Google Places Yahoo Button on homepage -- April Fools!

The Google Operating System Blog published that Google is now going to have a link to Yahoo search on their home page to increase competition and encourage search innovation.


I went ... ahhhh... no! April 1st is only a few hours away. It must be a joke. I am not sure it is a joke by the blog or by Google.


Then, of course, I initially thought that the 1 GB of Gmail storage was a April Fools joke 5 years ago when gmail was unveiled.

Let us know in the comments about other April Fools jokes on the web.

Top 4 New Wish List for for Google Voice.

In the past I have made wishes for the Grandcentral service that Google bought. I waited and waited and all of a sudden most of them came true in the form of Google Voice which is still in beta.

Now I have a new list to make the service even better.

1. Accept faxes and store as PDF's. Should be easy to do.
2. Allow me to chose the order in which my phones are called. Right now, my office phone starts ringing a few seconds before my cell phone. This is a good thing since the land line has better reception. But there might be times that i want my cell phone to ring before my home phone so that I get a chance to answer the phone before my family does.
3. Give me even more control of when each of the phones rings. Maybe this type of thing should be released as an API so that other developers could come up with cool scheduling applications.
4. Integrate even further with gmail so that gmail identifies numbers in the email and places links on the left sidebar to call the numbers or offer to add them to the contact information.

Let us know what you still want out of the service.

Upgrades are being rolled out slowly for Google voice

Supposedly upgrades have started rolling out for Google Voice for the Grandcentral Beta users.

We have not seen this yet.

Google Voice Blog: Tips on upgrading

Google Voice Blog: Moving to Google Voice!

Grandcentral corrected the typos on their page and now are l inking to googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com rather than voiceblog.blogspot.com.

See our previous post

Google Voice Blog: Moving to Google Voice!

Finally! The new and Improved Google Grancentral -- Google Voice

Finally releasing the update we have been looking for in Grandcentral. Tomorrow, Thursday, they will have the following new features

1) Integrated gmail Google Voice contact list.
2) Ability to receive text messages.
3) Ability to transcribe voice messages.
4) Ability to turn off the "Press 1 to answer..." feature.
5) Free conference calls.
6) Cheap international calls.

We will see how it is actually implemented, but it sounds awesome!

It may even be free!

The funny thing is that their blog link goes to http://voiceblog.blogspot.com/ which is some blog about Georgetown.

Get Rid of Cable - Get HD TV - Make your own Antenna

I cancelled my Comcast subscription last week. I hooked my Ubuntu machine to the TV and I bought a digital TV antenna.

Then I found the follow video on how to make my own DTV antenna. Has anyone tried this already? I think I will for fun. I have lots of extra cash now that I am not paying to Comcast.




Maker Workshop - DTV Antenna & Steadicam on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Connecting your Wii to Linux Ubuntu 8.10

The Wii is Bluetooth connected to its console. Matt Cutts recently hooked up his Wii to his Ubuntu computer at the same time as me. We followed basically the same instructions. He seems to stop short of showing us how to use it as a mouse.

I have my computer hooked up to my LCD TV and I am trying to determine whether I can live without the ridiculous $70 per month Comcast cable bill. So I want to set up the internet on this TV is the easiest way to be able to surf TV shows on the web.

First of all, you don't need to spend $20 on a Bluetooth receiver as he suggested. I bought one on ebay for $4 with free shipping. It worked immediately.

The rest of the info here is slightly modified from the following post on the Ubuntu forums.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CWiiD

It seems that the instructions for Ubuntu 8.04 worked for 8.10.

Here we go:

• Open up a terminal window.
  
• Type: sudo apt-get install libcwiid1 lswm wmgui wminput
  
• Type: sudo modprobe uinput
  
• Type: lswm to get the address ( XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX) of your Wii.
  

• Edit two files using the following steps.

• gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Make it look like

#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser run level.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

modprobe uinput

exit 0

• Save the file.
  

• gksudo gedit /etc/cwiid/wminput/ir_ptr
  

• Find these lines:
  

Plugin.ir_ptr.X = ~ABS_X
Plugin.ir_ptr.Y = ~ABS_Y

and replace them with:

Plugin.ir_ptr.X = ABS_X
Plugin.ir_ptr.Y = ABS_Y

• Using the Wii address that you got above enter the following command and push buttons #1 and #2 at the same time. sudo wminput -c ir_ptr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
• The Wii should be recognized and all of a sudden your pointer can be controlled by the Wii. The LED strip that comes with the Wii console must be on. So I turn the Wii console on a head of time. Apparently it is simple to build one of the LED strips. I have not done it yet.

Now I can surf the internet. I have been putting together a web page that gathers a lot of the TV viewing into one page. The text is big so that it is viewable on lower resolution screens and easier to target with pointers like the Wii.

http://www.surftvee.com

Let me know how to improve things.

Surf Internet TV like Cable TV but Better

The cost of cable is ridiculous these days, and the price of an "On Demand" movie is at least $4.99. The internet now has a huge store of movie and TV show content.

surftvee.com is a new portal to facilitate surfing the web. It is set up to allow you to select movies and TV shows from multiple sources. In the future, a blog will have tips on how to set up your home system to facilitate viewing TV and movie content on your home TV.