Google, like umpteen other companies, would like your first webpage of the day to be them Well, I'm hooked. Their offer is brilliant. If you log on to a gmail account, google offers a completely customizable page, that can organized via drag-n-drop in three columns. News Cartoons RSS feeds (Ya hear, PC ?) Weather Stocks Email .. .. And another 10 pages or so of a variety of widgets, that users of OS X Tiger, or Linux will feel familiar with. This is not new to google, but if it is to you, highly recommended. Oh, and so far no ads. Although I have to say that Google ads have never bothered me, something unique in my experience trawling the web. My page: C1: Local Weather, Quote of the Day, Comic C2: Font of the Day, BBC news, Google News C3: Wired, Stocks, Word of the day, hybrid site RSS
Yeah, writing this post, I felt like a hawker ! No stock. But a Google fan in general, and really quite tickled with this thing. My alltime favorite Google'isms are Maps and the omnipotent searchbar for their wow factor, and Google News to feed my addiction for current events.
google start is cool, ive had it since the day it was started. c1 gmail, people, quote of day, word of day c2 cnet, techdirt, slashdot, wired news c3 reuters oddly enough (highly recommended for that slightly off-centered news story) BBC, Forbes, (works only occasionally... need to change this) and "how to of the day" EDIT from oddly enough Boy sticks gum on valuable painting DETROIT (Reuters) - Painter Helen Frankenthaler's landmark abstract work "The Bay" just got a little more abstract -- to the dismay of Detroit museum officials. A 12-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school group on Friday stuck a wad of chewing gum on the painting, which is worth an estimated $1.5 million, the Detroit Free Press said. The barely chewed Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice gum left a residue stain about the size of a quarter in the lower left-hand corner of the painting, the newspaper said. The boy was suspended from Holly Academy, a Detroit-area charter school he attends, the newspaper reported. Neither museum nor school officials could be immediately reached for comment. The 1963 painting, which remains on display, is considered one of the most important modern works in the Detroit museum's collection, the newspaper said. Museum curators expect to be able to remove the gum residue with a solvent once they have researched the chemicals contained in the gum, assistant contemporary art curator Becky Hart said. "In the scheme of things, this is upsetting, and it will make us review our policies. But we're confident that the painting will be OK," Hart told the Free Press. oh well boys will be boys
ok... well from "how to of the day" how to read UPC barcodes Most barcodes in the US are 12-digit UPC barcodes, with ten digits at the bottom of the code and one small number to each side. Impress your friends by asking them to select a random item from the kitchen with a removable label and cut the numbers off of the UPC barcode; you can then proceed to read the numbers encoded in the lines. Steps 1. Note that barcodes are made up of both black and white lines. The white spaces in between the black lines are part of the code. 2. Understand that there are four different thicknesses to the lines. Henceforth, the skinniest line will be referred to as "1," the medium-sized line as "2," the next largest line as "3." and the thickest is "4." 3. Each UPC barcode begins and ends with 111 (thin black, thin white, thin black). In the very middle of the barcode, you will notice two thin black lines sticking down between the numbers. The thin white between them, as well as the thin whites to either side, make up a 11111. Each UPC barcode has 11111 in the middle. Image:UPC_EANUCC 12_barcode.png 4. Recognize that each digit, including the small numbers that begin and end the barcode, has its own unique four-line set. 0 = 3211, 1 = 2221, 2 = 2122, 3 = 1411, 4 = 1132, 5 = 1231, 6 = 1114, 7 = 1312, 8 = 1213, 9 = 3112. (Note that the sum of bar widths numbers is 7 for all codes because each code is 7 units wide.) 5. So, the barcode above whose first two digits are 03 would start out "11132111411". Broken down this is "111-3211-1411" where 111 marks the beginning of the bar code and 3211 marks the digit 0 . Tips * Barcodes from soda cans, books, video store rentals, and all the rest which are fewer than 12 digits only use the white/black/white/black scheme. * Memorizing the thickness of each line size takes some time (as does memorizing each digits line sequence), but it becomes easier with practice. * Notice that the line colors are reversed after the center-line: The lines of the digits to the left are white/black/white/black whilst to the right they are black/white/black/white. This provides some error checking and allows the reader to know the direction in which it is scanning a code. So, actually, each digit has two codes. * Recognize that each digit is made up of seven equally spaced lines. So you can see from the image above that the digit 4 is made up of the 7 black and white lines in the order of 1011100 where 1 is black and 0 is white. These seven small lines become 1132 in the simplified thick or thin line system. * The first code is the manufacturer of the product. Many times the "Brand-X" is made by the same manufacturer (e.g., Prestone antifreeze and the Advanced Autoparts generic, 3M "Post-its" and the generic sold at OfficeMax). While there's no guarantee the quality is the same, it's probably just the same item with different coloration in a different package. * When the numbers that the barcode represents are printed below the bars, the first and last digits are often printed outside of the bars. While the first number is part of the company number, the last number is a check digit (known as a Mod 10 check digit). This number is calculated based on the other digits in the number. Warnings * You will not do well if you have poor eyesight. * Outside the US & Canada, the similar 13-digit EAN barcode system is more prevalent. The EAN contains an additional digit used as part of a country code.
ok on that last post without looking at the pix, will be hard to understand sooo... http://wiki.ehow.com/Read-12-Digit-UPC-Barcodes
Riddle me this: what do Bar Codes and your DNA have in common ? And if you know the fancy word, an extra point
You mean like this one? http://priuschat.com/rss.php And here's one for HybridScoop: http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http:...scoop.com/feed/
I'm hooked on Google Desktop. Especially the Sidebar. I have the analog clock right at top with the calendar right under it. Then the weather, System Monitor and the bottom half of the sidebar is news. I used to do mail, but cleaning it got to be more of a hassle than it was worth. And I can't tell you the number of times I've used the Desktop search function. Someone asked about an email from three months ago that I had filed somewhere. I typed a few search words and there it was. *poof* Awesome!
Not to say that Google Start Page isn't, um, well, nifty . . . but, I find it a little too confining for my wants/needs/taste . . . kind of AOLish. :mellow: Instead, I opened the ten web pages I visit most often in ten separate Firefox tabs. Those ten tabs are saved on my bookmark tool bar in one folder. I can open any one, or all ten at once with just one click. I use to have all ten open as my home page, but soon realized that I did not necessarily want all ten opened every time I started Firefox. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmark_or_save_multiple_tabs Ooh, and my homepage? http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/ (I am a biological Seismometer. I feel earthquakes that most people are clueless about. Often I can tell the direction and whether it is a distant intense quake or milder and closer. This site helps me prove to myself (and my wife) that I am not unbalanced.) :blink:
