Recently I purchased an iPod Touch as a replacement MP3 player. With my previous MP3 player I had become accustomed to downloading specific podcasts, such as the Radio National podcasts, to the computer and then connecting the MP3 player to download the podcasts. This has proven to be a good method, as I can take a good link at the Radio National story that goes with the podcast before downloading it, not to mention that the Radio National website provides plenty of information on each podcast to inform this decision. However, I am finding that the iPod Touch does not allow this method of operation. For podcasts I need to use iTunes and accept push technology to download a whole set of programs in the general area of interest. Then, in order to play a particular podcast, I need to scroll through a series of dated programs in that general area of interest and have no way to judge whether a podcast is of sufficient interest before playing (as the iPod screen does not seem to provide much information about particular podcasts). How can I get the iPod Touch to do what we want - individual podcasts, rather than what it wants to give us, which is a suite of poorly described push jumble podcasts. (more…)

The speakers attached to my computer are built into the monitor and mysteriously the sound works in the morning but does not in the afternoon. This problem has been around for about 18 months and reinstalling Windows XP has not fixed the issue. Do you have any suggestions? (more…)

When not at school I often like to make movies and have found a CD-ROM from 1995 called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The program seems to have lots of sound effects that I would like to use. However, I cannot find the sound effect files on the disc, even though I can see other bits of video and audio. Is it possible to take the sound effect files from the disc to use in my movies, and how can I do this? The computer is running Windows Vista. (more…)

A work colleague recently gave me a DVD with several AVI files. Each of the videos is crystal-clear, similar to the quality when playing the video back directly from the camcorder itself. Interestingly, each AVI file is only a few hundred megabytes in size. However, whenever I attempt to create an AVGI movie the picture quality is also degraded and the overall size of the file is dramatically increased. How can I download the video while also compressing the file size, without losing any picture quality? (more…)

Several AVI video files on my computer play perfectly, however when I take these files to a different computer they do not play, but instead only the audio component of the video plays. Is there something wrong with these videos preventing them from playing on the other computer? (more…)