Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss a dating app data breach, smart speakers are more popular with men, a fine for Facebook's privacy lapses, China's space solar farm, Apple focusing on services, cashless stores, and more.

Steen in Shreveport, Louisiana listens on 710 KEEL and asked: "Can you explain the difference between a CD-R disc and a DVD-R disc. I tried recording some videos on a CD-R that I had 180 minutes and could hold so many pictures, but it kept telling me I didn't have a disk in. "

Steen, the short version is that CD-R are have a much lower capacity than DVD-R. DVD-Rs also require a different kind of drive to read them, the laser on DVD-R drives can handle CD-Rs, but the opposite isn’t true.

Having said that, it sounds from your question like you may have tried to write to a disc that was finalized. CD-R and DVD-R discs are not rewritable. You may be able to take a few passes on a single disc if you close the session but not finalize the disc, but if the software you’re using did finalize it, then even if you added a single text file to the disc, it will be “full” and will not longer show up as a valid writable media, you will not be able to delete and reuse the disc.

Otherwise, any drive that can write to DVD-Rs can write to CD-Rs as well, and while DVD-Rs can hold about 4GB more data than CD-Rs, CD-Rs should be able to hold a great deal of pictures and videos.

Sam in Baker, Louisiana listens on 107.3 WBRP and asked: "Can a converter box that went from Analog to digital - can they be used for anything other than transferring that signal? "

Sam, they make acceptable paperweights, that’s about it.

Converter boxes had a very specific mission, and that mission is coming to an end for most people as they upgrade TVs. All those boxes were supposed to do was covert the signal so the digital switchover didn’t instantly brick thousands of televisions, now that it’s been a while lots of people have upgraded their televisions, there’s not really a use for them.

If you’re one of those people, you can probably take it to an electronics store to have it recycled, it won’t do you much good.

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