Podcast Show Notes - Kickstartnews Revue

. . . continued from August 7 , 2005 Show Notes

Problems with Symantec's LiveUpdate

An"LU1899" error message is fairly common when using LiveUpdate to automatically grab the latest virus definitions for Norton AntiVirus. The "LU" part refers to LiveUpdate which is a little Symantec utility program that runs in the background on your computer actually fetching new virus definitions from Symantec's web site. Here's a link from the Symantec technical support site which helps explain the problem.

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About the only way to ensure that v3 will work on your HP media center PC is send an e-mail to eMedia tech support and ask them specifically about compatibility with your system. Be sure to send them the technical details of your system including CPU type and speed, amount of RAM, amount of available hard drive space and the model number of your graphics card or onboard graphics adapter, and the model number of your sound card or onboard audio.

There are several alternatives to the excellent Privacy Guardian. SecureClean (like Privacy Guardian) uses the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) 5220.22-M standard which specifies that non-removable rigid disks or hard drives must be sanitized for reuse by first overwriting all addressable locations with a character, then overwriting the same space again with its complement, then overwriting the same space again with a random character, then performing a verification. It's a very thorough method of permanent erasure. Here's the full review of Privacy Guardian

One of the points we sometimes make when writing reviews of this sort of software is that the degree of erasure—the thoroughness, lack of recoverability, overwrite depth, etc.—is directly related to the sensitivity or intrinsic value of the data being expunged. We don't recommend high cost or otherwise ultra-secure solutions for typical business, retail and industrial offices because typical free solutions such as partition formatting, drive formatting, deletion from the Mac trash bin and the Windows recycle bin offer acceptable security on a busy computer that is being used daily to read and write data. Remaining data left over from deleted items tends to be completely overwritten very quickly in such situations, leaving very little valuable data available for cost-effective recovery. This is why all of the undelete and file recovery utilities warn that you should cease all activity on the computer whenever you accidentally delete something. If you don't stop all activity on the computer immediately, there's only a very small chance that the data you lost will be recoverable.

First and foremost, regular graphics files in BMP, JPG, GIF and PNG formats do NOT contain any stitch information. That means, those plain old graphics or image file formats have to be digitized in a certain way. Digitizing a graphics or image file using software such as BuzzEdit v2. The process requires that you load the file to be digitized into BuzzEdit, then use your mouse to trace around the stitch areas to be digitized and then let the software do the rest of the work. Once the software has finished its work, you have to manually go through the resulting design and correct any errors. It's a bit tedious, but patience will be rewarded with an embroidery design that is well worth the effort. After all that, it's a simple matter to save the file in your embroidery file format of choice (JEF, in your case I think).

Of course there are also tons of free, downloadable JEF files too. Janome's web site offer tons of free embroidery designs in JEF, SEW and graphic file formats.

Buzz Tools seems to be the company that makes the software of choice for embroidery nuts. Buzz Tools has a number of programs for creating JEF and SEW files as well as converting other graphic file formats into JEF or SEW files:

BuzzEdit v2 seems to be the best all around software for converting, editing and digitizing files for use in embroidery machines.

Here's the Janome Canada web site's Frequently Asked Questions page. Lots of good information about dealing with JEF and other files.

Here's a really helpful article from Threads magazine about locating, downloading, unZipping and make use of PES files. If necessary, you can use BuzzEdit v2 to convert PES files to JEF format for use in (what I assume is) your Janome machine.