I know this is old news by now, but while browsing some of my older posts, I remembered this news I read a while back in the New-York Times: Google Adds Searching by Voice to iphone. In April 2007, I had posted about the fact that it looked like Google was stepping in the voice industry because they had come out with a new product called Goog411.
Now with the introduction of search by voice on the iphone, Google is literally, and figuratively, making people talk in the Speech industry. Don’t get too excited though, Google’s “new invention
” isn’t new at all. In fact, Nuance has been doing exactly this for two or three years already with a product called Nuance Voice Control. It’s an incredibly useful application that lets you make phone calls, search the web, dictate emails and view web pages on your mobile by using your voice instead of typing.
So, basically, the only one thing innovative about the speech capabilities of the iphone is that you can initiate the speech detection by simply tilting the iphone in a certain way. The same way the iphone will use the movement detection sensor, Google calls it the accelerometer, to change the image of your album cover when you tilt the phone horizontally. Anyways, as I said earlier, I’m interested to see where Google will take their speech recognition endeavors next. After all, the mobile industry is only growing (Estimated to 3.6 billion subscribers in 2008), and speech is the most natural input to a mobile phone.
I’ve spent the whole day cleaning up both my computers. I’ve been wanting to free-up space on my powerbook for the longest time. Mac is brilliant if you have enough space to support its needs. So I manage to free-up 7 Gigs, by mainly backing up old pictures and erasing some old programs I wasn’t using anymore… Anyways, this post is not really about macs and clean-ups, but about a new finding for wordpress addicts. I wanted to write about this cool new importer/exporter for people using Wordpress 2.0. I haven’t updated for a while (why would I, when I have everything that I need on this version?). Turns out that I needed this cool little gadget that comes pre-installed on the new version: XML Exporter/Importer for wordpress. Pretty neat.
Yes, the site is undergoing some changes and will soon (very soon) be moved to my very own domain (www.bonuel.ca). Right now, I have our wedding site there, and very soon I will have my blog at www.bonuel.ca/blog. Anyways, that’s the future. If you haven’t visited our flickr account lately, I suggest you do so. There were many updates there and you’ll discover that we were just in Jamaica for our fabulous friends’ wedding! What a blast! Now off to do more computer-geek things. Cheers
Published on
September 28, 2006 in
Technology.
Tags: apple, clean, defrag, leopard, mac, os, powerbook, Software, space, Technology.
An endless battle between a powerbook and its user: The Struggle for Space. Unless you have some cash laying around for a bigger and better hard drive, it seems like no matter how hard you try to keep things tidy around a laptop, space keeps running out eventually.
At least, this is what happened to me a couple of months ago, and again now today. In this article, I proposed a 10-steps process for cleaning up your Mac OS X (Keep in mind I am still running the 10.3.9 at the moment on this powerbook). In order to effectively clean your hard drive, you need a good picture of what’s in it, to see how it’s organized and get a strategy for cleaning it. But first things first, let’s take note of how much space you have on the computer.
Determining Available Space on Your Hard Drive
To check how much free space is available on your startup disk, do the following:
- In your Finder, select your Hard Drive icon (mine is called ‘Gimli’ in memory of Frodo’s small but bulky helpful friend, but it all depends on your personal tastes!). It could potentially be still called Macintosh HD ;
- Press Apple-I (Cmd-I) and get the info from this window: Capacity, Available, and space used ;
Continue reading ‘Freeing Up Space on Mac OS X’
