Wow. For those of you who are not in the know, I’m hearing impaired. I’ve lived with a steady diet of closed captioning for most of my life. When the internet first came around it was primarily text and pictures which made the intertubes easy to enjoy despite the slow speeds.  However with the advent of greater bandwidth came video blogs, and the mumblers of the internet were able to strike a heavy blow against those with my impairment.

Then Google came to the rescue.

They’ve developed technology that will automatically scan videos and allow me to view them with captions, whether or not people meant for it to be that way. And as they say in the article, since it’s computer-based, this also means that we will be able to use Google’s translators to have subtitles for videos in any language.

Now the technology is not perfect. In the article they have an example of how the transcription has gone hilariously wrong. Again, Google has provided a way to help with that as well. Upload a text file with the transcription already in it, and Google will use their technology to match your text file up with the timing of the speaker.

I’m so excited for this technology! I can’t wait for it to be fully implemented.

via The Official Google Blog.

I’m certain that I’m not alone when I say that the phrase “I have a lot of photos on my harddrive” is an extreme understatement. I have 35,000 photos and images, give or take, and I’m sure that there are many of you that have me beat by a fair margin.

Needless to say, a little photo organization is important, no matter how many photos you have.  A while back I started looking for a program that’s good at doing this, and eventually downloaded Google’s Picasa. While trying to figure out the best way to use Picasa to organize, I got distracted with something else and pretty much forgot all about my original goal. The photos remained unorganized.

Fast forward a couple of years to yesterday when Google’s blog announced face recognition in their latest version of Picasa.

Most of the time I shrug off claims like these as just gimmick features that barely work. However, this is Google claiming this, and lately they’ve done some pretty amazing stuff with their software. Because of this, I’ve become a bit of a Google fanboy and after seeing this news on my RSS feed (using Google Reader), I was anxious to get home and try it out.
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Lately the rumor mill has been spinning about a tablet that Apple is supposedly putting out in the future, but from what I understand, Apple keeps denying the existance of such a device. Yesterday Gizmodo revealed Microsoft’s latest concept device, the Courier. Recently I came across Microsoft OneNote and fell in love with the software. This appears to do much of the same thing, and if it does it as smoothly, my need for gadgets won’t let me pass it up. I’ll let the video and story from Gizmodo tell the rest.

::To Article::

Patrick Warburton really knows how to make me want a hamburger: http://cheeseandburger.com/