Lifetime map updates for Garmin GPS for one price

If you own a Garmin Gps - this is big - one price for free map updates for the life of the device. This is usually $100/year!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001PKTFM8

You can just google "nuMaps" for more information...

Google search options

http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS340US341&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=ww:1

Have you guys checked out Google’s new search options? Just click “Show options” from the Google results page. My favorite at the moment is “wonder wheel” – It shows phrases related to the phrase you entered in a “brain-map” style, so you can narrow down your search using more accurate terms.

Remote control robot via video with iPhone

• http://mrblog.org/2009/03/15/ispykee-open-source-spykee-for-iphone
• http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=9755

A more interesting way to say this is mobile webcam!

Microsoft opening up the Outlook email database (PST files) file format

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/26/microsoft-opens-up-the-pst-format.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/archive/2009/10/26/roadmap-for-outlook-personal-folders-pst-documentation.aspx

If I remember correctly, up until now you couldn’t do much with a PST no matter what API you used, unless Outlook was actually installed. Now you will be able to, which is great. I have many Gigs of email going back to 1995, all in PST format. I’d love to have or create some better (more targeted) tools to work with those archives, which usually comes down to looking for some old email for record purposes, like a needle in a hay stack.

This is not to say that there weren’t some very useful APIs already open for MAPI and accessing MAPI data using database APIs.

I remember reading somewhere that the PST format was based on MS Access. I assume the change on 2002-2003 to the format was to move it to something like the personal SQL Server db to beat the 2Gig filesize limit.

Clean install with Windows 7 Upgrade

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/23/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-the-answer.aspx

Honestly the jury is still out on whether you can use the win7 upgrade media to do a clean install on a blank hard drive. It appears that we can at least say “don’t count on it”. Some people say they can, other say they can’t. Paul provides an arcane, but fast, workaround.

Fix the Zune Software

…“In IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connection tab. Click the LAN settings button and then uncheck "Automatically detect settings."…

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/20/tip-of-the-week-speed-up-zune-marketplace-searches.aspx

This is amazing! Searches of the online Zune content from the Zune software are instantly fixed. And what an amazing difference. I’m surprised I never thought of this because I have seen this setting fix other similar problems.

If you have any cases where there is a initial hesitation by some piece of software that connects to the internet somehow, then try unchecking this setting. The reason is that because IE is the browser that comes with Windows, and the IE proxy settings are exposed via several APIs, they have become the de-facto global proxy settings, and many Windows applications check them before any internet communications. And this particuar setting says “go look around on your local filesystem and network to see if anybody has ever put one of the standard proxy config files in". There’s some long default timeout that will hurt you every time this is examined.

So even if you don’t run Zune software, and don’t use Internet Explorer, you should still go turn this off right now. Very cool!

Twit on Roku!!!

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/10/03/the-model-of-the-new-media-model/

Leo Laporte gives a great talk, including the bombshell that Twit (a channel of all his podcasts) is going to be on the Roku player (famous for Netflix and MLB streaming). Plugs into your TV, 99$. Not just the live shows, but access to the archives as well!

What's a 'puter?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/rackspace-launches-nomoreservers-com-to-tout-computing-as-a-service

This article/news item describes something that sounds a little desperate to me, though I like what I have heard about Rackspace, their values and how they do business. If I were trying to illustrate this, I'd have a a geeky kid standing by a rocket ship waiting to launch, trying to get someone to go with him, while a bunch of cool kids on motorcycles with cheerleaders on the back laughed at him. Is a rocketship a much better way to get to the moon? You bet. But not to get you to the dance on Saturday night, which is where the cool kids want to go. Will everybody be using rocketships in the future to commute home from moonwork? Again yes, but it's going to be a few years before they come with leather heated seats.

What's the parallel? I think that Rackspace is finding that the future may not be as close as they were lead to believe. Yes the web-two-oh crowd is fine with chucking the servers and moving into the cloud condo. But the enterprise folks are digging in their heels on giving up their datacenters just yet. Are they coming along eventually? Certainly. But they've just barely begun the move to VMs. They're in no hurry to take on the sea change that is cloud-computing. How did you miss the square footage of big iron (mainframes) still churning away? If they haven't gotten rid of that yet what makes you think they'd dump it's replacement, the midrange machine?

One characterization here I think is telling, and which explains my title, is their catchphrase "NoMoreServers". This is absolutely visionary. If the Internet is the computer, then there's certainly no more need for us to have racks full of boxes at work, right? I'll go them one leap better... "NoMoreComputers"! Cloud-computing is certainly just as much for Joe Everyman as it is for the Fortune 500. I'd love to keep the power of ubiquitious Internet while getting rid of the heat and noise, support problems, and loss of surface space in my home that personal computers represent. So Rackspace the enterprise isn't quite ready to climb in your rocketship. But how about little ol' me?