We also get a healthy dose of Jay “Geek Trivia” Garmon and then finish it up with more cool sites than you can shake a cantenna at:

• Symphony of Science – One of the better and more geeky tone changing tune maker sites, includes clips from Bill Nye and Carl Sagan.  It’s where our podcast only song of the day came from!
• Free Sci-Fi and Fantasy books – Really, honestly, and legitimately free books that are either past their copyright prime or released under creative commons or the like … and a lot of them are in PDF or ereader format for grabbing onto!
• Bones In Motion Active – Do you jog/bike/hike?  Do you have a smartphone?  Are you OCD and want every last tidbit of info about your efforts?  If so your name is either Mike or you’re at least a lot like me and will LOVE this app – check out the free GPS, weather, route tracking, elevation check and pace recording … awesomely good!

Podcast only song of the week this week is “We Are All Connected” off of our coolsite of the week Symphony of Science – go there and check out their other Sagan-based tune!

Another great week of awesomeness comes your way as Jay “Geek Trivia” Garmon gives us what for and answers last week’s question.

This time around we don’t skimp on the cool sites of the week either!  There’s still a bit of a MS theme, but some real gems you may not know about:

• Microsoft Technet: Server Quest II – Remember King’s Quest or Leisure Suit Larry?  Well, this may not be quite as fun as those, but it’s pretty close, feels the same, is free, and focuses on your hapless tech support technician and how he learns to save the IT Department (and get the girl).  By Microsoft, so naturally many of the answers to the puzzles start with ‘MS’…
• Microsoft’s Deploying Windows 7 Essential Guide – Pretty much exactly what it says, in PDF format you can load on your Kindle or simply view on-screen for some great tips!
• VistaSwitcher – No, it won’t help you switch from Vista to something else … but it does speed up the Vista Alt-Tab graphical wingding and make it much slicker!  Since it’s free, if you’re stuck with Vista for a while longer you might want to check it out!
• Lake County Passage – If you live in Lake County, IL, where WRLR broadcasts out of, this will help you see the traffic before you get there!  Even works on some of your smarter smart phones like the iPhone and Storm!

Got to tune it down with a little Iron and Wine and their single “Belated Promise Ring” – but I promise next week we’ll get a little more up-tempo!

We’re always in the mood for Jay “Ghoulish” Garmon’s geek trivia (check out http://jaygarmon.net for more), and Mike rambles about current happenings in the tech world today.

Now, normally we’d have some cool sites to share – but with how interesting the talk was with Simon (and how unrestrained the time was without Dave), we just didn’t get a chance.  However … early on in the show Mike brings up an oldie but a goodie:

• Sharepod – Ever have a machine blow up on you and the only record of your music collection is on that iPod, but if you link it to a new machine you know it’ll only bring over the stuff you bought in the iTunes store and you’ll lose everything else and you’re really freaking out because that’s, like, your TUNES man, and omg what the heck is wrong with those Apple guys anyways that they won’t let you get your music off?  I mean, it’s YOUR music, right?  And you can’t get it off your iPod?  Well, calm down, stop freaking out, and just go get Sharepod – you may never go back to iTunes again!

Had to have some Halloween fun this week, so we started the show off with a little Ministry, and then tried to end with Johnathon Coulton’s RE: Your Brains!

That’s in addition to awesome new geek trivia (check out http://jaygarmon.net for more) Dave and Mike babbling about random news stories and the usual inanity you’ve come to associate with us weekly.

Wouldn’t really be a show without some great cool sites of the week either!

• Using Google Voice to call from your cell phone for FREE – We love free stuff, and though this might not be a free website per se, it tells you exactly how to enable Google Voice to make free phone calls all day and all night using the ‘fave 5′ and ‘friends and family’ options that most carriers have.  If you’re looking to shave a few bucks off your cell bill this is the way!  Via our good friends at lifehacker.com
• Microsoft SharedView – Like the idea of ‘GoToMeeting’ but don’t like the sky high cost?  Believe it or not, Microsoft has a perfectly serviceable (up to 15 attendees) and even more perfectly FREE option called SharedView.  Like netmeeting but on steroids. Free steroids, that is!

Feeling a little down and slow this week, so we capped it all off with Rufus Wainright’s “Going to a Town” from his album Release The Stars.

Plus, Mike shows off his shiny new TechTalk Google Voice number: 847-984-0847.  Call us, leave a message, get heard on air!  If we do use your voice on air and you’ve given us enough info to figure out who you are (say, an email address or something) you may get some TechTalk tchotchke’s too … or even a book!

With all the excitement going on, Dave being back on the show, and Jay Garmon’s awesome new geek trivia and personal website (http://jaygarmon.net natch), it would have been no shame to miss the cool sites of the week.  But instead, we bring you two fantastic coolsites this week – check ‘em out:

• TextHog – Looking for an easy, quick way to track your cash expenses?  TextHog may be the (free) answer for you!  You don’t have to load in a bunch of personal data, just an email address and then start texting every expense – tagged however you like – off to texthog and you’ll get all the charts, graphs, and trends you could want.   And you wont’ be taking money out of your pocket to do it!
• GroovyPost – No, this isn’t about where to score the most rad concert info on the Dead man.  It’s all about some groovy tech tips and tricks, how-to’s and makes for a ton of stuff!  Wondering how to get Google Voice on your iPhone?  Add some internet calendars to Outlook?  Click on over to GroovyPost!

And a jumping old-school podcast only song of the week “Is This New” by The Fall!

Jay Garmon does his usual Jay thing again, but we’re once again without Dave “Sparky” Saganaki.  If you’re missing Dave, send him some love at techtalk@wrlr.fm and see if we can’t beg, con, guilt or otherwise convince him to come back in the studio sometime soon!

We don’t have a huge amount of time for cool sites, but I did pick a real good one – with multiple areas – anyways:

• Aviary - With a whole host of online, free, and very cool products to check out you’ll definitely want to fly up to the aviary sometime soon.  I’ve played with the audio creator (named Myna), but you’ll have fun looking at everything if you’re more graphically inclined than me!  They’ve got flash image editors, fun color and vector editors, and more … this may be just one site, but it’s got tons of great stuff on it!

And finally, the podcast only song of the week is the totally rocking “Elvis” by These New Puritans!

We finish up as usual with some awesome coolsites of the week:

• How to Use Prey – Heard stories about folks getting their iPhones and laptops back … and nailing the crooks in the process?  Now you can too (at least for your laptop or desktop), with this free and opensource product called ‘Prey!’  It’s a little confusing to set up for first-time users though, so I’m linking you to this awesome TechRepublic site how-to.
• SuperCook – The the name of this site is hyperbole?  Maybe not once you check it out!  Similar to RecipePuppy.com, SuperCook lets you list what’s in your pantry and come up with some great new recipes … that you know you’ve got the ingredients to make!

We finish it out with a song that’s a lot of fun to listen to, Fun for Me by Moloko!

The general point of the unit is to not only give you access to the world of internet streaming radio and podcasts, but to do it easily, quickly, and without having to know a whole lot about what’s going on with your network or connections. “There is a lack of good products available for people who are not tech savvy or just busy,” said Jake Sigal, Principal and Founder of Myine Electronics. “Ira doesn’t have any unnecessary bells and whistles, and sets up automatically right out of the box without a computer. We believe that with potentially confusing electronics, less is more.”

When you first break the Ira out of the box, you’ll see that it comes with the unit itself, a power cable, and a remote. It relies on WiFi being available to access the internet, and this is the first caution I would give potential buyers – make sure you have WiFi in your home, and that it is strong in the area you intend to put the Ira. The Ira seems very sensitive to interference and distance, so don’t expect it to work as consistently and quickly as your laptop card does.

After plugging it in to the power and a set of speakers or a receiver, the next thing you’ll need to do is configure it to access that WiFi broadcast. Although the Ira is geared towards ‘low-tech’ users, it will definitely take some knowledge of networking and network configuration (plus a fair amount of patience) if you have any security enabled. Although it picks up the SSID if you are broadcasting that, and will tell you what type of security or encryption protocol, you’ll need to be able to enter the passcode. If this is a WEP secure connection, this means you’ll need to use the arrows on the remote and a pseudo keyboard on the screen to plunk out the 16 digits/characters/symbols – and unfortunately the Ira will not save incorrect configurations meaning you’ll have to do it all again if you get one of the numbers wrong! It saves it if you get it right, so this may not be a big deal, particularly once you’re past it.

Once you’ve got it all set up, you really start seeing the value and power of this unit. Users can filter by location or genre, and there are literally thousands of stations available. There are you’re your typical shoutcast internet only stations, but also streaming live stations from around the globe. You’ve also got access to podcasts (including yours truly) and audio presentations, though you may find some of the more obscure ones missing. Myine selects the podcasts and stations that it will display through some mechanism that wasn’t revealed to me. They did add podcasts that I requested (e.g., TechTalk on WRLR) without any questions or hesitation however, so I don’t see this as a big hit.

If you’re familiar at all with listening to radio or streaming audio on your laptop or desktop, you’ll “get” this product immediately. What’s really neat about it for me is how portable it is – I can listen to tunes up in my bedroom, then take the little unit downstairs to our porch outside, plug it into some speakers there and keep listening – without having to drag my laptop with it’s rather junky soundcard all over the place! It’s even small enough to throw in a jacket pocket and take to someone else’s house to show off.

One area for future development and a feature that I really missed on the Ira is the lack of song information. Most stations broadcast the track and artist info with the song, but oddly the Ira unit does not display it. You can get a lot of other streaming and audio info, just nothing about the current track playing. The Ira software does have the capability to get updated over the wifi connection you use, so I would expect to see this fixed in a later release.

Overall, I have to give this about a 3 out of 5 chips. It’s a fantastic little product and idea, with portability and ease-of-use in the forefront of internet connected audio players (plus the benefit of not paying for XM or other similar options!). The lack of song tagging and weak reception strength make it just a little tougher to use than it should be however, and drops it down a notch. The price point is a touch high but still definitely within reach at around $130. The Ira by MyIne can be found on Amazon.

The inimitable Jay Garmon doesn’t disappoint us with Geek Trivia either, so it’s a great show (as usual, right?)!

Our coolsites of the week this week are perfect for any font geeks like Mike out there, and I just know there’s more than a few:

• Typedia – Billing itself as a ’shared encyclopedia of typefaces’ this site crowdsources information like a wiki to break down a huge amount of information about the various fonts, font foundries, and font families out there – as well as what they can best be used for and in many cases where to download them!
• FontCapture – Not happy with the fonts out there?  Think your own (or your kids) writing is the bomb?  Look no further; a couple of quick print-outs and then fill in your own handwriting to upload and make a downloadable font you can use anywhere here!  And of course, it’s totally free!

Sending some Ting Ting love out with their very cool ‘We Walk’ from the We Started Nothing album!

• Virtual Gumshoe – Looking to find out some information on a prospective employee, contractor, boyfriend or boss?  Look no further, Virtual Gumshoe will connect you with all the best free sites on the web that offer public records, civil and court case info, arrest data and more!  And of course, most of this is verified 100% free!

We don’t have a podcast only song this week, because we got a radio edit version of Shock Horror by The View so everyone can enjoy!  Check it out and tune in next week too!