Google Maps Navigation edition. (beta)

This is great! This application promises to provide GPS navigation capabilities for everyone with an Android phone.

Take a look at the video and tell me what you think:

A demonstration of Google Maps Navigation (Beta), an internet-connected GPS navigation system that provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps on Android 2.0 phones.

Screenshots

• 3D Navigation
• Search along route
• Traffic view
• Street View
• Navigation voice shortcut
• Navigation during call
  
• 
  3D Navigation
  
  
  Street View
• 
  
• Satellite view
• Satellite view

More information can be seen at the Google Maps Navigation homepage.

iPhone - Google App

If you want to see some impressive voice recognition software, try out the Google search app on the iPhone...

Find local businesses, directions, and other information by just speaking into your phone!

Check it out:

---

Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!

RocketDock - www.rocketdock.com

This is a great tool that gives you a Mac OS-like dock for Windows. I use it to quickly access critical folders and documents.

Get it at www.rocketdock.com

Description from www.rocketdock.com:

What is it?

RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock.

Now with added Taskbar support your minimized windows can appear as icons on the dock. This allows for better productivity and accessibility.

---

Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!

Remove the Content Advisor and Ratings Password

If you have forgotten the Internet Explorer content advisor password and want to change the ratings settings then follow these instructions to change the settings back to their defaults.

All the Content Advisor settings are stored in the key below. If you no longer have the password, then simply delete the key, and all the settings will be removed.

Open your registry and find the key below. Single click on the key to highlight it, press the DELETE key, or alternatively select Delete from the Edit menu.

Close Internet Explorer, re-open it, and the Content Advisor feature should now be disabled.

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Ratings]
System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Ratings]

---

Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!

Insignia NS-4V24 Teardown

You are looking at an Insignia NS-4V24 mp3 player.

This MP3 player would only turn on when a USB cable was inserted. I bricked it after I stupidly followed the advice of a BestBuy rep and attempted to format the flash memory to reset all configuration settings. I decided to tear it apart and posted the pictures here. Overall, I think this MP3 player is an iPod killer. It supports 8GB SDHC cards, it has a built in FM tuner, it supports wireless bluetooth headsets, plays videos, and has a nice 2.4" LCD.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

iPhone Contacts in Exchange - How to hide certain contact groups.

One of the issues I recently ran into was trying to hide certain contact lists from the iPhone's contact manager.

The iPhone does not allow you to 'select' which contact groups to synchronize. It is configured to 'hunt' for contact folders throughout your entire mailbox tree and then makes everything available. For those of you that have thousands of contacts, this solution might work for you.

1) Create a Contacts folder in the Public Folders database of Exchange. You can use Outlook to do this or the Exchange System manager.

2) Change the permissions for the newly created folder so that "Default" and "Anonymous" have no access. Set them to "none". Uncheck "Folder Visible" for Default and Anonymous. You can do this by right clicking on the Public Folder, properties, then permissions. Make sure that you are set as the Owner of the folder.

3) Move the Contact lists that you want to hide from your iPhone into this newly created Contact folder. Since this new folder is located in the "Public Folders" database of the Exchange server, it won't synchronize to your iPhone.

If you set up the permissions correctly, this contact list will be visible only to you, and your iPhone won't see it.

Note that you may have to disable Contacts in your iPhone's Exchange account settings to clear the contacts, and then re-enable it to refresh it.

Good luck.

---

Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!

How to block google chat in igoogle.com

Recently, I found out that Google did not provide a mechanism for blocking google chat in igoogle.com like it does for gmail chat.

To block gmail chat, you simply configure your firewall/proxy to block requests to/from 209.85.201.189 which corresponds to http://chatenabled.mail.google.com

There is no such mechanism for igoogle.com chat. In fact, igoogle.com redirects to http://www.google.com/ig/ which meant that blocking igoogle.com as a domain would not do the trick. Users could still go directly to www.google.com/ig/ and access chat.

Today, I accidentally ran across a solution.

To successfully block the chat feature of igoogle.com you need to block access to the following URL.

BLOCK: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

I used special URL filtering software to block any requests sent to "talkgadget.google.com".

You can do the same using windows default HOSTS file by redirecting talkgadget.google.com to 127.0.0.1 or using a proxy that filters out this domain.

The result is access to igoogle.com and all other google features, but with chat disabled!

---

Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!