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 …
Category Archives: tech
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 …
Domain – first to market with Street View?
Checking my moderation queue, and noticed a comment on yesterday’s street view post, that seems to be from someone on the Domain team. I didn’t see the comment until this morning, but I did receive an announcement email from Domain yesterday and was mightily impressed with their use of streetview. Obviously, they’ve had access to …
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Street view invades Australia
I can’t wait for the conspiracy theorists to get going on this one – Google have released Street View on their maps in Australia. Unlike earlier releases, this is a massive and dense coverage… amazing detail. The face blurring technology is in full swing, and not very discriminate – blurring both the wheels on my …
Semacode vs QRcode
This week has been a big one in the mobile phone world. Debate about the iPhone and the plans available to use here in Australia has been everywhere. At the same time, however, Telstra has been heavily pushing its venture into barcodes with the introduction of QRcodes to the Australian market. I say introduction because …
the appstore door is open
Not officially launched yet, but if you search for likely keywords (try ‘photo’) in iTunes Music Store, your results might include some applications. Click through to “see all” and you’ll be presented with a heap of apps you can download and install – yay! I’ve only been getting the free ones, but there’s loads in …
make your maps open maps
This week Google announced (yet) another new feature of it’s mapping toolset. For a little while now, we’ve been able to ‘submit’ alterations via the maps interface – moving things here and there – a quick look at Google Maps Recent Edits shows that it’s quite popular. The latest thing is Map Maker, which is …
Apple’s iTunes rip-off
I remember waiting with huge anticipation for Apple to launch iTunes in Australia – the rumours got thicker and faster until it finally arrived. The store finally launched with tracks selling at $1.69 each. At the time, as I recall, the aussie dollar was about $us0.65ยข so we were effectively paying about $us1.10 while the …
A week in touch
I’ve had the pleasure of using an iPod Touch for the last week. As much as I like my music, I’ve never really felt the need to upgrade from my old ‘gumstick’ 1Gb shuffle, but we’ve got one at work with the intention mainly of testing podcasts and public facing services. Yes, the multi touch …
Keep smiling – just in case!
If you’re hanging around the streets of Melbourne, keep a happy face on. I saw a car on Macarthur Avenue crossing Royal Parade yesterday, that looked very much like the Google Street View car that was seen in Geelong last year. Big thing of cameras and a little round GPS aerial on top of the …