Doritos opened the voting on their entries of Super Bowl 2010 ads. As reported, Doritos is putting $5 million on the line if all three of their ads will be landing on top of the USA Today Ad Meter in Super Bowl 2010.
This prize money has motivated a lo…
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Doritos Super Bowl 2010 Ad Voting Launched
A hailstorm of reports came out over the weekend after Google (NSDQ: GOOG) gave its global workforce a cellphone. Reports quickly concluded that this provides confirmation that the search company is indeed building a branded phone of …
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Google Phone May Be Much Ado About Nothing | mocoNews
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated). 59 Ways to Supercharge Windows · Recover From Regeditphobia · Turn Excel Data and Charts into JPEGs · Leave a Comment · TrackBack URI. a minimalist’s medley. Search for: Entries …
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'Best' Android apps « 0ddn1x: tricks with *nix
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated). 59 Ways to Supercharge Windows · Recover From Regeditphobia · Turn Excel Data and Charts into JPEGs · Leave a Comment · TrackBack URI. a minimalist’s medley. Search for: Entries …
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'Best' Android apps « 0ddn1x: tricks with *nix
November 2009, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10 · 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Navigation. Recent Entries · Archive · Friends · Backstory · Memories.
November 2009, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10 · 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Navigation. Recent Entries · Archive · Friends · Backstory · Memories. This page …
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Right On for the Darkness – Cleaning out favorites Pt1
In a move that will go down in camera history as a classic case of innovation gone wrong, Ricoh has announced today a new “Interchangeable Unit” camera where you change the lens and image sensor as an integrated unit. In the Ricoh GXR, …
In a move that will go down in camera history as a classic case of innovation gone wrong, Ricoh has announced today a new “Interchangeable Unit” camera where you change the lens and image sensor as an integrated unit. In the Ricoh GXR, …
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Ricoh Introduces Interchangeable Unit GXR – Digital Camera Reviews …
November 2009, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10 · 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Navigation
November 2009, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10 · 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Navigation. Recent Entries · Archive · Friends · Backstory · Memories. This page …
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Right On for the Darkness – Cleaning out favorites Pt1
Jack-o’-lanterns are my favorite things in Halloween. OK, Jack-o’-lanterns and mahoosive amounts of Jack Daniels. That’s why I am happy that Mark asked you for photos of the spooky heads for this week’s Shooting Challenge. Like before, you didn’t disappoint.
The winner picture above is Pumpkin Carving Night. Jeremy Champion did a great job in the composition and creating the atmosphere, shooting with a Nikon D90 with Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 D, 1.3 sec, ISO 200.
Check out the gallery for the second and third places, and the rest of the entries. All of them were great, so thank you very much for sending them.
Have a happy and safe Halloween tomorrow. I’m off to start with the other Jack.
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Twelve Beautiful Jack-o’-Lanterns [Shooting Challenge]
As you know, Google’s freebie turn-by-turn navigation app for Android 2.0 surfaced this week. After driving around our patented testing track for a few days, I can tell you what’s great—and what’s surprisingly bad—about it.
Brian already went through the details when he broke the news, all the features you need to know about. On paper, this baby sounds like it has everything the $100 apps have, and it’s free (for Android 2.0 users). I won’t go over all of the features again—live traffic, over-the-air maps, multiple visual layers, search along routes, etc.—so I encourage you to read that. This is what it feels to use the thing day to day, the wheels-on-the-ground perspective, and though it’s certainly as powerful as billed, the experience itself is a little more sobering.
On Android 2.0, on the Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid I’ve been testing, Google navigation is part of the Car Home suite, an easy-to-read, easy-to-reach set of apps including map, turn-by-turn navigation, voice search, text search and contacts. However, as you can probably guess from reading that lineup, the lines are so blurry it can get confusing fast. The sane place to start is voice search.
The surprise hit of Google’s new software is the voice command. I said “Navigate to Cloud City” and it quickly launched the navigator, showing me a few options with “Cloud City” in the name. On top was my wife’s favorite coffee shop (home of my favorite BBQ pulled-pork sandwich). I tapped it and got on my way. I have done this with street addresses, store names and categories like simply “barbecue” and it’s worked fine. It’s only when I tried text searching that things got iffy.
But voice command isn’t the only voice feature that’s awesome on this. The turn-by-turn lady may be a tad robotronic, but that’s because she tells you everything, including street names and numbers. Text-to-speech is considered a bit of a premium among the iPhone apps (many have it or are getting it, but not all do), so to find it for free is impressive.
As I mentioned, the text search is not as smooth as the voice-activated stuff. That’s because there are several different places to search, and at times they overlap in ways that make my head feel light. There’s the basic directions view that iPhone users are used to seeing, where you type a destination with no predictive guessing on the app’s part. Once you finish typing, it picks the most likely destination or offers you some options. Then there’s the true “Search” window that gives you a keyboard and lets you type whatever you like, and tries to anticipate what it is you’re typing by showing you similar past searches. And then there’s a screen of all your past searches, that you can only get to by backing out of the main Search window. It’s strange, and took me a while to figure out how to return to this little Narnia of a helpful screen.
If that’s not chaotic enough, well, take away any browsable POI menus, any “go home” preset address feature, and any multi-stop trip planning tool. Scared yet? At least its only a few taps to your contacts—which you can fill up with all your favorite destinations—but only if you remember what those taps are.
One of the things I was super excited about when Brian came back from his secret Google meeting was the Street View feature: When you came to a tricky intersection, Google would show you the actual intersection, and you would know just where to turn. Well, I live in Seattle, one of the biggest cities and certainly one of the most high-tech, and though I’ve driven with this thing on a few outings this week, I haven’t once been shown a photo of an intersection. (Note: Brian says you have to tap the screen to see the picture as you approach an intersection, to which I reply, “Sounds suicidal, I’ll pass.”)
I do, however, see the photos pop up when I reach my destination, and without exception they’ve looked awful. Sure, you can flick them around once you’ve stopped, but I think this highlights the major trouble with Street View on a mobile platform.
The driving directions are, for the most part, just fine. Re-routing is fast when you make an unscheduled turn, and the Droid phone appears to track the road as well or better than an iPhone. I have heard others talk of reliability issues, but frankly, that kind of evaluation takes weeks or months, and results can differ from location to location. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly what the reliability weak points are, especially since Google is using (from what I can tell) its own map data.
When you’ve navigated, you can pull up layers—traffic view, which shows you where the trouble’s going to be; satellite view, which looks neat but I don’t know how practical it is; and POI layers, like where the nearest gas or parking is. There’s some customization you can do to this, but only in the 2D bird’s-eye view.
The power comes when you select the Route Info screen (shown above), by popping up a menu while in your navigation screen. There you can see an icon with a solid arrow and a broken arrow, indicating alternate routes. Tap that icon, and you’ll see your route plus two ghostly alternatives. By selecting one of the alternatives up top, you can re-route. The Route Info screen also contains the all-important turn-by-turn list, buried a bit more than I’d like, but clear and readable nonetheless.
Tooling around northeast Seattle has been fine. My gripes about the driving interface are mostly cosmetic: You can see the time till arrival, in hours and minutes, but you don’t see a time of arrival, which I prefer. On other navigators and apps I’ve gotten used to seeing my speed in MPH and even posted speed limits, and Google doesn’t show those either.
But at least the screen is clean and easy to read. If the screen stayed like this, I’d live.
I spent a lot of time telling you what’s wrong with the Google navigation app, but that’s mostly because I get the feeling we’ll all be experiencing it one way or another soon enough, be it on this exceptional Motorola Droid, other Android handsets or even on the iPhone. It’s an extremely powerful program, but the execution isn’t the best. Not by a stretch.
Still, if this was built in to the iPhone’s Google Maps, or offered as a free download at the App Store, damn would it steal customers like a mofo. You might still see the occasional sale of a Navigon or a CoPilot, because of particular necessary features and because of the onboard map databases (which people who go off-grid prefer), but really, this thing would—and probably will—swallow the GPS app market alive.
Because of that, I am hoping Google’s developers pay close attention to this review, too. The app is still in beta, but there’s a lot of user-interface work yet to be done. Google: If you’re going to knock everyone else off the mountain, at least give us an app worthy of a king.
Amazing voice recognition engine
Live traffic and alternate route planner
Text-to-speech
Good routing and fast re-routing
Satellite view and other views not always useful
Text search features are overlapping, confusing
Interface overall needs better flow
No POI category browsing or “go home” feature
No multi-stop trip planner
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Google Navigator for Android Review: Good For Free But Far From Perfect [Review]
Finally, a piece of furniture that goes with your drinking straw lamp. Perhaps next time designer Scott Jarve could create a bendy straw couch so that I could mold the seat to my ass better. [Jarvie via Make]
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A Chair Made From 10,000 Drinking Straws [Furniture]
This year’s Solar Decathlon winner generates enough energy to power itself and two other homes.
Energy efficiency is the ultimate goal of the Solar Decathlon, but the surPLUShome’s good looks and functionality helped the German Team beat out the early favorites from California. Nearly all the available surface area of the surPlushome is covered in solar panels with a few stylish wood panels thrown in for good measure. Those and the windows are really the only things keeping the house from looking like an oversized 2001: A Space Odyssey prop.
Congrats to the winners! You can check out other entries from the competition at the link. [Inhabitat]
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The Solar Decathlon Winner [Architecture]
The Zune Wall Paper Development Kit by ABI will allow you to see what your wallpaper will look like before you put it on your Zune. It helps you layout the design elements for your wallpaper around the Zune HD’s clock, icons, and bottom bar on the lock screen. It will even apply the shadow as if you were viewing it on the device. It is an awesome tool for Zune wallpaper designers.
Additionally, we are having a contest to see who can create the best Zune HD wallpaper. The prize is a Zune HD AV Dock. Here is the contest thread and stop into the Zune HD Wallpaper Forum to download and check out the entries.
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Zune HD Wallpaper Development Kit
Runner’s Kitchen · Entries RSS | Comments RSS · Foodbuzz · Subscribe to The Runner’s Kitchen by Email. Archives. October 2009 · September 2009 · August 2009 · July 2009 · June 2009 · May 2009 · April 2009 · March 2009 · February 2009 …
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Alma's Spanish Ratatouille « Runner's Kitchen
Runner’s Kitchen · Entries RSS | Comments RSS · Foodbuzz · Subscribe to The Runner’s Kitchen by Email. Archives. October 2009 · September 2009 · August 2009 · July 2009 · June 2009 · May 2009 · April 2009 · March 2009 · February 2009 …
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Alma's Spanish Ratatouille « Runner's Kitchen
Runner’s Kitchen · Entries RSS | Comments RSS · Foodbuzz · Subscribe to The Runner’s Kitchen by Email. Archives. October 2009 · September 2009 · August 2009 · July 2009 · June 2009 · May 2009 · April 2009 · March 2009 · February 2009 …
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Alma's Spanish Ratatouille « Runner's Kitchen
