The Kaito KA1102 stuck out in my initial research and after reading the many positive reviews on the net, I knew that the KA1102 would fulfill my needs. I ordered my Kaito online and waited to get it and test it out.

My initial tests were excellent with the KA1102. It could get in all of the major international broadcasters as well as many other smaller broadcasters. It also received the HAM bands quite well.

Receiving ham radio transmissions was one of the most important needs I had for the Kaito KA1102. I was able to receive SSB, PSK31 and even RTTY transmissions with it. This is very important in any kind of emergency.

I really liked the fact that radio came with its own rechargeable batteries and the fact that it can recharge the batteries with the supplied AC adapter. There were a couple of downsides with this arrangement though. First, it can only charge the batteries when the radio is off and second, it uses three batteries. This kind of limits its usage as a general battery charger.

I’d also like to add that the Kaito KA1102 is quite small so it can basically go anywhere. I take it along with me in my backpack wherever I go. It’s very handy. Due to its small size the sound isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, but it does sound great with headphones and external speakers really sound great.

If you would like to get a Kaito KA1102, just click on the Black Kaito KA1102 link or the Silver Kaito KA1102 link. Happy World Banding!

I finally decided to get back in the game about a month ago. I have been stuck with a Tech Plus license since 1990 and I figured it was high time I upgraded my license and buy a radio or two. On April 9th, I took the General Class exam and passed with flying colors.

Next up on the agenda? It looks like they will be doing an Extra Class Exam in May so I’ll try my hand at it.

Right now, I am waiting for a couple of basic radios to arrive, a Yaesu FT-250R and a Realistic HTX-100. Yes I know 10 meters isn’t hopping, but I got the HTX-100 purely for nostalgia sake.

Anyways, take a look at this video introducing Windows 7.

I am doing a little bit of tumblogging and you can check out my research tumblr at Jack Woods and you can check out my teaching tumblr blog at Code555.

If you use facebook, you can connect with me on Jack Woods Facebook and you can connect with me on my twitter at Jack Woods Twitter.

Take care and happy teching.

One way to get traffic is to put a title screen and a credits screen on your video where you can show your webpage. This works really well and helps you hone a message, but these screens can easily be take out of a video if someone wants to make it their own. In other words, someone else can benefit from your hard work.

Fortunately, there is a better way. A great to protect every single frame of your video is to use a watermark. Watermarks can’t easily be taken out of a video. They stay there, no matter how many times they are uploaded and downloaded, no matter if someone else tries to benefit from a video or not. You can make your watermark be your web address and you can benefit from your video marketing, day after day.

There are several commercial video editing programs that can help you put a watermark in your videos. I’m sure they work well, but these commercial video editing programs cost money. I am cheap so I always prefer to use open source programs. And yes, there is an open source alternative that can help you EASILY add a watermark to your videos before you upload them, it’s called ffmpeg.

There’s a Windows version for it, but I use the version that’s in the repos for Ubuntu. Just go to the command line and type:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

and you are set.

Once it’s installed, all you need to do to use it is go to a terminal and type this:

ffmpeg -i ~/Desktop/rawvideo.mpg
-vhook '/usr/lib/vhook/drawtext.so
-f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial.ttf
-x 5 -y 5 -t Visit TechGringo.Com' ~/Desktop/finished.avi

Important note: Those four lines are a single command and need to be entered on a single line.

That’s it. You now have a simple text watermark in the videos you upload to Youtube and other sites.

I thought that I was taking proper precautions, but I thought wrong. I never knew that Flash, the browser plugin that powers many web applications, stores cookies of its own. I never even gave it a thought, but when I decided to check out my Flash settings, boy did I get a surprise. Dozens of websites that I have visited since I built this computer had stored flash cookies within the flash application folder. That means that those websites could track my visits to them on a regular basis. I find that just freaky. These aren’t the cookies you can delete inside your privacy settings in your browser, these are separate.

If you are like me, you don’t like having cookies that stay forever on your computer. While Adobe Flash doesn’t advertise that Flash stores cookies and they don’t make it well known how to change your Flash settings, it is relatively easy to clean out Flash cookies.

Here’s how you do it:

Visit http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html. This is where you can adjust many Flash settings, but we are interested primarily in the Flash cookies.

On this page, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Scroll through the list and you can see the literally dozens of sites that put these Flash cookies on your hard drive. Sites like Google Adwords, Youtube and Paypal are there along with sites you might never remember visiting. Freaky, isn’t it?

Now it’s time to delete these cookies. This is the easiest part, just click on the button that says Delete all sites and the cookies vanish and your computer is once again clean.

If you would like to advertise or have one of your products featured here on TechGringo.com, drop me an email at info@techgringo.com.