October 25, 2008

What I Did Not Blog about While I Was at the MLA Conference

Yesterday, I returned from the MLA conference and caught up on my reading. Here are a few interesting posts about which I did not have a chance to blog earlier this week:

Microsoft has announced the spring 2009 release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft is promising that SP2, scheduled between February and April 2009, will speed up Outlook and improve the charting function in Excel. If so, it will make a very good product event better.

This sounds cools, but I admit, it has limited applications: Blogger Amit Agarawal, has created a way to translate a latitude and longitude value into a street address on Google Maps. All you need to know is the the latitude and longitude where you are. Hm.
[via lifehacker]

As cities and states experiment with different types of voting machines, comes this unsettling report from The Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy about security vulnerabilities that researchers have detected in the voting machines used by the New Jersey. According to the researchers, the machines can be completely compromised by replacing a single ROM chip — a task that they were able to complete in only seven minutes.
[via arstechnica.com]

I'm a news junkie, and Spreed:News sounds like a dream-come-true. According to
lifehacker:
"Free speed-reading webapp Spreed:News lets you choose from a wide array of news sources and have their articles read to you in small clusters of words. Working from the principles that make for faster reading, you can scale the tool between 240 and 1500 words per minute, and set up an account to save your favorite sources — from Boing Boing to the New York Times and dozens more — for quick browsing."
I haven't had the time to try it, yet, but if you do, let me know what you think.

1 comment:

Phillip Kwik said...

On second notice, Amit Agarawal's creation is more applicable than I realized. You don't need to know your coordinates; use his site (http://digitalinspiration.com/community/location.html) to click on any point on a google map and you will see the address.

Of great use when plotting trips in cities with which you are unfamiliar!