Big Networks Block Web Shows From Google TV

I just love it. So predictable.

Robot Cars

Engineers at Google have developed and tested in actual traffic a car that drives itself. Eventually it seems like we pebbly will be able to build cars that can drive themselves more safely than we can. But surely they’ll still crash sometimes, right? How will we deal with that? Psychologically I’d think it would be totally different to blame an AI for a loved one’s death than another human.

Sending a Ping to PubSubHubbub from MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to ping Google’s PubSubHubbub hub when I post a new entry. If Multiblog doesn’t get triggered, the short URL I’m declaring in my page’s head won’t work because the .htaccess file at my link shortener hasn’t been rebuilt. If MT-PubSubHubbub doesn’t fire, the hub won’t get notified of a new post. I can work around the first problem using Bob the Rebuilder, and I’ve written up a sloppy AppleScript to deal with pinging the hub from MarsEdit.

I am absolutely certain that there’s a better way to do this, but here’s what I’ve got going for now. It works in testing using FriendFeed, which updates within seconds of a post that pings Google’s hub¹. Here’s the script:

tell application "Safari" activate do JavaScript "window.open('http://david. ely.fm/davextreme/')" in document 1 end tell  delay 2  tell application "System Events" tell process "Safari" tell menu bar 1 tell menu bar item "Bookmarks" tell menu "Bookmarks" tell menu item "Bookmarklets" tell menu "Bookmarklets" click menu item "Publish to Hub" end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell  delay 2  tell application "Safari" to close the front window 

I placed the script in my MarsEdit scripts folder (found easily by going to MarsEdit’s Scripts menu and selecting “Open Scripts Folder”).

The script requires that you have:

1. A “Bookmarklets” folder in your main Bookmarks menu in Safari; and
2. Google’s “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet in that folder, which bookmarklet can be found on Google’s site near the bottom of the page².

From there, I post an entry using MarsEdit, then select my “Ping Hub” script from the Scripts menu. It opens my webpage, waits two seconds for it to load, invokes the “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet, then closes the window.

My hope is that someone develops a plugin for MarsEdit that does this more elegantly, but maybe this will be helpful to people in the meantime. (Or someone can tell me why those plugins don’t activate when my xmlrpc updates go through.)

1. The only use I have for FriendFeed being testing this push stuff. ↩
2. Yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace, so I use “which” in new ways and employ footnotes too often³. Hopefully it’ll wear off soon. ↩
3. Also I go out of my way to point out that I’ve been reading DFW (and call him DFW). ↩

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Hmm. Google’s launching a campaign called “Going Google” designed to get companies to switch to Google Apps from (though unstated) Microsoft stuff. I do think that Gmail provides about the best email experience there is, be it desktop- or web-based, I don’t think Google Docs are at all ready for real use as a primary authoring tool, bloated and annoying as Word is.

Sign up for Google Wave updates

Sign up for Google Wave updates

Going into “beta” September 30.

Official Gmail Blog: Import your mail and contacts from other accounts

Official Gmail Blog: Import your mail and contacts from other accounts

It’s hard to believe one could have still been stuck with mail in different accounts.

Google iPhone Sync

I’ve played around with Google’s new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I’ve found three problems so far, two of which I’ve solved.

1. Junk contacts from Gmail. When I synced I had a lot of people in my list I didn’t want. I did some pruning and this is fine now, but even when you tell it not so Gmail likes to add contacts on its own, so we’ll see how that plays out long term.
2. When you enable over-the-air syncing on your phone, iTunes no longer syncs back to your computer’s iCal and Address Book. For iCal, you can use their CalDav support to get iCal to sync up on its own. My calendar needs are pretty simple so this works fine for me, but BusySync is I’m told a good utility for improving this.
3. What I can’t figure out how to do is keep Address Book on my Mac updated. iTunes doesn’t pull that data down from the phone anymore, so I’ll be left having to remember when I type a new address or phone number in my phone to also do it on my computer.

So basically I’m left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people’s email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.

Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users - Ars Technica

Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users - Ars Technica

Seems like it only syncs calendars and contacts now, not push mail. I haven’t tested it out yet.

Google Calendar CalDAV support

Google Calendar CalDAV support

Need to try this when I get home. I’d love to be able to sync my home calendar with Google’s.

iGoogle theme by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon

iGoogle theme by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon

Official Google Mac Blog: Mac OS X 10.5.3: sync Google Contacts

Official Google Mac Blog: Mac OS X 10.5.3: sync Google Contacts

No idea if this works witih Google Apps or not.

Official Google Reader Blog: "We found it!"

Official Google Reader Blog: “We found it!”

Google Adds IMAP Access to Gmail

After lagging behind Yahoo!, Google has added IMAP support to Gmail. This means that if you want to read your mail using a client like Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail, or MobileMail on the iPhone, any messages that you read on the client will be marked as read on Gmail’s web interface. It was annoying previously that whenever I opened up my email on my iPhone, all the mail that I’d already read during the day would pop up as new. Here’s the announcement from Google, and here’s a list of instructions on how to set it up. The iPhone gets its own page, and a video showing you how to set it up. There’s also a page explaining how they’ve translated Gmail’s Labels to IMAP folders. I don’t use labels too much—my mail needs are pretty simple—but this is a big deal because Gmail lets you apply multiple labels to the same message, while most mail systems tend to only allow a message be in one folder.

You can check to see if your account has had IMAP access turned on yet by going to Settings → Forwarding and POP. If it has a section for IMAP access, you’re set. If not, you’ll have to wait until Gmail upgrades your account. It doesn’t seem that Google Apps accounts have been upgraded. Mine hasn’t at least.

Update

Seems Google Apps accounts are being upgraded, too, so I’ll just have to wait until mine gets switched on. Also, you can reportedly use this to upload old mail to Gmail, if you have any stuff sitting around from other accounts.

Update 2

Here’s the post on the Gmail blog.

Update 3

My account’s active now. Here are some tips on how to set up your Drafts, Sent, and Trash folders to sync back to Gmail from Mail and MobileMail.

Official Google Blog: An update on Google Video feedback

Official Google Blog: An update on Google Video feedback

Google offers some more reasonable options for people who had bought videos from them.

Boing Boing: Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own"

Boing Boing: Google Video robs customers of the videos they “own”

A case in which the doomsaying about DRM was totally right.

Google News Blog: Perspectives about the news from people in the news

Google News Blog: Perspectives about the news from people in the news

Intriguing idea. It occurs to me that Google could use OpenID to make sure the people are who they say they are.

Awesome new Google Maps feature: Draggable Routes (kwc blog)

Awesome new Google Maps feature: Draggable Routes (kwc blog)

This is nice. I also like the feature they added a few months ago to make custom, annotated maps. Great for giving people directions if your place is hard to find based on the default directions.

Official Google Reader Blog: Feed Your Television

Official Google Reader Blog: Feed Your Television

Official post about the Wii version of Google Reader.

Google Launches Google Reader for the Wii

Google launches Google Reader for the Wii

Has specific commands for the Wii Remote.

Google Personalized Homepage becomes "iGoogle"

Google Personalized Homepage becomes “iGoogle”

This makes me not want to use the service. It looks like a lame attempt at a “what if Apple and Google merged?” Photoshop contest.