Category: Technology

Finally. Midleton, Co Cork has made onto Google Earth in hi res as part of the December update. The town is joined by some others in east Cork, including Cobh and Carrigtwohill, and the whole of Cork Harbour. Satellite pics of Ireland have never been this good.

Other additions include bits of Kerry and Clare, Mayo and Galway, Lough Rea, bits of Roscommon and Longford, a big portion of Laois, Westmeath and Kilkenny, the Arann Islands, large parts of the Burren, Donegal and as far as I can tell some of Wexford too.

Antartica has also been included as part of Landsat imagery.

The images don’t appear to be on Google Maps yet, but no doubt they will be soon.

Is your house on Google now? Mine is… Hmm.

More additions listed over the Google Earth blog.

I received my invite to Hulu over the weekend. Unfortunately for me, the service is still US only, meaning I can’t watch any of the videos. In the past I have used US proxies to watch ABC content, but I am having trouble finding a good proxy this time round. Can anyone suggest a service?

I do have access to all the shows/episodes that are currently available in the Beta though – there is lots there to watch, from full episodes of The Simpsons to Season Two of Heroes, and it is a rather nice interface too.

It is a while before it will be released but I thought I would give Firefox 3 a whirl.

For some reason pages seem to be loading a lot faster, the text is more readable, both on webpages and the interface itself. But, all of my extensions are broken – I expect they will work once it is officially released. There is also a new ‘places’ tab on the bookmarks toolbar folder, allowing ‘starring’ of pages etc.

Overall it seems solid enough, including a new facility to specify which programs Firefox uses to open what sort of files.

I will test it on the Mac tonight and see if it works as well.

Please be aware it is a Beta 1, so it may break stuff.

Update: Zdnet give their first thoughts. They get the same impression, Firefox 3 is fast…

The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless

Eoin links to an article in the New York Times about the legality of locking phones. When oh when will the rules be softened here, as in France?

Do I want one? Um. Yes.

So the iPhone launched today in the UK, and my logs show someone in Dublin visited on O2 using an iPhone. Who was that?

Digifone Online
Location
Continent : Europe
Country : Ireland (Facts)
State/Region : Dublin
City : Dublin
Lat/Long : 53.3331, -6.2489 (Map)
Language English
en
Operating System Macintosh MacOSX
Browser Safari 1.3
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3
Javascript version 1.5
Monitor
Resolution : 320 x 396
Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit Nov 9 2007 9:35:23 pm
Last Page View Nov 9 2007 9:35:23 pm
Visit Length 0 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL http://m.newsgator.com/iPhone.aspx

Suffice to say I can’t wait for these to come out. Samsung have roadmapped when they believe OLED models will come on the market. Laptops by 2009.

Samsung’s display operation, Samsung SDI, has a roadmap that calls for 14-15.4in, 1280 x 800 (WXGA) OLEDs for laptops and TVs in the 2009 timeframe, along with 21-23in, 1600 x 1200 (UXGA) panels for TVs.

SDI’s roadmap, posted by Nikkei’s Tech-on website, makes a distinction between the 21-23in screens and larger, 40-42in panels due the following year, in 2010. The latter are described as “full HD”, presumably becuase they’re actually widescreen panels – the UXGA’s have an aspect ratio of 4:3.

SDI began mass-production of the Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED) panels to be used in TVs and PCs this past September. That said, it’s currently churning out nothing larger than a 2in panel for phones and other handheld devices.

Recycling solar panels:

This new process is revolutionary won IBM the “2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award” from The National Pollution Prevention Program. IBM says that worldwide about 250,000 silicon wafers are started each day and that up to 3.3 percent of these wafers end up being discarded amounting to about three million discarded wafers each year.

In addition to merely saving the material and time used in the manufacturing of the reclaimed silicon wafers, IBM says that it sees an overall 90 percent energy savings because repurposing the scrap means IBM doesn’t have to manufacture as many new wafers to meet demands of its production process.

Will demand for Hulu invites rival those of Gmail in the early days and more recently Joost? We will have to wait and see.

Update: I have received my invite to Hulu, and am now a member. Unfortunately I don’t live in the United States so cannot view the videos. However, I may try using proxies to view the videos.

I like Google’s Gmail Privacy Policy.

Ok ok, it’s here. But fix the link Mr Google.