Gongol.com > Radio > Show Notes > March 20, 2010

The WHO Radio Wise Guys
Brian Gongol



Dan has a friend who's trying to cut costs in order to make his budget pay for Internet access. If cost-cutting isn't enough, don't forget that there are lots of legitimate ways to make money online.

Some Iowa communities, including (but certainly not limited to) Sioux City, Ames, and West Des Moines, are applying to take part in the Google Fiber project, through which Google promises to offer Internet access at something like one hundred times today's "broadband" speeds for a competitive price.

Besides being a private-sector moneymaking issue, broadband Internet access is emerging as a political issue, too. It's an active national political issue in the UK, and it's a hot topic on a more local issue around the United STates. But it's hard to deliver high-speed Internet economically in a country as sparsely-populated as the USA, so expect the matter to be slower to reach national prominence in the US than elsewhere in the world, where people live closer together, on average.

Is caffeine bad for your health? The science seems to have a number of answers, many of which hinge on just how much caffeine is consumed. A little might be good, but a lot seems pretty bad. For serious, valuable information on health questions, the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo Clinic are two of the best resources available.

Pop-music artist Lady Gaga has released a racy video full of product-placement ads. Is that the future of advertising: Placing ads anyplace they'll fit within things like Internet-circulated music videos?

A caller wants to find a way to get broadband Internet access to his house, which is tricky. But maybe the answer is to be found in getting back to the same co-op approach that built grain elevators, telephone exchanges, and mutual insurance companies decades ago. If the problem is that we don't know where or how to start modern-day co-ops, then perhaps that's a problem to be solved to enhance our ability to solve other problems.

If you're retiring old computers -- whether you're giving them away to charity, selling them on Craigslist, or sending them to an electronics recycler, be sure to remove the hard drive and keep it. You never really know what private data you might have left behind, nor who might come into contact with that data once it leaves your house. If you keep the hard drive, you'll know it's relatively safe.

A listener asked via our Facebook fan page whether we could think of a way to save the video recorded on his old Hi-8 tapes. His problem is that his old Hi-8 camera is broken. Unfortunately, short of finding a new camera or a new Hi-8 player, we can't offer any great suggestions. And, by the way, if you're trying to save old videos, the most headache-free method is probably to get your own tape-to-DVD recorder. Patching through your computer is probably just going to cause a lot more trouble than it's worth.

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Gongol.com -- posted 2010-04-22