Driving Directions: Seattle, WA, USA to Paris, France

Birthday

Well, it's my birthday today. I'm turning 21.

My plan? Go to as many "free thing on your birthday" places as possible.

Google Homepage Themes!

Google recently launched a theme option for the google.com/ig personalized homepage.

I like it.

The theme I chose changes based on time of day. As you can see, it's approximately lunch time.

Search Engine usability study

I participated in a search engine usability study today.

Google Code Search was supposed to be the crappiest among the given search engines - the Raphael said he would probably need to assist me during the tasks since they were known to trip up previous participants.

During the trial I discovered the trick to making Google Code Search work. Type in "test" after your query. This brings up test suites related to your result, which means you can figure out how to use the resulting APIs by example.

"You are by far the fastest Googler I have ever seen."

My prize? $30 Amazon gift certificate. Yummy.

Jott

There's a new startup called Jott.

Basically, you call a number, they transcribe what you say and then send it to you in an email. Unfortunately, the messages you leave are transcribed by humans! (privacy, scale issues)

Here's what Jott's CEO has to say about it:

jotts are completely anonymized to transcribers. They do not know your account name or other information.

Thanks,
John
CEO, Jott.com

Perhaps they should just reroute calls through Vista's voice recognition. It's probably the first widely available voice recognition implementation that's up to the task.

Easier way to assign audio sources to different outputs

Update: Please use this tutorial instead. It's a bit lengthier, but it works with the current version of Vista. (10/3/07)


I've found an easier way to do the Volume Mixer trick in Windows Vista. Just open up the volume mixer and select the output you want to use from the device menu. Then launch the applications you want to assign to the currently viewed audio device. Repeat for each audio device you want to use.

Windows Vista Volume Mixer Trick

In this tutorial, we present a method for individually assigning audio sources to different audio outputs.

1. Right click the sound icon in the taskbar and select Playback Devices.



2. Make the destination audio output the default device.



3. Launch the audio sources you wish to assign to the output you just made default.



Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each audio output you want to use.

Open up the volume controls once you're finished tinkering, and you should end up with something like this:

Headphone-bound applications


3-dimensional sound perception is critical to the user experience in some applications.

Speaker-bound applications


Control which applications are heard through the speakers.

The trick: Each time you open an application, its sound will be routed to whatever output you have currently selected as the default. This pairing between source and output is "sticky." Changing the default output does not migrate any of the sources to the new default output.

Microsoft should make this easier. A 2D grid of audio inputs/outputs would be optimal, but perhaps the easiest thing to implement at this stage is a "move to" contextual menu item, which moves the selected audio source to a specified audio output.

An awesome PS3 game

New Google Video Layout

I just noticed Google Video had a redesign. It looks like they've taken a few cues from YouTube. The comments, the flagging, the related videos -- it's as if Google is going to take everything good about YouTube and put it into Google Video.

There should be a Google Video/Youtube mind meld. The socialness of YouTube + the full resolution AVI downloads and skip-to-anywhere player of Google Video = social video awesomeness.