Rooster Teeth have just released the first episode of the fourth season of Red Vs Blue: Familiar Surroundings.
Griff: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Sarge: Go up there and get him Simmons
Donut: If he keeps screaming like that, he’s gonna pass out and fall off the cliff
Sarge: Cancel that order Simmons!
Griff: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Sarge: Donut, get me a sniper rifle.
Donut: Yet sir!
Told you that they’d let you do this: Integrating Google Talk with Google Desktop 2. [via FG]
The only problem I’ve found is that if I close Google Talk, it removes the panel from the sidebar, which is ok, but when I re-open it, the panel stays closed & I have to add it in manually.
UPDATE: Google Talk has now gone live. It includes a new messaging client which supports voice as well as IM chat. The voice is currently using the XMPP protocol, but they say it will support the open SIP protocol later. Also, according to the comparison page, voice calls only work when you’re using the Google Talk client, not with any other 3rd party client. This is a pity, but hopefully this will change if and when they move to the SIP protocol.
Google’s new chat tool, Google Talk is rumoured to be announced tomorrow (or tonight AUS time), but it seems that the server is live now. I’ve connected with my gmail address, (see instructions for Trillian or Gaim here) and it works. I’ve had a few stability problems, when I first connected it kept dropping me off (Jeremy at Forever Geek & Om Malik have noticed the same thing), but it’s been stable for about an hour now, so I think it’s settled down now.
Niall Kennedy and Matt Mullenweg have got it working and had a chat across the Google server.
If this all pans out, then this will be a huge boost to Jabber, as that is what the service is running. It’s good of Google to use an open protocol like Jabber rather than just coming up with their own (ala MSN, Yahoo, AIM, etc.). It means you can use pretty much whatever client you like (Trillian, Gaim, whatever) and it’s platform independent too. Also, they’ll also be able to build a plugin for their newly released Desktop Sidebar. And if they don’t want to write one, I predict it will take all of a day for someone out there to do it for them.
We interrupt your programme today with this important announcement:
That is all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Google has released it’s new desktop search tool. The sidebar is, for my 2 cents, a great idea. The ‘learning’ news section has already (after 4 hours) started to only return my type of news items. There’s an feed reader and email alert panel too, the email alert panel will show new email from both your local mail programs and Gmail (if you provide it with your login details). Nice.
Interestingly enough, Google seems to have taken a different direction again with the RSS naming argument, calling the feed reader panel ‘Web Clips’. I’m probably only going to stick my most popular feeds into this anyway, as it’s a bit too confusing to navigate once you get past a dozen or so items. FeedDemon still wins on this one.
Simon points out that Google Earth now has Sydney in high-res, including the harbour and North Sydney. So now I really can say I can see my work from here!
.It also means you can see the Sydney Opera House & the Harbour Bridge. Google Maps still has the low-res images for sydney.
Full list of updates on the Google forums.
New Aeon Flux movie trailer is up at Apple. [via Boo]
This is a pre-emptive congratulations to the creators & maintainers of WordPress. I’m about to leave the office, and while I’m on the train the WordPress Download Counter is going to tick over 500,000. And this is only downloads since the latest version (1.5) was released on February 17 this year.
Well done Matt & Co., it’s a great piece of work!
Erik Benson has some ideas for improving the taxi service
Better taxi technology
RSS feeds for everywhere a taxi has picked you up and dropped you off. In-taxi "rate your ride" display. Statistics on your driver’s rating. Better credit card integration. Perhaps there should be a button for "need to get there fast", "want to take the scenic route", and "would prefer not to have conversation".
Classic!
He’s right, I think an overhaul of the taxi service is well over-due. If clean, reliable taxis with knowledgeable drivers are possible in an LSD-inspired rabbit warren (aka London, also, the black cabs not the mini-cabs), why not anywhere else?
The taxi service needs some tech updating too. Yellow Cabs have an online booking service, where you can register your details. This I suppose would be useful to a regular user, but if I just want to get from the office to tonight’s designated watering-hole, why should I have to go to all the trouble of creating a username & password. Taxis Combined have a better system – 2 steps: where I am & where I want to be.
Also, taxis use some serious logistical technology to co-ordinate the location of all the taxis around the city, why couldn’t some of that info be aggregated into one place. As far as I know, all the major cab companies use GPS systems to locate their cabs around the city. Why not put that info onto the net somewhere? It wouldn’t need to be real-time or anything, maybe refreshing every 5-10 minutes.
Possibly integrate it into Google Maps once they finally get on with getting Australian street info into it. This would allow you to see where the nearest cab is and how long it’s likely to take to get to you. The system could automatically SMS you when the cab is just around the corner, reducing the amount of time cabbies need to waste waiting for people to get out of the building (and not forcing people to wait somewhere where they can see the street).
This sort of thing would be more useful if it was controlled by some separate agency, like the The NSW Taxi Council, rather than individual comapanies having separate ones, but that may not be a commercial possibility (getting compeditors to work together & all that). Having a central location where a customer can find out where the nearest taxi is and how long it will take to get one would, I think, make it much more likely that people would use them.
Tagged by Daniel
list ten songs that you are currently digging… it doesn’t matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they’re no good but they must be songs you’re really enjoying right now. post these instructions, the artists, and the ten songs in your blog. Then tag five other people to see what they’re listening to.
(In no particular order)