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Spam comes in waves -- different types hit their peaks and valleys at different times, and occasionally a new type of attack pops up. We've been seeing one of those lately, with the rise of the absurd news headline spam, designed to get the unwary e-mail recipient to open a message carrying a virus that can in turn send out more spam as well as subjecting you to identity theft.

Some creative researchers have figured out how to turn cell phones into CCTV cameras. There's both promise and threat here: On the upside, we can use cell-phone video to do things like track severe weather in real time...but on the downside, we haven't even begun to address the security and privacy ramifications of having surveillance everywhere.

A caller wanted to know how to replace the clock battery in his iMac. Without knowing for certain exactly how to crack open that machine, we can point him to Apple's community-driven support website, where questions like this are answered all the time.

Brian stands by his assessment that "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is one of the creepiest films ever. But when Nestle recently decided to give away a Willy-Wonka-style golden ticket for a trip to space, it seems ridiculously appropriate that the winner is a flight attendant.

It's pretty amazing to see how quickly rising gas prices have affected our behavior. In just a few short months, $4 a gallon gas has done more to change the auto industry -- sending truck and SUV sales plummeting and forcing rapid changes in what's being built -- than more than 30 years of Federal fuel-efficiency standards. And we aren't even paying as much for gas as our friends in Europe.

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Dan is one of many who are disappointed that bowling isn't an Olympic sport. Maybe they'll make room for Wii bowling by the London Games in 2012.

Did you know that tug-of-war was once an Olympic sport? We didn't either.

Apple is out with the next-generation iPhone (they're calling it the iPhone 3G, since it's designed to take advantage of 3G wireless networks. Lines were long, and it's still hard to figure out why anyone felt the need to get one right now, instead of just waiting a couple of days for the furor to die down.

Speaking of Apple, Fake Steve Jobs is retiring from his weblog. Fake Steve Jobs was a concoction of a Forbes technology columnist who's moving to Newsweek instead.

Back to the Olympics for a moment: The Chinese government claims it's broken up a bunch of terrorist attacks planned against the Games. Let it be noted here and now: China could break up in our lifetimes, and if and when that happens, the consequences will be extraordinary for all of us.

If you're using a Microsoft Zune for your MP3 player, Microsoft offers a support website.

Microsoft is going to offer a version of its Office software through an online subscription. The problem with that idea, of course, is that sometimes Internet access fails, and without that, your online software is useless. Google already offers a web-based office suite for free (Microsoft is going to charge about $70 a year), and we've long been fans of OpenOffice, which is a free office suite.

Internet Explorer has a serious security flaw due to its ActiveX extension. Most people ought to try to use an alternative browser, like Firefox.

Microsoft has stopped shipping new copies of Windows XP to most computer makers and retailers. Microsoft appears to be trying to make room for its next operating system -- namely, Windows 7 -- which they're scheduling for a January 2010 release. But it's hard to believe that they'll keep to that schedule and still manage to have a better program to offer. Besides, Microsoft has supposedly committed to supporting XP through April 2014. They've had to make that promise because so many people and organizations have been so underwhelmed by Windows Vista.

Microsoft hasn't given up on trying to buy Yahoo. Now, instead of a direct buyout, there's talk of three-way transactions and fights over who stays on Yahoo's board of directors. Microsoft still needs to find another line of business and stop making things so complicated. The Internet is no longer the wild west it once was.

If you've ever noticed that online discussions often deteriorate into idiotic name-calling flame wars, then you ought to be familiar with Godwin's Law.

The Internet is scheduled to run out of IP addresses by 2011. While that sounds spooky, there's a solution at hand which involves a lot of back-end work that most users will never notice. But getting the right people to implement it is going to be a lot like the Y2K situation: A whole bunch of behind-the-scenes action, right up until the last second, which almost nobody will notice.

If you're hoping to save some old vinyl records by putting them onto CD, you might look at getting a USB-enabled turntable. It looks like you can find a bunch of them on Amazon.com.

Viacom -- owners of Comedy Central, MTV, and other networks -- has won a dispute with YouTube. The judgement entitles Viacom to a list of every video viewed on YouTube ever. It's a reckless invasion of YouTube users' privacy.

Dan is delighted to share the news that an estimated 8% of computer users are now using Macs.

We've been asked about Linux, the open-source operating system (or, rather, family of systems), and which version is best for the average user. While we have no direct experience with any of the specific distributions of Linux, we've heard a lot of good things about three of them: Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Debian. Both Dan and Brian have intended to play with versions of these operating systems at different times, but there are only so many hours in the day.

The iPhone turns one year old right about now. It took a little longer than Brian expected for the clones to appear...they're really only gaining ground now, about 12 months after the release, rather than the six months Brian had predicted.

Bill Gates has signed off as a full-time employee at Microsoft. He started the company in 1975, and now he's going to spend his time giving away his money.

Macs have a reputation for being pretty secure, but they're not impervious to attack. A new Trojan horse virus is attacking Apple computers.

30 years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, a full 1% of all US births are test-tube babies -- that is, they're in-vitro vertilized.

A caller asked about upgrading from a Sony Clie to a new smartphone. The Clie runs the Palm OS, so the easiest upgrade would involve moving to one of the current generation of Palm smartphones. (Smartphones, by the way, are phones that double as PDAs and Internet browsers). Incidentally, there are lots of sites on the Internet (like PDAPhoneHome.com) where you can go to get ideas and advice from fellow users.

Listener e-mail of the week:

I enjoy your show very much and wish you guys had a different time slot as I don't get a chance to listen every Saturday.

I have Microsoft Works Suite 2006. I am very happy with it and it has worked well for my needs. However, I have an e-mail that was sent to me with an attachment. This attachment is a very large list that was made on a Microsoft Excel program and I can not open the e-mail to view and edit the list.

I have done a search for Microsoft Excel but I am not sure what product to buy. Is there much of a difference between Excel Home Edition and an Excel Office Edition. This attachment that I can not open may have been made on an Office Edition. My computer has a spreadsheet program so I really do not need Excel except for opening this e-mail and any future e-mails.

- Brenda

Good news for Brenda (and you, too): You don't need to buy Excel to open an Excel spreadsheet. First off, Google Documents opens many Excel spreadsheets reasonably well, and the service is free. Or you can go to Brian's list of great free programs and download OpenOffice, a free office suite, which includes a spreadsheet program, a word processing program, and a presentation program, among others. Or, of course, you could always call up the person who sent you the file in the first place and ask them to convert it before sending it to you.

Other people talk about all the bad things happening in the world, but we like to focus on the positive -- like the new UV-blocking sunglasses Brian picked up in a drugstore the other day. The improvements in things like UV-reducing lenses, laser eye surgery, and even genetic research on blindness are all making life better for all of us.

A caller asked about using modems and blacklists to screen out telemarketing calls for his small business. While there are services and programs that can help with the avalanche of calls small businesses get, Brian's advice (as a small businessperson) is just to use a standard caller ID service as an early-warning system for fake or blocked numbers (like 000-000-0000) which tell you that a call is likely to be a waste of your time, and then to give the annoying calls 10 seconds to state their case before you simply hang up. The amount of time you'd waste in programming numbers into a blacklist or trying to set up a modem to filter your calls probably wouldn't be worth it unless you're getting scores of time-wasting calls a day. Or, if you're really pressed for time, if you see "Number Blocked" or one of those nonsense numbers on the caller ID, you can always let the call roll over to voice mail. Junk callers almost never leave messages, but legitimate customers and clients will.

If you're a novice looking to convert old home movies to DVD, here are a couple of recommendations:

• Get a DVD recorder with a VHS slot built-in. This will make your work easy and save you the trouble of figuring out lots of new cords and programs. Don't bother trying to put your movies through a computer before burning them to DVD. Direct conversion is lots easier.
• Don't go cheap on the DVD recorder -- good-quality converters are available in the $200 to $350 range, and if you try to cut corners by getting the cheapest thing you see, you risk regretting it later. Most stores have staff who can direct you to a reasonably good recorder in that $200 to $350 price range.
• Record to the 2-hour speed on your DVD. Most DVD recorders will give you a range of speeds to record at; the smaller the time they can record, the higher the quality. Most old home movies are no better than about the 4-hour quality on DVD, so if you record to 2-hour quailty, you won't find yourself regretting later that you didn't save every bit of quality that you could.
• Buy brand-name, archival-quality recordable DVDs. You can get them for less than $0.50 each, and you'll appreciate the quality in the future.
• Don't bother setting a bunch of chapters on your DVDs unless you only have a couple of movies to record. If you have more than about 5 tapes to record, you'll get burned out setting all of those chapters, and then you'll quit recording those DVDs before you've saved your entire library. Much better to have a complete library of home movies on DVD without chapter settings than an incomplete library on DVD with a bunch of VHS tapes crumbling to dust in boxes somewhere.
• Store those DVDs in a cool, dry place away from sunlight.

We received a call about saving old vinyl records to CD, which we'd love to show you how to do, but that will require a brand-new how-to page that will take us some time to put up. Check in with us in the future.

Online extra: GPS jamming isn't a new rock phenomenon -- it's a sign that Communists can't stand the idea of people finding their way on their own. Oh, and that they know how useful GPS navigation is to our national security.

On this, the first day of summer, we thought we'd make it about barbecue.

Local barbecue expert Steve "Woody" Wasson of Woody's Smoke Shack (2511 Cottage Grove) joined us in-studio and gave us some tips on selecting a good smoker/slow cooker, like the offset and bullet, and included some good information on temperature and safety.  Oh, and he fed us a terrific lunch!  Thanks Woody!




Judith Fertig of BBQ Queens joined us for some tips on making your backyard barbecue well rounded.