Todd Cochrane talked to Marc Quadagno and Shaun Fisher of RawTalentGuitar about their product at CES 2011.  The RawTalent Guitar program works with any guitar that you can plug in. It comes with a guitar to USB cable. Plug one end into the guitar and the other end into a PC. The program offers performance feed back in real time. As you play your notes are place on top of the the correct cords and notes. The music scrolls as you play so there is no need to turn pages.

The program includes a Amplitube X-gear an industry-leading amp and FX modeling tool, so you can get the effects you want, without having to pay thousands of dollars for the equipment. It can even teach you how to tune your guitar and there is a metronome to help you keep time. There are 15 license songs included in the program. They said one of the hardest things they had to do is trying to get licenses for the songs. Rawtalent Guitar is available now for $199.99 at this time it is Windows only, although they are working on a Mac version

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central.

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Todd and Tom get together with Jerry Cimadomo and Greg Stetson of Ectaco to review their range of ebook readers and translators.

First up was is the Jetbook Mini (shown right) at $99, which runs off 4 AAA batteries giving 90 hours of continuous reading. It comes with free software which converts a wide range of ebook formats into a one suitable for the device.

Second was a new model that will be out in a couple of months. Aimed at the school market, it will come preloaded with a pile of educational material. It goes beyond being a simple ereader with features such as voice recognition so that language programs are able to give feedback on pronunciation. Around $250.

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central and Tom Newman of The Fogview Podcast.

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An Oakland, California high school is receiving a gift of Cisco Valet Wireless routers and wireless adapters for its students.  The Valet Wireless Router, a new offering from Cisco intended for home use, purports to be one of the easiest to use and set up in the industry.

The purpose of the gift is to give students at the high-risk ARISE high school the access they need from their homes.  The ARISE program prepares low-income students to be the first in their families to attend college.  The graduating class of 2010 had a 100% college admission rate, which is phenomenal.  With the help that Cisco is now offering, it can only help to continue this high rate of transition to college.  Students with online access have a much better shot at success than those without, and Cisco hopes to breach this digital divide for the ARISE program.

What is unique about the Valet is how easy it really is.  As a person who has had to set up multiple home-based wired and wireless networks, I know what a pain it can be.  And after you’re gone, the client is left having to deal with the network and its complicated setup and potential issues.  No wonder many routers supplied by phone companies and other ISP’s have the SSID hard-set and the password printed on a sticker on the bottom of the device.  Really unsecure, but easier for the client to access and work with than some complicated setup a geek did for them.

Valet promises a 3-step setup process and an easy access system right from your computer to enable parental controls, open or close guest access, and add devices like the XBox to the setup.  Both the Valet and the Valet Plus devices offer four ethernet ports for expansion to non-wireless devices, as well.

The routers are a bit pricier than the Linksys model Cisco is known for, but still reasonable.  I paid not much less for my latest Netgear router, purchased because my six-year-old Linksys router box had finally failed.  I should have held out for the Valet.

Tom and Andy interview Mike Reiners from Casio America, who’s brought along the Casio fx-CG10 aka Prizm graphing calculator. This calculator is a long way from the 9-digit, 8-segment LCD calculators I used in my school education as the Prizm comes with a hi-res LCD color display (216 x 384 with 65k colours) making it the “first” full colour graphing calculator. There’s no touchscreen but there’s a little joypad for navigation.

You might be thinking that a colour display will munch through the batteries but Casio’s new Blanview LCD is extremely frugal and 4 alkaline AAAs will give 140 hours of typical use. Which is great because you really don’t want to run out of juice in the middle of an exam.

The video also demonstrates the use of a Flipbook, a series of photographic images which demonstrate an effect, such as acceleration or simple harmonic motion. The Prizm can then help the student understand the nature of the effect.

The Prizm won Design & Engineering Showcase Honors at CES in 2011. Congratulations, Casio.

Children today just won’t know the joy of putting in 5376606 and turning the calculator upside down.

Available now for $129.99 in Best Buy and on-line.

Interview by Andy McCaskey of SDR News and Tom Newman of The Fogview Podcast.

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Jeffrey takes a look at NEC‘s cool dual screen Android tablet. Each touch screen is 7″ and while there are many uses, one target market is education. One screen can be used to show video or diagrams with the accompanying text on the other. It’s powered by a 1 GHz ARM Cortex CPU rather than the more usual Atom processors. The video shows that the tablet comes with plenty of features such as SD card slots and USB ports in convenient places.

Available in Japan in 2011 and later worldwide.

Interview by Jeffery Powers from Geekazine.com.

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Andy McCaskey talks to Heather Shelstad, Director of Marketing for CourseSmart. Anyone in education will know that textbooks are expensive and CourseSmart offers a cheaper and more convenient alternative.  CourseSmart is the world’s largest provider of on-line textbooks with around 90% of the current curriculum available at about 60% of the cost. CourseSmart has relationships with many of the major publishers, so new textbooks are available on-line simultaneously with the paper editions.

Heather shows off the iPad’s virtual bookshelf client that takes advantage of the iPad’s touch screen to provide real-world functionality such as sticky notes and annotations. The on-line world can provide a richer experience than a traditional book, with links to other resources across the Internet but a new feature coming soon will be the ability to download and store chapters or whole books for reference off-line.

Any web browser can be used to read etexts at CourseSmart but there are specific clients for iPads, iPhones and Android devices.

Interview by Andy McCaskey of SDR News.

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Imagine a school that passes out Amazon Kindles instead of printed textbooks. No books at all, zilch, zero, nada – everything electronic. Printing costs could be completely eliminated, along with a myriad of associated problems – replacement books, textbook obsolescence, and book disposal to mention but a few. A single high-battery-life device such as a Kindle would suffice for replacing all books.

Let’s take this electronic book thought experiment a bit farther. The next logical step would be for the teachers to pass out tests and other traditional paper handouts electronically, eliminating paper altogether. At that point, the Kindle or other reader or tablet would have to be able to allow student interaction, say on a multiple-choice test.

The stickiest problem with this scenario would revolve around having an easy-to-use input system on these devices that allowed students to write phrases, paragraphs, papers, and draw images or diagrams to send back to the teacher.

All of this technology already exists in various forms. Perhaps the iPad comes close to meeting many of these requirements, but some form of the dreaded pressure stylus input would still be needed. Also, two separate devices would be needed – a reading screen, and an input screen on which to write, type and/or draw.

Are we there yet? Not quite, but we are getting close. With the success of the Kindle, iPad, smartphones and maturing touch screen technology in general, the day of eliminating the need for tons of paper is finally becoming a practical, desirable reality.

Andy and Steve

Andy McCaskey of SDR News and Jeffrey Powers of Geekazine had a rare honor as we got to interview Steve Wozniak - now Chief Scientist over at Fusion IO – a company that works with NAND  memory for high speed / High Capacity storage.

There are two parts to the interview. The first one, Jeffrey talks about Fusion IO, Steve’s role and a how the Segway Polo is going. After switching seats with Andy, something amazing happened. The two just started talking. I couldn’t get the video queued fast enough and they didn’t see the queue in. So, I just hit the button and they continued on.

But what we did get was an amazing conversation about education, the future of technology and Steve Wozniak’s new role.

Part I

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (38.1MB)

Audio Only Version

Part II

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (68.7MB)

Audio Only Version

Texas is the state with the most listeners to the Geek News Central Podcast congrats to our Visa Gift Card Winner! New promotion starting next show, tune in to win. I talk a little about the state of podcasting and give you all a little information about a new website that we will be building full details shortly. We will need the communities help! Next show will be live from Silicon Valley, looking for a good meetup location for dinner suggestions?

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Listener Links:
AT&T Getting Better?
Internet Detox Center
Follow How it Works Mac Users Only!
Readers Digest in Trouble.
One to many exploding iPhones.
Building Block of Life found on Comet
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Murdoch Lessons

Show Links:
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Stress Test on the Cloud!
New FeedDemon Released
AT&T Dumps Mitnick!
Social iTunes i’m not so sure about that?
How Hackers are Hacking your Banking etc.
South Eastern Conference going to go after Fan Sites!
You can hide but a court order will jack you up!
Is Warren Buffet right?
465 Gigs a Day Transfered from Moon!
Our Fate in several Million Years
Employers use Facebook #1 Source to vet future Employees!
Paypal hitting you in wallet for new fees.
Video Ads in Magazines
WordPress URL Shortner.
Addicted to the Net?
How much is your credit card worth?
Plastics breaking down in the ocean faster than thought!
Oracle – Sun Merger very close to be finalized.
Mac or Netbook for Students?
Windows 7 beta is closed.
RIAA Surcharge for XM and Sirius Listeners
Blogger Strike defeats the purpose!
Happy 100th Show Geekazine.com
Inflatable heat shield tested!
SciToys projects for you and your kids!
iPhone does 1080P
Cool clock that is Cool but Expensive
New Bose QuietComfort.
97% Love the phone 55% Hate AT&T!

Have you ever been surfing the net and hit a website that tries to launch a swarm of pop up ads. I am sure many of you have had this happen especially when using Internet Explorer 6.0 without any utilities to stop such action. Imagine being a teacher and having that happen during a class where students are exposed to pornographic images.

Well this happened to a teacher named Julie Amero in 2004, she was fired almost immediately and then prosecuted and tried shortly after that on a variety of charges stemming from the pop up swarm.

We all know that schools rarely have the latest technology and I doubt that they had software installed to prevent the actions that occurred. But what is a travesty is how it all turned out you are going to just shake your head. www.alternet.org

During the past two weeks I have become to realize as many others have that are actively building podcast communities and also at the same time working on our own shows is that the general public at this point still has very little idea what a podcast is.

Many continue to be confused and think that a iPod is necessary to enjoy this powerful content. In my book on Podcasting I called podcastings greatest strengths was the “Power of Walk Away Content, it’s content that you subscribe to not what someone is trying to shove down your throat”

With the latest move by Apple we need to educate the general public on what the big deal is about this content, we need to have an awareness campaign that in under 60 seconds gets them up to speed.

I have been holding a domain for  a while that I would be willing to host for the community if we could get some community leaders to brainstorm on a design and put something together that will serve as a place to educate the consumers.

The domain is “whatsapodcast.com” maybe not the best domain but hey it’s easy to remember. If you would like to help out in putting some info together on that site drop me a line and we will get to work.