Since this is a blog, I suppose an update of sorts is needed. While it’s been a busy past few weeks not much has really happened.

I’ve needed a phone upgrade for about a year now. My xv6800 has been all but worn out. Sure a new battery would fix the 2 hour battery life, but it really wouldn’t fix the slowness, the GPS being locked out, or the randomly missed calls. Hint: the phone is supposed to ring when calls come in.

This caused a dilemma, I knew I wanted another smartphone, and I was pretty dead set against another Windows Mobile phone. Microsoft really needs to scrap the whole thing and start back at the drawing board if it wants to get in the game. What I wanted was the iPhone. Problem was I’m on Verizon and still had until January 2010 before I was out of the contract.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

As I mentioned previously in my Picasa post, I’ve only recently become a Google fanboy.

Oh sure, I was pretty close already with all my email coming to me through Google Apps, as well as my use of Google Reader to help me keep up with all the webcomics and tech news I follow. And then there’s Google Analytics for my websites and well, I could keep going, Google makes a ton of different, very useful products…. I use just about everything that Google has put out. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m not using Blogger, but I prefer WordPress just because it’s on my own server.)

Really, though, the announcement for Google Wave and its accompanying (way too long at 1:20 minutes) demo video is what finally turned the tides and made me into the gushing, ravenous fanboy you see before you.

Tomorrow, September 30th 2009, will be the day that Google starts inviting people into Google Wave. I’m hoping that I’ll be one of the few 100,000 that gets in. If not, I’ll be crushed, but I’ll wait patiently in the hopes that one of my friends or anyone that reads this blog (all two of you) might have an invitation to spare and can let me join in on the Wavey goodness.

Good luck to all the hopefuls out there!

::To Article::

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.
Read the rest of this entry »