Archives for November 2008

Reindeer Car Antlers are a Great Holiday Present

Last year I got these reindeer car antlers for my wife. This year she let me have them for my car. They look like this:

Reindeer car antlers

(Note: this is the picture from the catalog, not one of our cars.)

Tons of people stop, stare, and then break out in a smile or start pointing out my car to friends as I drive by with my sleek reindeer antlers and big red nose. The antlers slide onto your windows, which then shut securely. That means you don’t need to worry about antler-theft in a parking lot or losing an antler as you scoot down the highway at 65 miles an hour. You may need to pay attention if you roll down your window at a McDonald’s drivethrough though.

I ordered mine from What on Earth and they’ve worked great. Lots of fun and highly recommended.

9 tips for the Google Mobile App for iPhone

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone.

  1. To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google Mobile App installed, you might want to uninstall the older version before installing the newer version.
  2. Voice recognition is turned off by default for non-U.S. users. To enable voice recognition, click on the “Settings” tab at the bottom of the screen and slide “Voice Search” to ON.
  3. If you hold the iPhone up to your ear and don’t hear the “baBUM” sound to start talking, swing the iPhone down and back up to your ear. Sometimes a little wrist flick helps to tell the iPhone you want to search.
  4. You can search things besides Google’s main web index. Do a regular query such as [daffodil pictures]:

    Daffodil pictures

    then press on the magnifying glass near the top left corner to bring up other options to search. By default you’re searching iPhone and Web, but you can also search Maps, Images, News, Shopping, or Wikipedia:

    Daffodil pictures

    Press an option like Images and the application will immediately redo the query:

    Daffodil pictures
  5. If you want to go straight to the onscreen keyboard, you can tap the “Search” tab at the bottom of the screen twice.
  6. Searching with the keyboard can be very handy. As you type, the application will suggest contacts, websites, previous searches, and related query suggestions:

    Outback Steakhouse

    and do you see those query suggestions in the middle of the screen? You can slide/flick them to get more suggestions:

    Outback Steakhouse
  7. The “Apps” tab at the bottom of the screen is a one-stop shop to get to all your Google services easily, including Google Apps versions of services:

    Apps tab
  8. You can use Google Mobile App with multiple Google Apps accounts. In the Settings tab, click on Domain. Then you can add multiple domains, separated by commas.
  9. Google has posted HTML documentation for Google Mobile App and also provides a Google Mobile Help discussion group.

Bonus tip #1: If the voice recognition is close, you can press on the green query in the search box to see other possible queries. For example, if you said [background gradients in css] and got this search query:

Refining query

Notice that the query was recognized as “gradient” instead of “gradients” with an ‘s’. So I pressed the green query and saw other possible queries:

Refining query

My desired query was the second choice. 🙂

Bonus tip #2: If you want to understand what your cat is trying to say to you, start the voice recognition and just hold it up to their mouth as they meow. Then Google will try to convert the meow into regular English text. Thanks to Sean Harding for this tip.

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