Matt Jones' Random Acts of Verbiage

Google TiSP – your FREE in-home wireless boradband!

The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.

Google has finally done it. They have announced free in-home boradband wireless!

The free kit that you can send away for contains everything to you going. Unfortunately if you are on a septic system, you are ineligible for the service as the fiber optic cable that is connected to the in-home wireless router must be sent through the sewer system.

They offer three levels of service.
The Trickle: Free with 8 Mbps.
The #2: $9.95/mo with 16 Mbps.
Royal Flush: $24.95/mo with 32 Mbps.
Pretty good deal.

“I couldn’t be more excited about, and am only slightly grossed out by, this remarkable new product,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. “I firmly believe TiSP will be a breakthrough product, particularly for those users who, like Larry himself, do much of their best thinking in the bathroom.”

You can sign up at this page; I recommend you do so now before the rush. If you want to know more, you can read their Frequently Asked Questions or the How it Works and Install Guide. Get on this before it becomes backordered!

Why is TiSP in beta?
When things go wrong with TiSP, they go very, very wrong. Let’s leave it at that.

ADDENDUM: For all you Gmail fans: Google has also introduced Google Paper! Google will print up any of your gmail for free and send you the paper copies! Even get your photos printed up on high quality photo paper!

Is there a limit?
You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you

Ahem. Please note the date. I like Google.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope your weekend has been lovely and that you and your family are all feeling blessed! Please feel free to check out today’s Letters of Faith Through the Seasons post on Luke the Evangelist, I enjoyed it.

And now for your Christmas viewing pleasure:

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While looking through some pictures from college I came across two pictures that I took of the microcomputer that I built in my Physics 335 (Electric Circuits Laboratory II – Digital) class and thought I would post them for all the nerds out there! Read more…

While surfing around the other day, I can across this cool page: the Image Mosaic Generator. Their web based program allows you to upload an image and it will search Flickr for photos that match in color to create the mosaic. It is pretty cool. I think one thing that would make it cooler is if it could search your own photographs (either on Flickr or your hard drive) to create the mosaic. As it stands you don’t have any control over which photos are used. But, regardless, it is still pretty neat. Here is one that I did:

This is a picture I took at the Seattle Science center and is (obviously) of the Space Needle and the Ferris Wheel. Please vote for this photo at JPG Magazine’s Embrace the Blur theme. And this is the mosaic creation (you can click for a larger version, but it looks better if you stand far away or view a smaller version…): Read more…

Great post title, eh? Okay, all this really means is I have a few awesome links for you all to check out.

Firefox 2 RC3 is available for download. This is still a Beta project so not everything will necessarily work perfectly, but I, personally, cannot see why you wouldn’t want to download it. The reason I am so excited? Built in spell checker!! Whenever you spell something incorrectly a little red dashed line will appear underneath the word. Let me tell you how helpful this is for me! Plus a new version of Firefox is just cool.

Ruben’s Tube is awesome (via Not So Fast). Check out the Flame Tube / Ruben’s Tube explained at ISU’s physics dept. And then check out a cool demonstration of Ruben’s Tube at YouTube (I have embedded it at the bottom of this post as well). I always enjoyed studying sound in my physics classes but I had never seen this demo, it is very cool.

Play all the old-school NES games online! (Via Hypercubed) All the fun games you used to play on NES can be played in this flash emulator. Fun times.

Yes, our economy is actually doing well (despite what the MSM might be saying). Visit Pursuing Holiness’ post “Great Economy – Go Figure” for some great stats. The Dow Jones is at nearly 12000 (it actually hit it today before dropping below by the end of the day). One of the stats that I think is pretty awesome: “$207,788,000,000: The reduction in the Deficit in the Past 29 Months Due to Stronger Economic Growth.” Check out Laura’s post (where she also notes some interesting stats on poor households in the comments) or the source. [UPDATE: The Dow closes at 12,011.73! (10.19.06)]

See? I told you they were awesome!

Alexandre and Evgeniy, the two Russians who created Wikimapia, have tipped me off to their new Wikimapia Google Earth Layer. It is a cool addition to Wikimapia that really increases its felxibility and usability. For more info, see my post: Wikimapia Invades Google Earth! Full details are at that post (and feel free to digg it there!).

Addendum: Wow, the Digg Effect is pretty amazing! The post at my Wikimapia Blog was dugg about 16 hours ago (it is 5:15pm now). It has since been dug an additional 586 times! Check it out and digg it yourself: Wikimapia Invades Google Earth @ Digg. Because of the publicity, my Wikimapia blog has had over 7000 visitors since midnight! Now for some big bloggers, that is nothing, but for me, that is HUGE! My site (at all my blogs) has been running a bit slow because of the traffic (not because of bandwidth, but because of the amount of SQL requests), so please be patient! Anyway, just thought I would update you… if you happen to care about such things!

Addendum II: So here are the final stats for the 24 hours after my article was dugg: 676 Diggs; Visitors (includes the hour before the Digg as well but none of my visits): 8433 Page views with 7387 Unique Visitors. For a nice graph of the Digg Effect, click here. I think my day of “popularity” is over now.

I have a new addiction. Wikimapia. A combination of Google Maps and Wikipedia and their goal is to “describe the whole Earth!” Seriously, with things like this and Google Earth I can’t leave the computer. The following images will take you to their Wikimapia page. I have also set up Matt’s Wikimapia Blog to look at the fun and interesting things to do with Wikimapia.

There are similarities between Google Earth and Wikimapia, but the idea of Wikimapia is to make it easy to see and find out info about the places you are looking at. You can easily add new places or add to or change existing ones. At right are two that I added: Gig Harbor High School and its band room. Because that is the kind of geek I am.

And for some more…

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There has been lots of talk around the blogosphere about how Google contributed to (far) leftist group MoveOn (as ineffectual as they are). There has been a wide range of responses to this. Some folks on the right are going so far as to suggest a boycott of any company that advertises through Google’s Adsense program or to take steps to remove Google’s search bar from Firefox. For some, this is just another straw against Big Brother Google and their China loving (although Yahoo was much worse as far as this goes), left leaning ways. While I don’t think MoveOn is worthy of Google’s benefaction, I am not going to get all up in arms about it. Now I don’t agree with all of Google’s practices, but they are still a quality company that puts out great products that I enjoy using! I just think that some people like to complain. Do people cut off ties with family members because they have different political views? (If you answered ‘yes’ to this, you have issues.) H/t to Kristin.

Another thing that made me actually laugh out loud (also via Kristin) was this story about a Pittsburg Pirates farm team, the Altoona Curve, who are going to have a promotion night titled “Salute to Frivolous Lawsuit Night”! Go read the promotion, it is hilarious, especially this line: There will be “A grand prize drawing in which one fan will receive a “clue” and their own frivolous lawsuit.” Heh, classic.