Who has read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and not thought a Babelfish would be a pretty cool thing to have? Ever since I first came across speech-to-text technology about 15 years ago, I’ve imagined an electronic Babelfish – a pair of glasses with a ‘head up’ display and a directional microphone coupled with some …
Category Archives: tech
I didn’t know you could do that!
Just discovered a feature of flickr I didn’t know about – short URLs. Every Flickr photo page has it’s own embedded short URL. Much smarter to use the built in tool than using bit.ly or tinyurl etc. Well, it would be if you knew it was there! There is some documentation about the short URL …
and the winner is…
For a few years now, Web Directions conference has incorporated The McFarlane Prize, which recognises excellence in web development. Although a relatively small prize, it is hotly contested, peer reviewed and any sites that are shortlisted (let alone those that win), have achieved very high levels of excellence in coding, usability, design and accessibility (that’s …
looks like spam, smells like spam…
So, come on Google – mark it as spam! Does that screengrab look like spam to you? Sure looks like spam to me, and I’ve been dutifully marking dozens like it as spam each day for weeks, but still they arrive. Come on google, how hard can they be to spot?
watching my bandwidth…
Like most people who have broadband, my account doesn’t have excess charges, just ‘shaping’ – dropping back to crawling ‘dial-up’ speeds until the end of the billing period. It is just horrible and I really do my very best to avoid it. Obviously the best way to avoid it is to keep a close eye …
OVI store – a competitor?
Nokia today launched it’s OVI store, an attempt by the company to jump on the tidal wave of success that is the Apple Store (along with about a half a dozen other imitators). Many industry pundits are touting it as some sort of competitor, but I’m afraid that’s an uphill battle, and one they’re never …
commbank goes mobile
I don’t know exactly when they released this, but the Commonwealth bank have just gone mobile with both a mobile and an iPhone app. I’ve just had a poke around the site on my nokia 6120 and it’s excellent. Does everything I need smoothly and easily – they deserve a big thumbs up. If there …
Women’s Semi Final, Australian Open 1992
Every January when the Australian Open Tennis is on, I fondly remember back to 1992 when, working for XPress Group, I was lucky enough to be handed a Press Pass and a Nikon F2 camera fitted with a new Kodak DCS-1 back. The camera, in turn, was connected to a ‘luggable’ hard disk with (B+W …
never buy lexmark again – ever!
My advice to anyone considering a new printer. Choose a Canon, or an HP, or a Fuji Xerox – anything except a Lexmark! About 12 months ago, I bought a new colour laser printer, a Lexmark C500n, having had a gutfull of expensive inkjets with drivers that don’t get updated. I wanted to get a …
the other street view
…there’s another one? I hear you gasp! Yes, it seems the old one about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery has struck a chord at streetdirectory.com.au – and they obviously love Google! This is sort of amazing to me – I mean it’s incredible enough that a giant corporation like google pushes forward with …
a change in the weather
Melburnians are obsessed with weather. More accurately, we are obsessed with predicting the weather. Of course it’s a national joke that we can have four seasons in one day, but we don’t mind that as long as we can tell when those seasons will fall. Our chief tool in this quest, is the venerable BOM …
Flickr’s open (street) map
I don’t know when this happened, but last night when I placed some photos on my flickr map, I was delighted to see that (in certain areas, and at certain magnifications) they have started to use OpenStreetMap for the map layer. Yahoo were generous enough to allow OSM to use their satellite data as a …