Archive for the 'Internet' Category

April Fool’s Day News in the Tech World

Published
by
Aaron
on April 1, 2006
in Internet and Technology
. 0 Comments

Today, as you all (at least if you’re in the U.S.) know that today is April Fool’s Day. In addition to your typical pranks and jokes, there were also some major things happening today in the tech world. Here they are:

For April Fool’s Day, Google pulled a clever little prank by launching a new "service" called Google Romance. Romance, which is being advertised on the Google homepage, is supposed to be Google’s attempt at a dating service. The joke is pretty clever, and is quite funny. It’s a good April Fool’s Day laugh.

Google, in addition to their prank, has some other news on April Fool’s Day. GMail, Google’s very popular e-mail service (which I happen to use) turns 2 today. Besides the GMail logo on your GMail account homepage being decorated with confetti and a candle, Google hasn’t really done anything special with GMail for it’s 2nd B-Day, unlike it’s 1st birthday in which GMail users got 2GB of storage space and additional space being added every second, even to this day. But GMail’s birthday is not even close to today’s next birthday.

The biggest April Fool’s Day birthday is for…APPLE COMPUTER!!!!!!! Yes, thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak incorporated Apple Computer. This is a HUGE day for Apple, and they’re doing absolutely nothing. That’s right, no new product, no announcement, not even the slightest acknowledgment of this big day in their history. What a bummer. But still, it’s a warm outside (at least in NYC) so you can still go out and throw a graet, big Apple 30th Birthday Party, that is, if you want to. 

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Google Finance

Published
by
Aaron
on March 21, 2006
in Finance and Internet
. 0 Comments

Google has just unveiled their new service, Google Finance. I understand that this means absolutely nothing to a lot of the readers of this blog, being that they or bored by the stock market or just don’t follow it. I, on the other hand, do follow the market and am a very small investor, with 10 shares in Apple Computer and 10 shares in SanDisk Corporation. So, if you don’t really want to know about Google Finance, read no further.

Google Finance has a very nice interface. It is sleek and easy-to-use, just like all of Google’s other products. The actual pages for the stocks are organized beautifully. Each page for a stock features the current price on top, along with the same basic stock info. such as Market Cap. Volume, Highs and Lows, and Change that you would find in the stock charts of a newspaper. Then it has a chart of the stock, which if you move your cursor along, will show you in little text in the upper-right hand corner of the stock its price and volume on that one day. There are also "flags" throughout the chart that are labeled with letters. Each "flag" corresponds to a news story from Google News on the right of the chart that is also labeled with that letter. The flag appears on the chart at the time that the news story was published. When you click on the flag, the news story becomes highlighted. Below the news stories and charts, there is also a summary of the company, basic facts about it including number of employees and HQ location, and the management of the company (who’s CEO, COO, etc.). And below that you have financial figures and ratios about the company. Google also added two other things unique to Google Finances. They show blog posts on the web (from Google Blog Search) and posts in discussions (from Google Groups) that have to do with the company. Now that is cool. Google also now includes a portfolio for your stocks, so you can see how much money you’ve gained or lost in the stock market.

Overall, Google Finance is very, very cool. It’s trying to go head-to-head with companies like Yahoo and Microsoft which also offer very similar stock analyzing and tracking services, but of course, Google outdoes them with its easy-to-use interface and its own search technology built right in. I really think that Google has truly matured in the finance department.

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The Wayback Machine

Published
by
Aaron
on March 12, 2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

This has got to be one of the coolest sites EVER!!!!! The Wayback Machine is a site that keeps archives of pages on the Internet that go as far back as 1996! For more information, check out my MacUser post on the subject, or just read it below:

Have you ever wanted to see the page for the original OS X? What about the iPod? Well, now you can with the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine, which is run by Internet Archive, a site dedicated to making a digital library of all the pages and media on the Web, allows you to visit archived pages that have long since vanished. Simply put in the URL of the site you want to see an archive of, click “Take Me Back,” and you will see a list of dates that the site you requested has been archived on. For example, I can see archives of the the Apple.com homepage that go as far back as October 1996! And I can even click on links on the archived pages and go to their archived pages! Awesome! The Wayback Machine is a great research tool, but you can also have a lot of fun. Now you can finally relive the glory days of System 7.

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MacUser and First Podcast Review Copies

Published
by
Aaron
on March 1, 2006
in Apple, Internet and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

This post has two things in it. The first is MacUser. Just yesterday I was invited to join the Macworld Magazine run blog, MacUser. MacUser is a blog where a bunch of, well, Mac users, get togather and blog about Mac stuff. This is VERY cool becuase I’m working with adults on this blog AND getting opaind $5 per post to do it! Now that’s awesome! I’ve already posted three times, so head of to MacUser.com to check it out. Also, because I’m posting on MacUSer is that this blog may not be posted on as frequently. Sorry, but that’s what has to be done.

Also, today I got my first TWO free review copies for my podcast! The first, which I was expecting, was an IPevo Free-1 USB Skype phone, and the second, totally unexpected because I’m on a waiting list, is the Logitech S 350 Cordless Desktop for Mac. Both are very cool and will be reviewed in future episodes.

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Google Pages

Published
by
Aaron
on February 27, 2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

Google Pages is Google’s new web page hosting/managing/creating service which has a variety of templates to choose from to help make cool web pages. The beta program (isn’t everything Google does now?) went online earlier this week, but today Google reopened the program to the public, including me, to sign up. Pages offers a variety of tools including a very large selection of templates and image tools to get you started, along with a variety of page layouts and 100 MB of space to upload files and store your site. Some features that I would like to see in pages would be intergration with Blogger and being able to use your GMail account for file and page storage. You can check out my page, which is right now very small, but I’ll add on more later. You can also sign up for Pages and try it out yourself.

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Digg

Published
by
Aaron
on February 19, 2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

Today I tried out Digg for the very first time. It’s very, very cool. Users submit stories that they find online or that they’ve made themselves, and otehr users "digg" them, which is like a points system. Once a story gets enough "diggs" i gets on the front page. It’s way better than Slashdot, the previous reigning Web 2.0 news site. But you can’t alwyas trust the stories. Some users will "digg" any story that just sounds cool, even if it’s totally false. But still, check it out at digg.com. Anyone can read the stories, and you can register to "digg" them and comment on them for free.

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New Version of Flock

Published
by
Aaron
on February 18, 2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

Flock, the new Web 2.0-centric, Mozilla-based web browser has just been officially upgraded to version 0.5.11, featuring a Flickr uploader, support for Shadows.com bookmark sharing, and support for a few Firefox extentions are just a few of the new features that come with version 0.5.11. Personally, the features that I like the most is support for tags (testing if that works with this post) and categories (this one does work) in Wordpress and other MetaWeblog based blogs (like mine!!!!), the Flickr photo uploader, a bookmarks bar that can also show blog posts, maps, the Shelf (a place to store snippets of text and images for blogging later), and much more. It also runs all together much more smoove and faster than before, and and RSS feed made up of several RSS feeds which used to crash Flock now runs seamlessly. You can grab the new version of Flock here.

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