharing” but it works very much like Chromecast in that the tablet is not actually sharing its screen in the literal sense. So far I have not used this feature much as it is so much easier to just use the Charter Cable to find something to watch.

Q – Are Blu-ray burners available?

A – Members in the audience said that Blu-ray media and drives are available. From Wikipedia: ‘"Blu-ray Disc recordable" refers to two optical disc formats that can be recorded with an optical disc recorder. BD-Rs can be written to once, whereas BD-REs can be erased and re-recorded multiple times.’

Q – Does anyone have experience with M-disks that are supposed to last for 1000 years?

A – This appears to be a brand name for special write-once DVD+R recordable media (www.mdisc.com). Special “M-DISC™ Ready Drives” from LG are required to record (they call it “engraving”), the disks can then be read in any DVD drive. Media cost is roughly $3/disk. Capacity is the same as a regular DVD or 4.7GB. Amazingly, there is no reference on Wikipedia.

Q – How Many times can a CD-RW be rewritten? I have a multi-CD player in my car and I’d like to make new CD from time to time.

A – In my personal experience, I’ve reused a single CD-RW or a DVD-RW at least five times and many more. The media are so inexpensive; reuse should not be a big worry. I agree that changing tracks using a CD player built into the car is much easier (and safer) than changing tracks on an iPod. Some modern cars can control an iPod using buttons built into the steering wheel, but we will assume that is not the case here. As to recording CDs to play in the car, iTunes makes this trivially easy. Just install iTunes and feed it all of your existing music CDs. iTunes will RIP the songs to MP3. Then select a few songs and follow the directions to burn a set of tunes to a CD. Your car CD player may not understand MP3 format, but there is no way to find out other than to try. If your player refuses to play MP3s, burn the CDs using WAV format. MP3 is a lossy compression format, the files are thus smaller so more will fit on a disk. The process of RIPing to MP3 and then reconversion to WAV will result in some (small) loss of fidelity. To avoid this, you can use Windows Media Player to RIP to WAV files, but you lose iTunes ease of selecting the songs and burning the set to a CD. Certainly there are hundreds of other programs available to do all this that offer different features. A more thorough reading of iTunes documentation may find more up to date information.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warranty as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!

 


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