Daniel Ho’s Musings

This service only works for looking up US businesses, but it works well. It would be my favourite Google app if it did Canadian businesses as well.

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Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone.

To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone.

Using this service, you can:

* search for a local business by name or category.
You can say “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” or just “pizza”.

* get connected to the business, free of charge.

* get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone.
Just say “text message”.

And it’s free. Google doesn’t charge you a thing for the call or for connecting you to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, based on your telephone service provider.

Note: Google Voice Local Search is still in its experimental stage. It may not be available at all times and may not work for all users. We’re fine-tuning the service to get better at recognizing your requests. It’s currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings.

Send a Message to Senate leaders and your MP
Join over 230,000 others who have signed on to Make Poverty History.

Make Poverty History supports Bill C-293 as part of its call for not just more, but better aid.

Bill C-293 would require Canadian foreign aid to contribute to poverty reduction; take into account the perspectives of the poor; and be consistent with Canada’s international human rights obligations.

The Senate will be recessing in June for the summer. We need to get Bill C-293 passed by the Senate before the summer break. Send an e-mail to the Senate leadership at http://makepovertyhistory.ca/e/home.php and let them know that you want them to act now to help make poverty history.

My previously completely stable Apple iMac 24″ is now crashing hard (kernel panic) all the time. This started after the latest update to OS X.

Anybody know why?!?!

Edit: Buddy immediately sent me this blog post about why you should always install updates using the Combo installer. I’m going to give it a try tonight.

The main reason is that: “Using the Combo installer essentially refreshes everything in your operating system that’s changed since the .0 release. So anything that’s gotten corrupted is suddenly brand spankin’ new!”

Edit 2: Still having kernal panics…so the Combo Installer trick didn’t work for me.

Lately, I have a few emails from people that know I use a Mac (what thinking person doesn’t these days?) asking what apps are on my computer.

Here’s a list of stuff that I use all the time.

Freebies/Part of OS X:
- iPhoto
- iTunes
- iCal
- Address Book
- Disk Inventory X
- Firefox
- Mail.app
- Skype (Free, but I have paid for various services and add-ons)
- iChat with Chax
- Adium
- Cyberduck FTP/SFTP client
- Twitterific
- Tea Timer (Useful for keeping track of the parking meter when I’m not wearing a digital watch with alarm)
- Audacity
- Azureus
- Flicker Exporter for iPhoto
- Flip4Mac WMV Player
- Google Earth
- Handbrake
- Mac The Ripper
- PocketMac Sync Manager
- TNEF’s Enough
- VNCThing
- SSH Tunnel Manager
- Gizmo Project
- Gleam
- Growl
- Spanning Sync
- Stuffit Expander
- VLC
- XCode
- CoRD

Paid for Applications:
- PGP
- Parallels
- BBEdit (Text Wrangler is almost as good…also, by Bare Bones and is FREE!)
- Adobe CS2 (esp Photoshop)
- FileMaker Pro
- Roxio Toast
- Super Duper
- VueScan
- Visual Hub

Apparently getting USTREAM.TV to work on a MacBook Pro is easy, but not so for a MacBook. Not sure why there is a difference, but this is what I had to do.

First off, I’m using Firefox on my Black MacBook. There are some users reporting that USTREAM is not happy with Safari. I haven’t validated this, so YMMV.

USTREAM uses Adobe Flash Player as the basis for connectivity. So to get it to work, you have to access some control panels that I didn’t even know existed.

The tips that seems to get things working are:

- Go to Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager – Website Privacy Settings Panel
and delete all the websites from the list.
- When you try to connect, another window will open that will say connecting. Right-click/Ctrl-Click to get to “Settings”. There, you’ll have to click on the webcam icon and set the camera type to “USB Video Class Video.”

That should do it. Let me know if it works for you. Have fun!