Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

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FamousFood.us updated

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Just a quick note that I have recently updated the FamousFood.us databases to include the 2012 Michelin Guide, Best Thing I Ever Ate (Season 6), Diners Drive-Ins & Dives (upto season 13) and Throwdown with Bobby Flay (Season 9). This update has added over 300 new restaurants to the database.

So head on over to FamousFood.us and find the restaurants featured on the Michelin Guide and TV shows like Best Thing I Ever Ate, Food Wars, Man V Food, Throwdown with Bobby Flay and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Happy Eating :)

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Amazing audio quality of the Nokia N900

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

The fact that I have been using various Nokia phones and attending multiple Iron Maiden concerts (5 at last count) over the years led me to this amazing demonstration of the improving audio quality of Nokia cameraphones. While I have been a big fan of the N95 camera but I always complained about the audio quality when recording video in loud environments. This video that I recorded at the Iron Maiden show in Concord in 2008 shows how the N95 struggled with clipping and noise issues when the environment was too loud.

Now fast forward 2 years and I went to another Iron Maiden show in Concord a few weeks ago with an N900 and recorded the following video clip. In this video I am once again in the front row of the pit but am offset to the right and am in fact standing right in front of a 6 foot high speaker stack. Both video were copied off the phone and directly uploaded to Youtube with no editing of any sort.

As you can see the N900 video has much better audio quality and is actually good enough to understand the song lyrics despite the fact that I am actually standing in a noisier location. Additionally the video is in true 16:9 widescreen with fewer compression artifacts than the N95 video. It is also better at dealing with the low light levels and the background lights pointed at the screen.

I have to give kudos to Nokia for continuously improving the performance of their devices and cant wait to play with the N8 when it comes out in October.

P.S.: All the photos below were taken with my N900 at the same concert. You can also see two other videos I shot below

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Recreating your track day laps in GT5

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Polyphony Digital has announced a new feature in Gran Turismo 5 which will allow you to upload data from an automotive data logger and recreate your laps within GT5. The technology currently requires the use of the CANBUS data along with a Denso GPS controller and will initially be built into the Toyota FT-86G. As the owner of a Race Technology DL1, I can only hope that one day we might be able to use this technology with existing track day dataloggers.

In the meantime check out this video of a Lexus IS-F lapping the Fuji circuit with its virtual recreation side-by-side.

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Posted in cars, motorsport, technology, thoughts | No Comments »

How to disable the MacBook two-finger pinch-zoom in Firefox

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I recently switched to a new unibody Macbook Pro and while I love the keyboard and the battery life I have had major issues with the multitouch keypad. My usual method for using the trackpad on the old Macbook was to rest my thumb on the button while using my index finger to move the cursor. On the new buttonless Macbook the computer keeps interpreting that as a two-finger pinc zoom and as a result I keep resizing my brower text every 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately Apple in its infinite Jobs-ian wisdom has decided that no one will ever want to live without this feature which means that there is no official way to turn it off from within system preferences. So after a bunch of searching though various forums I’ve stumbled across this method to disable the two finger pinch zoom feature within Firefox. This will require changing the firefox config file to use at your own risk:

1) Open Firefox
2) Type in “about:config” in the address bar and hit enter
3) Hit the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to get into the actual config
4) Type “gesture” in the “filter” field. This should give you a list of all the supported gestural interactions
5) Double-click on “browser.gesture.pinch.in” and delete the value in the text box that pops up.
6) Repeat for “browser.gesture.pinch.out”
7) Close the tab and you no longer have to deal with inadvertant pinch-zooms in Firefox

This will only affect html pages within firefox. Other mac applications will still have the pinch-zoom feature as will PDF files you open within Firefox using the PDF plugin.

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Posted in technology, tutorial | 1 Comment »

The ultimate mobile search experience (a.k.a Foodfinder lives)

Monday, February 9th, 2009

The folks at Yahoo oneSearch just announced the new oneSearch Shortcut application with a new auto-locate feature that determines the users location using cell-tower positioning and wi-fi triangulation. This combines with the existing voice search and oneSearch clusters to create what is in my opinion the best mobile search experience in the business (especially on Nokia S60 devices). Read on for a quick description of the user experience:

oneSearch Shortcut
The Shortcut application starts off by showing you a small text entry field on the idle-screen of you mobile phone. The text field has a small note telling you to hold down the “Call” button and speak. I think I’ll give Slumdog Millionaire a try.

oneSearch Shortcut Voice Search
Once you have said the search term the app “thinks” for a couple of seconds before showing you the search term for confirmation. Just hit the “Search” button to start the search.

Auto-located oneSearch results
Which results in a search results page that automatically determines your current location (Sunnyvale, CA in my case) using cell-tower and wi-fi beacon positioning. Additionally since oneSearch knows that “Slumdog Millionaire” refers to a movie, it automatically displays the movie information along with the showtimes from the nearest theaters. You can even use the “Buy Tickets” link to buy your tickets so you wont have to wait in line when you get to the theater. Click through on the image above to see the full search results page which includes things like the trailer, official website, movie reviews, etc…

And of course movies aren’t the only thing you can search for this way, Shortcut helps you find any local content (restaurants, stores, etc…) based on your auto-locate location, as well as regular web content. And for those of you who prefer typing it also has search assist which allows you to auto-complete your search terms. In my opinion this integrated solution that allows users to find information (local and otherwise) by just saying what they want is the ultimate mobile search experience. Get it on your Nokia S60, Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone by visiting http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut.

P.S.: For those of you who remember my Foodfinder hack from YRB – yes that’s exactly what auto-locate does :-)

P.S.S.: I do work at Yahoo! but these are as usual my personal opinions and do not reflect on the views of Yahoo!

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Posted in mobile, review, thoughts, work | No Comments »

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