I accidently happened upon an Android G2 Google I/O edition phone (with 30-day SIM card, etc.) (The giveaway was detailed on TechCrunch.)
I'll give this away to the developer who convinces me that she or he will do something cool with it! Leave me a comment or send me a tweet, and I'll pick a winner on Monday night 9pm PST.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Printing a PDF from a gnarly hotel kiosk computer
I'm in Europe on the tail end of a wonderful trip (Amsterdam/Zurich.)
Tonight I asked the guy at the hotel desk (great hotel by the way) if they had a printer I could use to print my boarding pass. "There's the printer", he said motioning to his right. "But unfortunately it won't print PDFs sir." I looked at the machine... Some kiosk version of Windows XP - wouldn't allow downloads (let alone installs.) Serious bummer. I have an early flight and a tight connection, it would have been helpful.
Then I remembered "Gview", Gmail's righteous PDF viewer. Went back to the laptop in my room, mailed myself the boarding pass PDF and sparked up Gmail's viewer. Half way there. Then right-mouse'd, saved, and emailed the image file in .png format for Page 2 (the actual boarding pass) to myself again. Went downstairs, logged into Gmail, read that mail, clicked "View" and VOILA! The image file opened up in the browser perfectly... Clicked print... and it worked.
Thank you Gview team!
Tonight I asked the guy at the hotel desk (great hotel by the way) if they had a printer I could use to print my boarding pass. "There's the printer", he said motioning to his right. "But unfortunately it won't print PDFs sir." I looked at the machine... Some kiosk version of Windows XP - wouldn't allow downloads (let alone installs.) Serious bummer. I have an early flight and a tight connection, it would have been helpful.
Then I remembered "Gview", Gmail's righteous PDF viewer. Went back to the laptop in my room, mailed myself the boarding pass PDF and sparked up Gmail's viewer. Half way there. Then right-mouse'd, saved, and emailed the image file in .png format for Page 2 (the actual boarding pass) to myself again. Went downstairs, logged into Gmail, read that mail, clicked "View" and VOILA! The image file opened up in the browser perfectly... Clicked print... and it worked.
Thank you Gview team!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Paul Resnick lecture in Palo Alto
This morning I went to a very interesting lecture on reputation systems by Paul Resnick, Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information (where I'm an advisor. And like me Paul went to umich for undergrad, MIT for grad school.) Paul's work provides some rigorous mathematical foundations for how collective intelligence systems can be manipulated, and techniques for bounding and mitigating abuse. Important stuff that I'm certainly paying attention to... Note there were a lot of questions about marijuana legalization on the whitehouse.gov Town Hall last Thursday. ;-)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sonos player
Irene's got a Sonos system in her house... I discovered a new feature this weekend, and it's pretty darn cool.
I love listening to This American Life, but rarely can free myself up at exactly 12pm on Saturday, when it airs on KQED. So I started fishing on their website to find out how I could catch it earlier (by say, listening to the East Coast airing on WNYC) or catch it later (listening to the Hawaii airing on KIPO). But it was really tedious and hard to figure out when it was airing where...
Sonos to the rescue... There's a feature that allows me to search for shows by name, see if they're playing now, see when the show is playing next (across the zilliosn of stations around the nation that stream), and see what past episodes are available via podcast. Pretty cool!
I love listening to This American Life, but rarely can free myself up at exactly 12pm on Saturday, when it airs on KQED. So I started fishing on their website to find out how I could catch it earlier (by say, listening to the East Coast airing on WNYC) or catch it later (listening to the Hawaii airing on KIPO). But it was really tedious and hard to figure out when it was airing where...
Sonos to the rescue... There's a feature that allows me to search for shows by name, see if they're playing now, see when the show is playing next (across the zilliosn of stations around the nation that stream), and see what past episodes are available via podcast. Pretty cool!
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