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Popular Science Archives Now Available Online

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If you are a gadget freak, chances are you’re reading Popular Science. In fact, it might be your most favorite technology magazine. Did you know that Popular Science has been around for 137 years already?

Now, here’s the good news, Pop Sci the web wing of Popular Science has already scanned the entire issues of the magazine and has put up the archives available on the internet. By archives, I mean digital archives.  The project was in close collaboration of  PopSci with Google Books.

The Popular Science Archives is freely available on this site.  The moment the home page loads on your web browser, you’d immediately notice a simple search box.  That search box is your only way of getting into specific issues of the magazine.  A cool feature of this archive is the fact that it even has the original advertisements that appeared on when the magazine issue was released.

The online archives does not allow you to go into specific issues of the magazine except for the instance when you are brought to specific issues via the search function.  It would have been better if a browse option is available though especially if you have  not particular topic in mind and you just want to look back at what’s hip and cool in technology of bygone years.

Google Turns Email Notifications for Wave

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I know for a fact that Google Buzz and Google Wave are two different services. But we can’t discount the fact that their functions are almost similar.  So let me ask you this question, since Google Buzz was released, are you still using Google Wave? If yes, then you’d be glad to know that Google has just activated email notification for Google Wave.

Google Wave’s notification works just like all the other Google notification systems – Buzz, Email Alerts for specific search results and others. It sends you email alerts whenever a wave that you are participating in gets an update or whenever a new Wave has been created by your Google Wave contacts. The notification contains a short summary of text and links that will lead you straight to the updated waves. Once you’ve checked out a wave, Google will stop sending the notifications related to that wave.

The feature also lets you select the frequency of email updates that will be sent to you. It could be as often as “immediately,” and you can select which of your friends you will like to receive notifications from, whenever they create a new wave or update an existing one.

Now, should you decide to use this feature, expect to encounter the following known issues so far, which Google is currently resolving. But don’t let this stop you from trying out the new Google Wave notification feature.

  • Sometimes the email snippet does not show all participants on the wave
  • Under certain conditions you may get an update about a wave even if you were the last person to change it
  • To change the notifications setting you have to go back to the menu where you turned it on. (The link at the bottom of the notification emails is not working yet.)

Vlingo iPhone App Adds Voice Command for SMS and Email Messaging

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While voice search and voice-to-text have  been default features  of Google’s Nexus One, Vlingo which pioneered voice control app for the BlackBerry last year believes that this technology can be extended to email messaging. As such, Vlingo has updated it’s iPhone app by adding the ability to send e-mail and SMS messages using voice commands.

Vlingo is offering these two new features as in-app upgrades which you can choose to get by paying $6.99 for each feature or $9.99 for both. This may seem a pretty fair deal for email messaging but not for SMS especially if you’ve use the Nexus One’s free voice-to-text app.

While I have no plans of getting Vlingo with these features for my iPhone, Mashable’s Christina Warren notes that the app’s voice-activated web search lets you select your default search engine although you can still use other search engine if you wish to.

She also noticed that voice recognition is pretty good as well. Hopefully better than the Nexus One’s poor voice recognition feature. Now, I’m beginning to get interested with this app. You know what, I think I will get this as soon as I’ve checked if my iPhone still has some room for another app.

In addition to this, Vlingo has also updated its iPhone app’s interface by making it more streamlined and easier to select what options you want to use.

I’m currently downloading Vlingo (iTunes Link)  from the Apps Store right now. Will update this post as soon as I test out these features.

Update: Alright, I agree, Vlingo’s voice recognition is pretty good. It was able to recognize what I said the first time I tried it. Yes, it’s better than the Nexus One’s voice recognition feature. I’m getting the paid features now.

10.5 Million Blogs Go Real-Time with Pubsubhubbub

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All WordPress.com hosted blogs just beaten others in becoming a really real-time online content property. Thanks to Pubsubhubbub or PuSh as what some people have shortened it to, each and every posts you published on your WordPress.com blog will now be pushed automatically, in real time to the web. This means, real-time feed push to RSS aggregators such as Google Reader, Bloglines, Friendfeed, Netvibes and others.

Basically, what PuSH does is to let your feed aggregators  to register automatically to receive updates from your blogs each time you publish new posts. These updates are sent out within a second or two after you publish a content. Previously, the process is a bit tedious since your blog is periodically being asked by these aggregators if there are any updates before notifying those who are using the service.

The service was automatically activated  for all WordPress.com blogs, so there’s nothing that you need to do to get it going. If you’re blog is not hosted on WordPress.com, you can still have this feature by installing a new plugin which you can download from  here.

And if you want some more information about PubSubHubBub, you can may want to check out project site or the Google groups. If you don’t have any idea what PubSubHubbub is – TheNextWeb describes it as:

An open protocol for distributed Publish/subscribe communication on the internet. The main purpose is to provide near-instant notifications of change updates, which would improve on the typical situation where a client periodically polls the feed server at some arbitrary interval.

Google Gets Patent for Location-Based Advertising

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So last week Facebook won a rather “vague” patent for news feeds. Now, it’s Google’s turn. This time it’s a patent for location based-advertising which if compared with Facebook’s patent is very clear as to what intention Google will use this patent for.

Actually, Google may have set the pattern already when it acquired mobile ad company – AdMob. It is clear that Google wants to dominate the mobile advertising market, what with the recent launch of its Google branded phone, the Nexus One. AdSense on the other hand have implemented mobile ad serving a long time ago.

And now this patent for location in an advertising system, which is actually the emerging business model for most consumer-facing location startups today.

We must also consider Google’s long-standing  priority over location-enabled search. In fact, just last week a location filtering option for search was rolled out by Google.

Interestingly, this development has to come amidst the proliferation of location-based mobile applications such FourSquare, Gowalla, Yelp and even Google’s own Buzz in its mobile version. [Read more…] about Google Gets Patent for Location-Based Advertising

Opera 10.50 Browser for Mac Makes You Want to Forget About Safari

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Alright Mac users, if  you’re tired of using the stock Safari browser on your machine but you don’t feel like using Google Chrome for Mac or Firefox, how about Opera 10.50 for Mac which is now available for download?  This new version of Opera for Mac is said to be using a new Javascript engine and boasts of key features like HTML5 support and multi-touch gestures.

Honestly, I’ve never used the Opera Browser on a laptop or desktop before. The only time I used it was on my old Sony Ericsson P990i mobile phone. But that was a long time ago. For all I know, both the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones and the Opera desktop browser have probably gone through several revisions already.

Anyway, here are the new things that you should expect in the latest iteration of Opera browser for Mac:

  • More stable than the pre-alpha build
  • A whole new polished UI
  • Supports Opera Unite allowing you to download unite apps from the Unite Apps Repository
  • Supports HTML5 tag
  • Supports widgets as stand-alone apps
  • New menu for Developer Tools

Now, why did we say that Opera 10.50 for Mac might make you forget about the Safari browser that comes preloaded in your Mac? Well, blame it on the guys from 9 to 5 Mac who’ve tested the browser and found that it beats Safari in a WebKit Javascript benchmarking test.

You may want to give Opera a try on your Mac, get it from here.