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Tag: Google (page 6 of 6)

Links for March 22

  • Exposure: Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on the photographs from Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker. Morris has a new documentary on Abu Ghraib coming out on April 25 called Standard Operating Procedure. It’s tough to believe that Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush will never go to jail after reading this article.
  • Marginal Revolution: Why have burglaries declined? Globalization has made manufactured goods so cheap that the incentive to steal them has been reduced.
  • Compiler: New Wiki-Style Features Allow Anyone to Edit Google Maps. It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment works out.
  • Edmunds.com: We Test the Tips. Edmunds tested a bunch of “better gas mileage” tips to determine which ones will actually improve your car’s fuel economy. Driving less aggressively seems to offer the biggest bang for the buck.
  • Andrew Brown: The nerd is the enemy of civilisation. ELIZA creator on RMS and his friends at MIT in the 70s.
  • furbo.org: Vote for virtualization. Not allowing virtualization puts OS X behind the times.

Voice mail for the homeless

Google is using its GrandCentral service to offer free voice mail to San Francisco’s homeless population. Signing up for the service will give them a local telephone number that they can forward to any number they choose (if one is available) and that is associated with a voice mail box that they can check from any phone line. This service is already freely available to anyone who can sign up online, but it’s great to see Google specifically going out and offering it to the homeless. They stand to benefit more from the service than people who already have phone lines, and there’s probably very little chance they would even find out about it otherwise.

iPhone WebClip icons

A couple of notes for iPhone users. The first is that Web pages you add to your home screen do not automatically update their icons when the creator of a site changes them. I noticed that Google Reader had a new favicon this morning, and guessed that they’d added an iPhone WebClip icon as well. I opened Google Reader to see if the WebClip icon changed automatically — it did not. However, when I deleted the WebClip bookmark and added it again, Google Reader did in fact have a custom icon.

The second note is that Google Reader has a new WebClip icon, so go get it. Google Mail and Google Calendar still don’t have their own icons.

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