Archive for the 'Google' Category
Google Buzz
I heard about Google Buzz on CBC Radio yesterday… came home and tried to connect but it wasn’t activated. What’s all this Buzz about? Today, while using Gmail, I noticed the icon for it, opened it up, and added some “connected sites”. I’ve already had two conversations about a picture of a turtle I took a few years back. Awesome.
Seems easier to use than Facebook too.
Posted by Karl Herrick on February 10th, 2010 in Google, Culture | No Comments »
The calendar has moved
So, I moved my calendars off of Apache/WebDAV and onto Google Calendar. Have I lost some control? Yes. Have I gained a huge amount of convenience. Definitely.
Google don’t fail me now!
Posted by Karl Herrick on November 1st, 2009 in Google, Linux | No Comments »
Google appears broken
After trying to search for some CSS magic on Google, I was puzzled as to why the sites kept returning “This site may harm your computer”… Then I checked my own site. What? My site won’t harm anyone’s computer. Then I google’d “Google”. It appears that Google will harm your computer too! They have labeled themselves a security risk.
These warnings are appearing on all of my searches, and I have independently verified these odd issues at two workstations running different os’es with different browsers at one location, and one workstation at another location.
**Update**, it looks like it’s fixed… I was getting tired of copying and pasting the url’s to get to the sites I wanted to go to. It’s certainly an interesting reminder on how dependent I am on Google. I keep telling myself… I can quit Google whenever I want! 
Posted by Karl Herrick on January 31st, 2009 in Google | No Comments »
Google Calling
How cool is this? My wife Denise was telling me the other day that she wanted to find a photographer around Lansing that could take a specific size photograph and develop it in a certain way. So she browsed over to Google Local, searched for the business, and it had this “call” link. She clicked it, typed in our telephone number, and up rings our phone with the business number on the caller id. She answers it and the phone says, “connecting.” Then Google routed her phone call to the business… for free. 
I thought at first… “mmm-kay, whoopie doo…” but it actually is pretty neat, and convenient for those who happen to google businesses regularly.
You don’t even have to press the numbers on the telephone for the business you are calling anymore! I’m not sure if it will connect you to the business if your number is outside of the US, and I tried checking out google.ca to see if our Canadian friends had the same ease of use, but it doesn’t make the “call” link on the webpage.
The US side is fully functional however. Give it a shot at Google Local. Just type the name of the business, or type of business… and where it’s at, like “Detroit, MI” and it will have a little “call” link next to it. Type your phone number in, click “Connect for free” and your phone will ring.
I love innovation.
Posted by Karl Herrick on November 27th, 2006 in Google, Telephony | No Comments »
Currency Conversion
A long time ago, I wrote a PHP script to compare current gas prices from Michigan and Ontario in current US and Canadian dollar rates from the following three sites:
http://ontariogasprices.com/
http://michigangasprices.com
http://finance.yahoo.com
as soon as all of the data was retreived (gas prices used a php web scraping library, currency data from Yahoo! Finance retrieved similarly to how Exch does), do the math, and it would let me know who was paying what for gas prices… well using a little Google search, most of the logic of this script became a lot easier (well it has been for some time, but I thought I would share on this little known secret :-)… for example Google these searches below:
3.16 USD per gallon in CAD per liter
3.16 (U.S. dollars per US gallon) = 0.945976868 Canadian dollars per liter
1.10 CAD per litre in USD per gallon
1.10 (Canadian dollars per litre) = 3.67450845 U.S. dollars per US gallon
1.10 CAD per litre in EUR per gallon
1.10 (Canadian dollars per litre) = 2.90268461 Euros per US gallon
1.10 CAD per litre in EUR per litre
1.10 (Canadian dollars per litre) = 0.766808149 Euros per litre
Google even acknowledges the alternative spellings of “liter/litre” … nice huh?
Posted by Karl Herrick on June 26th, 2006 in PHP, Google, Web Development | No Comments »