Very cool infinite-zooming mosaic

Found this photomosaic that you can zoom in forever on Boing Boing yesterday, very cool indeed!

Going offline

It has been very quiet here lately and will be even more during the next weeks. This blog will be on hiatus until I will be back online in July or August. In the meantime I will be busy with our move to Montreal and will only have access to the Internet from time to time.

Red Bull Air Race

On saturday I went to the Red Bull Air Race here in Barcelona. Very spectacular! An amazingly huge crowd of 1 Million people on the beaches! I'll post some more details later.

Finally old Europe is on the maps

The Official Google Blog just announced Google Maps in Europe. So far beta versions of Google Maps for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are online. For Barcelona (probably for other European cities as well, didn't check) it even has the metro stations. I have been missing this feature for my soon to be home of Montreal.

Eye-Fi - the revolution that digital cameras need

I have been thinking about this before and hope it will become reality soon:

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » More on Eye-Fi
...you'd love this. No buttons to push. Just turn your camera on when you're within your WiFi network at home (or possibly at WiFi hotspots that are open around the world) and everything happens — automatically. When he took my picture my picture appeared on his computer without him touching the camera further. Obviously there's a bit of setup, but that's easy. Anyone who can use a Web browser could setup the system.
...You don't need as much memory if you have an Eye-Fi. Why? Cause your camera's memory is just a cache. As soon as you're within a WiFi hotspot the camera could spit the photos to your favorite photo sharing site (BubbleShare, for instance, lets you upload and download full photo files, so you wouldn't need to store them on the local camera)....

As Scoble says, I want one... that is if they come out with a CF version!

Free Cone Day!... was yesterday

Thanks Metroblogging Los Angeles for having me made aware of Ben&Jerry's free cone day. Yesterday I got three scoops going from one B&J's to the next. Cherry Garcia, Oatmeal Cookie Chunk and Chunky Monkey, mmmmmm, they just make the best ice-cream!

How to switch to the new Yahoo! Mail beta

Even though I only occasionally use my spam-filled Yahoo! Mail account I must say I was a bit jealous when my wife (who has a Yahoo! France account) got the invitation to switch to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta recently. I had to get it too! Well, I am so happy with my Gmail that I more or less forgot about it, but today I found this little hack to get an invitation while surfing some blogs:

Get in on the Yahoo! Mail beta - Lifehacker
- Log in to Yahoo Mail
- click Options
- select Account information from the left panel
- go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
- select, for example, Yahoo UK
- click Finished
- go to Yahoo Mail
- you’ll see a page that says “It’s the New Yahoo! Mail Beta… and you’re invited.”
- click on “Try Beta Now”.

In my case I changed the preferences to Yahoo! Canada as I will be moving there soon anyway (see my project) and it worked. However this won't make me go back and use Yahoo as my primary e-mail. The new Yahoo! Mail Beta may be a bit better than the old but my first impression was: sloooooooooow! It doesn't look very good either, sort of like Outlook with ads! Since I have been using Gmail I got so used its thread view and to labels instead of folders that I cannot imagine working with something else.

Now there it is: Google Calendar is live!

A nice gift from the Google folks to start the day: Google Calendar is live as of this morning. I just started up the PC and tried to log on using the known CL2 login page and there it is Google Calendar, yes it's not CL2 as was speculated, this seems to have been an internal name only. First impression after a few minutes of use: blazing fast, no bugs! Probably this day will be dedicated to trying it out from A to Z. So is this good-bye 30Boxes and Kiko? Probably yes, though I have somewhat grown to like their own (still imperfect) calendar implementations they'll have a hard time to make their stand against Google.

UPDATE: The Gmail integration is still missing, I cannot see any "add event", "add to calendar" or other links to Google Calendar in my Gmail account, even in e-mails containing event-specific data.
UPDATE II: It seems they will roll out Gmail integration during the next days, some users already reported having it. Just a few minutes ago the official announcement came in:

It's about time

...we invite you to try Google Calendar -- a tool that simplifies keeping track of events, special occasions, and appointments -- whether they’re on your own agenda or on the calendars of contacts who opt to share their schedules with you...

New Version of Kiko Calendar

Right when I was about to forget about Kiko Calendar I received this announcement in my inbox yesterday:

We've spent the last few months with our heads down, and we've finally released the new Kiko. We're sporting a brand new, much cleaner tabbed interface and a whole host of new features:

• Appointment reminders via email, text messages, and AIM
• RSS feed for upcoming events
• Natural language appointment creation
• Import appointments and contacts via iCal and vCard
• Sharable URLs for your calendar

Check out the new site at http://kiko.com/. You can sign up with a new login or migrate your old account by signing in with this email.

Cheers,
The Kiko Team

Just by curiosity I signed back into my Kiko account to check it out and I must say the new version doesn't seem that bad. Overall the look and feel is better than before and reminds me a lot the screenshots of the upcoming Google CL2 calendar. Even a few CL2-like features for example drag-to-create are nicely implemented in Kiko and the whole thing is a bit more stable than before.
So will I switch back from 30Boxes to Kiko? I don't know yet, 30Boxes is very easy to use and has some nice features but Kiko is catching up and I haven't used both calendars enough to say that I couldn't live without them as I am still waiting for Google to get their thing going. Even if Google is a bit late to this race they will probably end up winning it because of full Gmail integration and their large user base. What the heck, they should just buy both Kiko and 30Boxes!

Listen to Dani California online!

I am really looking forward to the RHCP's new album "Stadium Arcadium" due out on May 9th. Since yesterday I have been listening their new single "Dani California" and I must say that Anthony Kiedis' singing becomes better with every new album and John Frusciante's guitar play is outstanding! You can now listen to Dani California online at the Chili Pepper's site.

Walk / Don't Walk

Walk / Don't Walk
Originally uploaded by oHoTos.

Saw this while walking around in Barcelona on saturday - pretty confusing!

Writely now part of Google

Well, when this day started I thought this was a nice rumour, I didn't expect this to happen that fast. Google announced on their official blog that they have just acquired Writely, my favorite online word processor:

Official Google Blog: Writely so
For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I'm happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google.
...
To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it's far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we're not accepting new registrations until we've moved Writely to Google's software architecture. If you're interested in giving us a try, we hope you'll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you'll be able to try out Writely.

Google, Writely In Talks?

A nice rumor to start the day. Hopefully this will turn out to be true, I would prefer to have more of the services I regularly use under my Google account and Writely is one of them:

Google, Writely In Talks?: So you all know that Google’s got designs for a G:Drive and doing an end run around Microsoft? Now what if you can simply store and save data on that drive, but that’s not clearly as much fun. What if you could write a document in a browser, much like you write on Microsoft Word, but then save it directly to the G:Drive? That would increase the utility of G:Drive tremendously. Maybe that explains why Google is rumored to be in talks with Writely, a browser-based document processing application, for a possible acqusition. Writely, is the first product of Upstartle, LLC. (More on them here.) Writely is one of the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 companies. The pending deal has been making the rounds in the Valley today. I picked up this very strong rumor from fairly reliable sources, when visiting the money corridor (aka Sand Hill Road) this morning. Now I am still waiting to hear from Google and Writely about the rumors, and will treat this chatter as just that, unless of course I hear otherwise from the two companies. Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice. Anyway will update the story later when I hear from the two respective companies.

Now is the Google calendar coming or not?

TechCrunch has some exclusive screenshots of Google Calendar . I really hope that I won't be disappointed and that "CL2" will be available soon (...April 1st???). Currently I am still using 30Boxes but I am missing the tight Gmail integration that Google will probably offer.

Theee Simpsooons... dü dü dü di dü...

Now this is really, really cool. The Simpsons intro as live action recreation, they must have put a lot of work into this, it's so true to the original! Found this through one of the better blogs out there WWdN

Speed limit

This experiment with the speed limit makes a good point, see for yourself:

What if Microsoft designed the iPod's packaging?

Yesterday I watched this cool video:

Schmap city guides

Schmap, apparently a new online city guide service just contacted me through Flickr because one of my CC-licensed photos was shortlisted for inclusion in one of their guides. I previewed their San Francisco guide after downloading their small viewer and it doesn't look bad but if Google would come up with something similar integrated into Google Earth it would beat them. Their service is going live by the end of March it seems.

Google Pages

Google Pages is another new Beta from Google. It's an ajax WYSIWYG-editor and you can host a whole site on Google's servers. I just tried it and it's very easy, here my first try at a Google page: oHoTos' stuff

3GSM Congress in Barcelona

Chocolate fountain
Originally uploaded by ohotos.

Yesterday I dropped by the 3GSM Congress for two hours, my employer kindly offered me a pass. If you're not interested at checking out the gazillions of new mobile phones it's actually quite boring. This chocolate fountain at the Oracle booth was quite a success it seems.