Bruce Schneier has a write up about lock smiths in New York spamming Google Maps with multiple fake business addresses. The result is a single locksmith showing up in every neighborhood in the city regardless of the location of their actual office.
I remember this happening in Somerville when we moved in a couple years ago, so I don’t think this is isolated to New York City. What other businesses would find this practice useful? Taxis, courier service… There’s got to be others.
Have a Google Calendar and want to sync it with iCal? Check this out (via KFM).
Only works with Leopard (not a big deal) and will only sync calendars you own. The latter is a dealbreaker for me (Rachel and I share our Google Calendars, and I need to see both in iCal and on my iPhone) so I’m sticking with Spanning Sync for now. If you only have a single calendar, though, this looks pretty sweet.
Here’s a link to a Brazilian blog that posted a link to download the last album of the band that I was tour manager for. Go check it out, it’s a good album. Anyway, if you speak Portuguese, I’d love to know what this says. For what it’s worth, the link was happened upon by my friend organically. That is totally found without Google, which I thought was a funny coincidence.
Answering all my prayers (well, the ones about adding text messages to Gmail), Google has added text messaging capability. It’s only in chat mode for now, but can straight texting from Gmail be far behind? Thinking this is probably for Android, but who knows. I was hoping that a response from the phone to the text would automagically save the person’s cell phone email address in your phone, but alas. Google is too tricky for that.
Text Messaging in Chat
Send SMS text messages right from Gmail. You chat from your comfy computer and reach your friends on the go; they get your messages as texts and can peck out replies on their little keyboards.
To get it to work, go to the Lab tab in the Settings menu and enable this feature.
