Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

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

Portable wifi hotspot

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Avis has begun to offer a product called Autonet as an add-on to some car rentals, giving customers with a mobile device such as Treo or a laptop access to the net (and Internet radio stations, one assumes).

The service, called “AVIS Connect” allows customers to rent the router and service for $10.95/day, less than most hotels charge for daily WiFi access in a room. AVIS currently offers the service to rental car customers in San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles, with plans for service to seven additional cities expected soon. [RAIN]

Rent movies on iTunes, watch on Apple TV

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Apple is in talks with the Hollywood studios to make new movies available for rental on iTunes, with titles to rent for $2.99 for a set number of days before expiring. It is unclear which studios might participate. [WSJ.com]

I hope –and expect– this to come together. Netflix is great but there’s still some lag time. And I can’t recall the last time I bought a PPV movie from DirecTV. Selection pretty much sucks. As Barb and I have less and less time (or so it seems), the convenience and choice of on-demand becomes more and more important.

NYT: Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

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This story appeared last week in the New York Times and is one of the best I’ve seen in a while on Google. Posted here for future reference.

“Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster.

As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.”

Beyond blogging with TypePad Pages

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smays.com is hosted by and managed with TypePad, a blogging platform. I’ve been a happy camper since making the switch from Blogger. The ONLY thing it didn’t offer was the ability to create individual pages (as opposed to a blog post). And this morning I see they’ve added a "TypePad Pages" feature. Yessss.

I’ve been steering clients to TypePad for the last year or so and the inability to add "static" pages has been an issue. I’ll add a page or two here at smays.com and let you know if this is as handy as I expect it to be.

Bringo: Talk to a real human

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Call a customer service phone number and end up in automated operator hell. With Bringo, you don’t even need to dial your phone. Just find the company you want to talk to in their directory, type in your phone number, and a couple of minutes later Bringo calls you and connects you to an operator at that company. [via Tech Crunch]

Google Reader share feature

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I am a Google Fan Boy. I can’t help it. I love most of the Google services I’ve tried. And I keep discovering new ones. The “Share” feature in Google Reader is not new, but I just got around to playing with it and I love it.

I frequently come across a story that I’d like to share. I’ll sometime email it to friends and –if I have the time– post on it here. But there are times when I just want to point you to the story and have nothing to add. With one click in my Google Reader, I can add the story to a public page (“Steve’s Shared Items”). The five most recently “shared” stories also appear in the sidebar here at smays.com.

This simple tool extends my role of “who asked you?” editor/aggregator. While I cannot post on everything I find interesting, Google Reader has made it easy to share.

flickrvision

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flickrvision

flickervision lets you see photos as they’re uploaded, with geographical location. Hard to stop watching. Like channel surfing but better. And at the risk of getting all “We are the world” on you… it reminded me that there are people just like me in every country, taking pix and putting them up for the rest of the world to see. Thanks to J. T. for the point.

Objective: 1,000 photos on flickr

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That’s my goal. And I’m about half-way there. I’m using flickr to host images for the rebuild of The Basement Diaries which should be far enough along for a link by next weekend. A lot of the prints are 40 years old and weren’t great to begin with. But I’m not trying to win a contest, just share some memories with old friends.

And there is something so satisfying about getting these images out the shoe boxes and up on the web where anyone can find them. That means a lot of scanning (I might try one of the services I’ve read about). From now on, if  the image is worth keeping… it goes on flickr.

iDVD

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[Mac shields up!] I created my first DVD last night, using iDVD that ships with OS X. Now, I’ve burned files to DVD’s before but iDVD makes it fun and easy to create a more finished product. Pick a theme, drag over your video from iMovie, your still images form iPhoto, pull some music over from iTunes… hit the burn button and you’re done.

iDVD

This first effort looks like it. But the next one will be better. I haven’t done much with DVD’s because it seemed like a cumbersome way to share media. But this was fun and the resulting DVD looks pretty snazzy.

Voice-to-text-to-blog?

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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.