smart computer use?

Found this one on Mashable today:

We’re in luck, because Google just finished their worldwide rollout of local search results on a map. So now all you have to do is search for what you want — coffee, gym, food, flowers, or dentist, for example — and Google will guess your location and display local business results for your search term on a map.

The first thing that came to mind was – wow, Google is now making navigating real life as easy as navigating through a video game world using an interactive map. That’s the gamer in me.

The reality is that this is just plain sweet. This is just another example of Googles continued addition of seemingly small things to their applications that make them a whole lot more usable for us end users.

I run into a lot of situations where clients/colleagues/etc. need to know just enough about HTML to use a content management system or to do simple markup for simple web-based tasks.

For these people, they don’t need (or want) to know a ton of HTML and all the intricacies that go along with delving into web site development with HTML/CSS. They just need to be able to bold text, make headings, make lists and other small things. Usually their content management system or whatever other software they are using will take care of the rest of the formatting for them.

But, they do need to know some basics. And they need a reference for the basics.

I like to point them to this: http://werbach.com/barebones/barebones.html

This is a simple guide that outlines the HTML elements. It has the tags and stuff that I show them, so it’s there if they need reference, plus they can dig in and try to use some other HTML tags if needed.

I like this particular guide because it doesn’t go into how to implement a lot of the more advanced tag usage. For that reason, people that know a few HTML basics and need a reference will find it very accessible and non-overwhelming. It’s just a tag reference, so they can find what they can’t remember and not get too distracted by everything else.

So, everybody is using Twitter all of the sudden. I like it I guess. It’s fun to see the free-flow of info roll through that site. It’s hard to say whether it’s got long term staying power, but it’ll be fun to see what happens. If people are using it, it worth using!

I read about Google sounding out of touch about Twitter:

Last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented on everything from the economy (which he called “pretty dire”) to Android’s jump from phones to other devices. In other words, stuff you’d probably expect. What came as a surprise was the curveball he threw at everyone’s favorite micro-blogging website, Twitter.

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,” Schmidt said. “In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?” He then went on to call Twitter’s success “wonderful,” but it all sounded a little backhanded.

Yeah, he has a point that I can agree with. It does seem like it might just be a phenomenon. It’s hard for many things these days to have more staying power than email though.

I like it. I’m relatively new to Twitter, but it’s fun. I actually really do like how it’s relatively easy to gets tons of info and links of stuff you are interested in if you follow the right people, that is probably my favorite aspect.

I like Firefox. Probably my favorite browser. Firefox has come a long way since version 1.

Get ready for version 3 of Firefox. Mozilla will probably release it by June.

Additions boost security and allow users to run Web sites when they are not connected to the Internet. Mozilla also says Firefox 3 uses less computer memory than Firefox 2.

Nice. I like the idea of Firefox using less memory. At times it is the single most resource using application I am running. I do, however, tend to have 10 or more tabs open at any given time.

Read the rest here.

If you liked legos as a kid (or still do), then you better check out Serious Lego.

For example:

This robot solves the 3×3x3 Rubik’s Cube®.

I started to think about this problem in about August of 2000. In Jan 2001 fellow Mindstorms forums user ‘agiecco’ announced his intention to work on a robotic solution and, simultaneously, I saw that Rubik’s Cubes were on sale at www.target.com. So I bought a couple of cubes and started getting down to business…

It’s amazing what can be built with legos.