My ipod locked up this morning - it would not respond to any buttons but it would detect the lock being slid across as the lock icon would appear or disappear on the screen. I got to work, mentioned it to my colleague who promptly started to google it. Much to our amusement the first result after typing in reboot and then a space was reboot ipod.
After pressing the menu and center buttons twice, the ipod unfroze and I was able to listen to my podcasts in the car this morning.
Recently in Google Category
Google Sync for the Blackberry is now available - a program that synchronises your Google calendar(s) with the one on your phone which in turn is probably synchronised with your Exchange or Lotus Notes calendar. I installed this yesterday as this would mean I would have my work, personal and wife's calendar all in one place so I could keep up to date with my availability.
The install took ages to download and run - about 30 minutes in total and a synchronisation was made successfully. However 10 minutes later the Blackberry rebooted. I wasn't surprised as it has been doing this about once a day for the past week. After the 15 minutes passed for the Blackberry to reboot and come back to life everything was good for about 10 minutes......then it happened again - another reboot. After about 90 minutes of this I decided to remove Google Sync and the phone has stayed online ever since (or at least it's not rebooted every 10 minutes!)
In summary, a great product when it works but totally useless after the initial sync is done. I'm really hoping the next version will be stable. Needless to say this is only my experience - I've not had anyone else in the team try this yet - they probably wont as we can't really afford the phones to be out of action whilst we test it. I was fortunate yesterday in that I was already on the office phone so couldn't use the blackberry for incoming calls anyway.
Google have announced a partnership with BMW in germany to enable you to send directions to car when you need to find somewhere and have a suitable gps navigation. That's a cool feature but a) are users driving along the road and googling directions at the same or b) have not learnt how to use the GoTo button on the gps unit already? Either option sounds rather scary to me.
I've been doing a lot of research,reading and studying in improving my productivity and time management recently. This morning I came across the Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes document which really strikes me as an oxymoron. Notes seems to be the most counterproductive piece of software out there and it is not helping me in my productivity. So maybe I'll get this document to see how it should be done.
One of the things that I picked up from one of the books was to use 1 calendar for everything which is ok if you are single and don't have a spouse that also needs to see your calendar but they don't work for your company and have access. As we both have google accounts, I thought that syncing the Notes calendar to google calendar would work as then my wife can see the google calendar and we could both use the calendars to ensure we didn't doublebook events. I did find the Companion Link for Google Calendar software but it doesn't work very well.
The synchronization takes forever (when it does work) and I've ended up with duplicate entries in google but with different times - 1 hour apart I could understand due to some funky dst issues, but these are a couple of hours apart. Recurring appointments are not supported (although recurring appointments that have been canceled appeared in gmail but active recurring appointments didn't)
Still, at least I now have a base copy in Google calendar which I will hopefully be able to keep up to date.
If you try to upload a file that is greater than 500k then google docs will complain with the message "We're sorry, but we were unable to upload this document" and then suggests you copy/paste the document from your spreadsheet or save as html. It doesn't tell you that the reason it failed to upload is due to the fact that the file is too big. The file size is mentioned in the requirements so it would be nice if the error message mentioned that. It does give you a sensible error message if you try to email the file though (which is how I discovered this)
I installed this optimized google reader script to give more screen real estate. This means it is now possible to read all the comics properly in the 1024*768 screen resolution that I'm stuck with. Wahey!
Using the power of Google Coop I've created a Friends In Tech search engine. Entering search terms into the form below will run a search on all of the Friends In Tech websites.
I've been trying to use Microsoft's WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin's mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.
However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo's need to be loaded into Picassa - this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn't like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.
As it will take some time to load the cruise photo's, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.
I think it's funny that in the first couple of days that I've been running Google Analytics, the number 1 page is How to remove Google Desktop.
I like the nice picture of where my visitors are coming from but I'm not sure about the rest of the stats - I get much better detail from using awstats and webalizer but they aren't as pretty or suitable for management perusal.
I've signed up and installed Google Analytics to get some more log/traffic analysis of visits to this site. This may give me an easier (read quicker) method of looking at the stats, search entries and stuff like that. I'm not quite sure what it gives me - I will find out when I get some data in the next couple of days. The one thing I've worked out, is that I wish I had a custom header or footer included on all my pages so that i'd only have to make the change to a couple of files and have it updated on all pages rather than edit the multiple templates and then rebuild all the files.
I needed to translate this german page about an IBM X345 Raid problem but googles result is pretty weird and not much use at all to be honest as the key sentence of "brühwarm that one rausgenommen today the driver again has, because it is afflicted error" is complete gibberish
You can now chat from within the gmail interface (so no need to open another program) - or at least you can if your contacts also have had this feature enabled in their gmail account. My first gmail account has had this option enabled but my main google account that I use on a day to day basis (as it contains all helsby.net emails) does not have it activated yet. The strange thing is that you can initiate a chat invite from a working account (and I was hoping that would activate my secondary account for chatting) but the secondary account does not receive the invite in the mail box - I'm guessing it probably goes to the chat client - if it has been downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. At the moment I'm guessing it is text only IM similar to the web interfaces to MSN and ICQ.
In related news I've been setting up a Live Communication Server for a client and the Communicator program looks pretty good. The annoying thing is that I can't see any documentation on how to get hold of the non-trial version of the client - it apparently is free with licences for the server so you would expect to get the media for the client with the server - but nooooooo.......
In a surprising move, google are now paying adsense people to push the installation of firefox with the google toolbar - $1 for each new installation of firefox with the google toolbar....now if only I could persuade all my clients to install it :-) I must admit that there only seems to be a couple of reasons for using the google toolbar with firefox (as most of the functionality seems to be there already). The one thing I do like is the automapping that it can do (clicking on an address to get a map - but I'm sure there is an extension or greasemonkey script to do this already.
I'm sure that everyone else has blogged that yesterday was Google's seventh birthday. It is hard to imagine how computer support was before that....actually I can remember - I used altavista instead.
It's taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn't take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn't an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well - Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup
It looks like the Google Desktop software has been updated recently as now the index status does not show how much of the index has been completed (or it has finally indexed the computer). The status on this computer is normally stuck at about 20% complete but this information no longer appears on the status page. However the cpu usage of the desktop search does seem to be often pegged around the 50% mark so something is still not quite right there.
The Antispyware software also seems to have been updated as the nightly scan that ran last night picked up Ultravnc as potential spyware even though it has been installed on the pc for about 2 months and I had previously flagged it as ignore.
Amazing satellite imagery from google maps of New Orleans. I've linked to one of the areas where the flooding is pretty intense.
The old laptop has been coming up with the rather generic error (left) of "Runtime Error! Program C:\program files\Internet Explorer.exe This application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team" for the past couple of days and I've only just had a chance to have a look at it. A repair of ie didn't make any difference and it seemed such a generic error, I thought that googling for the answer was going to be a tough one. As it turned out, the solution from Wugnet solved the problem - removing the google toolbar and everything went back to normal - very strange. Like the OP in the forum, this toolbar has been on the computer with ie for a long time with no changes that I'm aware of - but then again the google toolbar does have an autoupdate facility that you can't switch off and it doesn't tell you that it is being updated - which makes it hard to track down problems when things like this occur.
Reinstalling the toolbar from a fresh download has produced no further problems so this should make Kristen happy again (and me too)
I got Miranda working with google talk and the screenshot for the configuration (with notes) is at my Configuring Miranda to talk to google talk on Flickr page
From the bbc I found a link to Google Talk - their latest beta product enabling free voip for computer to computer chat.
What I can't understand is the need for yet another im/voice chat running on yet another protocol. Surely all these conflicting services mean people end up with too many ways of communicating so they need to buy faster machines and bigger screens to cope with all the icons in their system tray (I have 19 at the moment!). This also seems to be moving away from the "one number gets me anywhere" philosophy that people would like. Now to get hold of me you can send me an email, ring me on the home phone, the mobile, send me an sms, yahoo, google, msn, aol message me (and you used to be able to contact me via irc but I don't do that anymore).
The big drawback of this app is that it doesn't do talk to landlines.
Update I've added my systray picture to flickr tagged with systray - what does yours look like?
Google have released a new version of Google Desktop Search which is still not compatible with Nod32. It does look good from the screen shot on their website though. However the "report a problem" link that the program refers to goes to a page that doesn't exist.
You can compare the two mapping services at http://www.jonasson.org/maps/ and you can see how naff the msn service is for the Ohio area.
Update Oops - a bit embarrassing when I managed to get the html code for this post wrong!
moon.google.com - just don't get too close :-)
Use this link for Gmail on the axim. Going to gmail.com gets the axim stuck in an endless loop. I had to get this page by loading gmail into avantgo and waiting to get redirected properly
By installing the greasemonkey script mentioned in Flickr: GeoTagging Flickr you get the capability to have google maps on the same page as flickr if the image has been geotagged.
I've never had my display driver blue screen and not respond, but this morning it happened for the first time. Using Google Earth I was exploring Australia when all of a sudden the mouse and keyboard stopped working and the computer beeped. About 20 seconds later I got a fault in the display and it went back to a 640*480, 16 colours resolution, told me to reboot and then send the error report to Microsoft. Immediately after sending the error report I get sent to their analysis page which tells me that a Microsoft analyst has investigated this problem and they don't have a solution and that I should contact Intel for a solution.....hmmmmm I wonder how much of that is true. Apparently you can track this problem and get notified when/if they update a solution - apart from the fact that the wizard fails saying the page can't be found.
Since the API has been released, people have been busy producing kml files that you can load into google earth. You can add these bookmarks to GE and then browse geotagged photos from flickr (newest) and nearest or del.icio.us.
Using the google maps api I made a map of all geocaches that I've found, centered on my home town. I'm pretty pleased with it so far. It requires the gpx of my finds uploaded to my webspace, the html page and a google maps api key.
I now have this at the top of my geocaching blog and would have it in this post if I could work out how to get an iframe to be displayed inline on a blog entry.
Google Earth has been released (at last).There is a free version (unlike keyhole which was a 7 day trial) and a plus version which supports gps imports. The funny thing is that if you have keyhole installed, earth detects it, says it MUST be uninstalled and offers to remove it. I said yes, uninstall and it then said it couldn't uninstall and that I should uninstall it later and did I want to continue with the installation of earth? A bit weird if keyhole MUST be uninstalled. Hopefully I can have both installed as I like the facilities of keyhole that I have at the moment and hope earth has these too (the import of kml files (geocache points) is a must have for me.
Update It's funny how the streaming is always at 99% complete! It also supports kml files which is great :-)
1) Go to http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.862577,-77.001771&spn=0.16,0.16
2) Click on "local search"
3) Enter "stupidity" in the search field and click "Search!" [via Glimpse of a Grrl]
The funny thing is that if you switch the search to idiot you get a funny result too. I'd love to know how they are working this one out as the number 2 result for stupidity near us is Ohio State University!
Got my first piece of spam delivered to my inbox at gmail today. Not bad in just under a year of use (I signed up 1st July 04). In that time I've also not had a false positive either. The only spam that I have had to the email address has been some sort of "working under pressure" mailing list that somehow got my address from somewhere. Seeing as though I am careful about who I give the email address to I know I didn't sign up for it and it also looks like gmail is more resilient to the mailbombing antics that yahoo and hotmail seem to face.
Google have released a Web accelerator, otherwise known as smart caching software. Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
- Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
- Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
- Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
- Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
- Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
- Compressing data before sending it to your computer
Doesn't this sound like something that should be happening anyway?
A useful links of google map hacks
If you have a google account for groups or gmail then if you sign into the account and then go to the SearchHistory page then it will record the searches you have done for your later perusal. It also changes the google.com page to include the searchhistory results as a link. Very handy if you are using multiple computers and know that you found the answers on one of them during a google search.
From the email that google sent me, here is how to remove Google Desktop by hand:-
Thank you for your note. If you're unable to uninstall Google Desktop
Search through Add/Remove Programs and/or "Start" > "Programs" > "Google
Desktop Search" > "Uninstall Google Desktop Search," you can remove it
manually. To do so, edit the Windows system registry and then delete the
appropriate program files. Here's how:
TO EDIT THE WINDOWS SYSTEM REGISTRY:
Note: editing the Windows registry is an advanced process. You may prefer
to contact your system administrator.
That said, you should be able to solve the problem by deleting the
following registry keys:
- Hkey_Current_User\Software\Google\Google Desktop
- Hkey_Local_Machine\\Software\\Google\\Desktop\\InstalledNTUserName
- Hkey_Local_Machine\\Software\\Google\\Desktop\\InstalledUserSID
Restart your computer so this change can take effect, and then remove the
program files for Desktop Search. Here's how:
TO REMOVE GOOGLE DESKTOP SEARCH:
Open C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME-THAT-NO-LONGER-EXISTS\Local
Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search. Delete all the
files in this directory.
If you need further assistance, please let us know.
Regards,
The Google Team
Apparently you can't uninstall the desktop search if you installed it as another user as you get the error message "Google Desktop Search was installed on this machine by a different user, DOMAIN\Username. To uninstall Google Desktop Search logon as that user" This is not necessarily possible if the domain doesn't exist anymore (and therefore you CANT log on as that user)
The funny thing is that if you enter the error message into Google it asks if you meant login and not logon. (and there are no results for either of the two options.
I've logged an error report with Google, so we'll see how long it takes for some action on this.
Apparently, Google now downloads the first result in a search before you click on it if you are using firefox which should speed up searching (although half the time my first result is never the one I click on).
Has anyone noticed google not being able to retrieve search results today? About 4 times over the course of the day I've been getting errors with a "please try again later" message which returns valid data if you press F5.
After Neil posted his adsense earnings I *really* got motivated to start displaying some ads on this page. LIke Neil I do get quite a few hits to these pages, mainly from google searches for technical answers so the way i figure it is that if I'm providing content for google then they may as well pay me for it (in some small way). We'll see how it goes. At least if I (or you readers) don't like it then I can take it off. As for the regular readers I doubt it will make much difference to you as you are using rss readers aren't you?
