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Google Voice Setup

November 7th, 2009

I got a Google Voice invitation. :-)  

A few days ago I submitted three email addresses for invitations.  I got two invitations last night, and interesting the one that didn’t get the invite was my gmail account.  Everything works the same anyway. Here’s a screenshot walkthrough of the setup experience.

After I clicked the invitation link in my email and signed in with my gmail account.  I was presented with this screen.
Google Voice Setup 1

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Google it on Bing on Facebook

September 16th, 2009

Interesting, Facebook uses Bing for web search results when it can’t find anything on itself.  *shrug*

bing on facebook

Windows Live Street View?

February 26th, 2009

Oh, Microsoft.  Implementing a Street View feature for Windows Live Maps, are we?  One of my friends snapped this picture on Elkhorn Ave in Norfolk, Virginia.
live-local

(Read on …)

Surf the Web Gangsta-style with Internet Explorer 7

February 13th, 2008

I have a 24" monitor hooked up to my computer, and sometimes I like to make a webpage take up the whole screen so that I can lean back and read in comfortably.  For this I use Internet Explorer 7’s zooming feature.  This isn’t like previous versions where it just changed the size of the text.  In IE 7, zooming will actually make the whole page bigger.

As an example I will use a comic from xkcd.  Here’s what it looks like normally:
xkcd, zoomed normally

That’s fine, but the comic itself doesn’t even take up a fourth of the screen.  There are two ways I can make the page bigger.

The first is to go to the zoom button in the bottom right corner of the window.  Clicking on the button rotates between 100%, 125%, and 150%.  Clicking the down-arrow next to the button gives more options. (FYI, that "e" icon next to it is IE7Pro.)
zoom options

My preferred method is to hold control and then use the scroll-wheel on the mouse to zoom.  Scrolling up (moving the tip of your finger away from you) zooms in, and the opposite zooms out.  (Clicking on the zoom button after using this method brings the webpage back to normal size.)
ctrl scroll

Here’s that same page, zoomed in so the comic fills the window:
xkcd zoomed at 170%

Using the ctrl+scroll method, IE supports scaling a page up to 10,000%  Here’s Google.com scaled to that degree:
google.com zoomed at 10,000%

IE 7’s zooming features was especially helpful before YouTube had a full-screen option, but it’s still helpful for emended flash videos on other websites that don’t have a full-screen option.

Of course, this feature is also handy if you have poor vision, but I like it too, because maxin is easier leaning back in my chair.