Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

All posts that don’t obviously fit in one of the sub-categories go here.

Voice-to-text-to-blog?

Posted on by

Planet Nelson points to Jott: “…is a free service (to the extent that your cell can call anywhere in North America for free) that allows you to dictate a 30-second message into your phone and then have it sent as a text email to a friend/colleague/self/offending politician/anyone whose email address is in your Jott address book.”

From Jott.com: “Using Jott, yoau can either Jott your blog directly or just jott yourself and post later. Better yet, your readers can listen to you too — a great way to connect?”

Blog with Jott

If I understand this correctly… a news reporter could be posting audio and text reports directly from their mobile phone to their blog. And given the evolving definition of “reporter,” this tool could be used by anyone, whether they went to J-School or not.

Update: Jamie at Planet Nelson Jott’ed back on this post. The voice-to-text was close. “Blogroll” became “blog rule” and “Gnomedex” showed up as “noon desk.” But pretty slick all the same.

One hundred million iPods sold

Posted on by

“Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.”

flickr back on top

Posted on by

I’ve been using flickr for a long time. I fell out of love for a bit after Yahoo! acquired the service and the conversion didn’t go as smoothly as it might. But I’ve been making an effort to better understand and use flickr’s many, wonderful features.

Flickr Map is hardly new but I just never got around to playing with it until last night. The short version is, you can locate a photo on a map to show precisely where sit was taken.

For example, during my affiliate relations days in Iowa, I stopped by the farm where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. I knew the farm was near Dyersville, Iowa, but couldn’t remember the exact location. So I checked Wikipedia and found the exact latitude/longitude. Plugged that into Flickr Maps and, voila! And I was able to zoom in close enough to see the shape of the ball diamond.

I now have about 500 photos in my Flickr account. Unfortunately, when I started saving digital images, I foolishly sized the images down (to save space). So my rez is poor on those older images. Alas.

But the organization tools on Flickr are pretty amazing. And –you knew this was coming– it works so nicely with iPhoto that uploading images is even easier than before.

Google Earth

Posted on by


Just installed Google Earth on the MacBook and….oooh! Nice. Last time I looked at the app it had just come out and I was on a PC. Everything about Google Earth is better. The images have been updated and the tools are amazing. Here’s the smays compound:

 

iTunes adds Major League Baseball video highlights

Posted on by

On Friday, Apple announced they’ll be offering Major League Baseball video highlights for the 2007 season on the iTunes Store. MLB video on iTunes will include a daily 25 minute MLB.com Daily Rewind highlight show and two weekly Games of the Week, featuring full versions of the best games from the National and American Leagues.

Customers will be able to download individual episodes of MLB.com Daily Rewind and each Game of the Week for $1.99, or purchase a Multi-Pass for a month of Daily Rewind shows for $7.99 or a Season Pass for every Game of the Week at just $19.99. [Podcasting News]

I’m not a baseball fan but I do love highlights (of almost any sport). And I’ll probably invest $1.99 just to see how these look on the Apple TV. (“I just don’t know what you’d watch on that Apple TV thing.”)

Regular readers know the company I work for has the multi-media marketing rights for 32 college athletic programs. I sure hope somebody is working on something similar for our schools.