I'm an IT Professional, geek and technology 'edge case'. I enjoy keeping up with the latest devices, technologies and news in the IT world. On this site I post some of those things I find most interesting. I hope you find them interesting as well.
TiVo, Domino’s team up to make us all fat Here's the deal: when a Domino's ad or product placement shows up, TiVo users can click through with their remote controls to order pizza, or can access an on-demand ordering screen through a TiVo menu. It's similar in theory to the deals that TiVo has with Fandango for movie ticket ordering or with Amazon.com for ordering products related to TV shows, except that you get a pizza.
Slydial Makes It Even Easier To Avoid Awkward Human Interaction a free service that lets you dial any mobile phone number and get directed straight to voicemail. It may sound counterintuitive, but it can be a godsend for avoiding awkward phone conversations - I’ve had it saved in my phone’s ‘Favorites’ menu since the service launched (though I’ve never used it, honest).
Firefox 3.1 gets tab tearing The latest Firefox 3.1 development release features the announced option for tab tearing: drag a tab out of its current window, and it is removed and opened on a new one, providing a more intuitive way to organize your web browsing.
Silicon Mountain Allio HDTV Has Built-in PC, Blu-ray, More
That new HD LCD TV is great, but you know it really needs? A DVD/Blu-ray player, for starters. Also, if you could toss in an Intel Core2Duo processor and a terabyte of storage, that would be nice. And while we’re at it, I’m going to need a wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a split-screen feature, so I can multi-task. Got all that? Good.
iPhone twice as reliable as BlackBerry? Dream on
I love my iPhone and have never felt tempted to return to the BlackBerry, but I was still rolling my eyes at TechCrunch’s report of the iPhone being “twice as reliable as the BlackBerry”. After all, my iPhone crashed in four different applications in a 45-minute period this afternoon.Of course, the referenced SquareTrade study covers hardware malfunctions, not software malfunctions. In this, perhaps it is true that the malfunction rate for Apple’s smartphones after one year is only 5.6 percent, while Research In Motion’s phones crap out 11.2 percent of the time.
But in day-to-day usage, I’ve found my iPhone software to be far less stable than the ugly-but-reliable BlackBerry software.
Google can now OCR all PDFs
Google has a new system that scans Acrobat PDFs on the web for words using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Similar to its process for using OCR to detect words in PDFs that have already been OCR processed, the new system will do the same for scanned documents posted online that haven’t yet undergone OCR.If you have scanned PDFs and are interested in having them converted into text, you can upload the images to your website and take advantage of this service.
Simply follow the instructions for how to use Google OCR from the Digital Inspiration website
Top 10 Things to Look Forward to in Windows 7
While the next iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft desktop operating system, Windows 7, isn’t a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a “preview” tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009. Let’s take a look.
In case you haven’t seen one of the 50 different DTV commercials that are on every other hour or you need more information on how it’s going to work… check out this video.
Tonight I flipped away from the Olympics during the trampolene competition and caught Lenovo’s new ‘Cast Away’ commercial featuring their new IdeaPad Y Series of notebooks. This not so original commercial was however quite eye catching.
Lenovo is advertising their Veriface technology which is basically a facial recognition program that uses their built in webcam to automatically recognize the face of an enrolled user and log him/her on to the computer. Pretty slick.
According to Notebooks.com, Veriface is quite secure and will only enroll, in the flesh, human faces and can’t be fooled by glossy photographs. Veriface isn’t exactly new technology as IBM was bundling it with webcams years ago. As cool as it is, I’m not sure it’ll actually sell any laptops but I can guarantee that anyone who puchases a Lenovo with Veriface will definitely use it.
Unbenonced to me, I’ve apparently been thrust into the political arena. My phone has been ringing off the hook today with calls from reporters and aides from the B. Hussien Obama Campaign as well as the McCain Campaign. I’m not sure how it all happened but, as of today I accept the will of the people and announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America!
Both parties should be afraid because now there’s a true conservative in the race.
Here’s the latest news report detailing how it came to be.
