Google Reader offers Offline Mode!
Finally! What all RSS readers have been waiting for! Google is now offering an offline version of Google Reader. You’ll now see a “Go Offline” link on the top right that, when clicked, prompts you to install Google Gears. Gears is an open source extension to the browser that lets you store and serve data locally as well as housing data in its own internal relational database. You simply go to a page that is configured to use Gears and give Gears permission to run content on that domain name. This also means offline Gmail, Gdocs, and Gcal!
Singapore and Their RFID Fish
The Underwater World aquarium in Singapore has recently unveiled a system by which you can identify fish in the aquarium tanks with RFID technology. The minute tags embedded under the skin (or scales) of the fish will allow visitors to more easily identify the various species swimming around without having to search around for 15 minutes looking for a specific fish of interest. The system consists of a sensor somewhere in the tank and a touchscreen monitor on the outside. Each time a tagged fish swims past the sensor, information about it is displayed on the monitor.
via RFID Weblog
The Go! Team
This band ROCKS.
www.creedthoughts.com.gov.www\creedthoughts
Dwigt Schrute
Man, last night’s season 3 finale of The Office was probably the best season finale I’ve seen in a long time. The writers for that show just keep getting better and better as the show goes on. They’re really honing their craft and have completely nailed the show’s sense of humor. The finale last night had a perfect balance of drama and comedy, and incorporated some of the funniest traits of each of the characters. If you’re an office “fanboy” you already know what I’m talking about. And if you’re not, I suggest you go out and buy all the DVDs and watch every episode… many times if you’d like (just like we do at my house).
P.S. - Read the picture caption carefully, you Office fans…
USB Batteries: One Smart Invention
A company called Moixa Energy Ltd. is now selling USBCell batteries, AA batteries that charge by plugging them into a USB port. They can be charged by plugging into any standard USB port or powered USB hub. This means I can now charge my Xbox 360 controllers’ batteries by plugging a pair of these into the front of the console. I always seem to have some kind of computer/power supply but never have my NiMH battery charger. These would work wonders for me. A pair of them runs $19.99… somewhat steep, but a small price to pay for the convenience they may afford you. I hope this represents a sea change in battery technology. By the looks of the company’s website, they have plans for AAA, C, and 9-volt batteries as well as some for cell phones. Here’s Palm Discovery’s video review:
Tuneglue: Mashup for Similar Music
I just ran across TuneGlue, a Flash-based mashup for finding similar music via Last.fm and Amazon (UK) APIs. You give the tool an artist name and it generates a cool web-like structure linking together artist names. You can expand the web by finding similar artists to the similar artists, and it will interlink any of the existing artist bubbles that appear. It also integrates with the Amazon API, allowing you to browse any artists albums and tracklists from Amazon. It reminds me of the digg swarm Flash visualization tool for digg.
via ProgrammableWeb
The Greenest Tower in the Middle East
The architects responsible for the massive construction projects currently springing up in Dubai have cooked up another good one. This tower, known as Burj Al-Taqa, will produce all of its own energy. Impressive considering it’s in the middle of a scorching hot desert. The roof will be equipped with a massive wind turbine for power, and supplemented by a gargatuan array of solar cells (161,000 sq. ft.), most of which will be floating on an island within sight of the tower:
The architects chose an ancient Persian architectural feature as their model. Hundreds of years ago, wealthy merchants erected wind towers on the roofs of their houses, an idea which was eventually exported to the Arab world. The buildings, which have now become tourist attractions, have a natural air conditioning system. Lateral openings in the towers suck in cool air like a chimney. The heavier cool air sinks down and displaces the lighter hot air, creating a comfortable temperature inside the living space despite the scorching sun.
Gerbers’s design is designed to function in a similar way: The negative pressure created by winds breaking along the tower will suck the spent air from the rooms out of the building via air slits in the façade. The plan is for fresh air to be pumped into the interior of the building by means of a duct system at the same time.
They’re really breaking ground over there in the UAE. In 10 to 12 years, I know exactly where I’ll be vacationing.
Compress Them PowerPoint Files
I just ran across a post by Amit from Digital Inspiration detailing how to shrink down those obnoxiously large PowerPoint presentations. We all know that the root of all size problems when it comes to documents (Word, Excel, PPT, PDF) are images, and to a lesser extent, audio and video.
There’s a simple, supported way to compress images from within PowerPoint. By selecting the Picture Tools ribbon (in 2007) or highlighting an image and exposing the Picture Tools toolbar (in Office XP and 2003), click the Compress Picture option. You’ll see something like this:
By selecting the sharing and email option, you can sometimes decrease the filesize by about 60-70%. Pretty cool if you ask me. And most importantly, simple. Just this morning I showed a user how to do this and she decreased her .ppt file from 10MB to 3MB, with no discernable change in quality. Now if only I knew about this when I worked for the University where 100MB presentations were routine, and often crammed on 10 year old ZIP disks. This simple solution would have saved us all a lot of grief.
Google Reader on the Wii
It seems those crazy Googlers have done it again. Yesterday on the Google Reader blog, Mihai Parparita posted about his experience using Google Reader in the Wii’s Opera-based “internet channel”. In his words:
As I was recovering from Wii elbow, I began to explore the capabilities of the Opera-based Internet Channel. It occurred that Reader may be a lot of fun on the Wii, especially with many photo and video feeds.
So naturally Mihai and his crack dev team went into their coding cave and emerged with a version of the Google Reader web app modified for the Wii Internet Channel. It even integrates with Wiimote controls:
- up/down: scroll up/down
- right/left: next/previous item
- 1 button: show subscriptions
- 2 button: show links
When showing subscriptions:
- up/down: previous/next subscription
- right: select current subscription
- left: close
- -/+: collapse/expand folder
Check this out if you want to see a demo of what the Wii GReader interface looks like. Google Reader just keeps getting better. Oh and here’s his demo video:
via Official Google Reader Blog
New Google Analytics Design On the Way
I just noticed a post by Jeff Veen of Google detailing a complete redesign of the Google Analytics UI. Looking at the feature tour, it looks pretty impressive and is a welcome change to the existing interface. The new UI incorporates some features that are very similar to the rich Flash-based data and graphing tool they have on Google Finance (sample). The new dashboard looks like it’ll be far more user-friendly, particularly for end users in marketing, business development, and management, but also even for us people in IT who hate digging around for web traffic/conversion data in a complicated UI. There will be better chart and graph views for your primary market areas as well as AdWords campaigns or keywords. I’ve been using Analytics a good bit lately to get deeper into the SEO and traffic optimization stuff for my company (as well as my personal websites), but this new interface looks like I could even get the non-geek involved in the more technical aspects of the development of our company. Google has posted a Flash demo of the new features of Analytics.
Google Analytics is a derivative product of Urchin Software’s Urchin On Demand system. Urchin was acquired by Google in the Spring of 2005.
