Tom Tom Go

My friend Steve (blog) sent me an email about a pretty cool car GPS navigation device. The TomTom Go, is a portable in car navigation device that incorporates navigation software, maps and GPS receiver in one device. It has voice prompts, 3D maps, and a touch screen.

It looks like it is not CD or DVD based, so I assume that there is a USB connector or it takes some flash media to load the maps. The map for the state of California is about 66Mb, according to their web site, and they do offer regional maps.

A car kit is available which offers Power supply, audio out, audio mute, audio in, and disconnect signals, so it seems like it could be integrated pretty well with a pre-existing head unit.

The one downside for this product, is that it doesn't appear to be a double din mounting kit. I would love it if this could be integrated into the dash, as opposed to sitting on top of the dash

Restricting access to phpBB2 in PostNuke

I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to prevent unregister users from accessing the forums on my PostNuke web site. Tonight I found some instructions on how to get phpBB2 to respect the PostNuke permissions settings.

This seems to be working very well for me.

Konfabulator

I have just installed Konfabulator on my laptop, and it seems like an interesting tool. Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine that lets you run Widgets, which are little applications. For example there are alarm clocks, calculators, applications that display stock quotes, display the current weather, and tons of other ones.

In a post a while ago, I mentioned GeekTool. There are Widgets that can do everything that GeekTool can do, but they look pretty. The Widgets can take full advantage of Apple's Quartz rendering engine, so things can look very nice.

Updated Squeezebox

Engadget has a post that mentions that SlimDevices has updated the SqueezeBox. They have replaced the 2 line 40 character display with a 280 by 16 pixel display. Also they have updated the software to include a visualization feature.

Netgear Access point

Engadget has an post on the Netgear WGT634U. It is a 802.11g Access Point that has an USB 2.0 port that will let you share a hard drive across a network. I am not sure what protocols it uses to share the hard drive, but I am assuming that has implemented samba.

This would be a good solution for someone who needs an 802.11 access point, but also wants to share files around the network.

Address book export to squirrelmail

There is an article on Mac OS X Hints on how to export Mac OS X Address Book's data for use in Squirrelmail. I have modified it slightly so that it creates the squirrelmail file in my home directory. I only had to change sm_data_path to my home directory

Web controlled Thermostat

I just saw this web site for a internet connected thermostat. I really like the potential of having appliances web connected to the network. There are so many potential applications with these devices.

This device will download a 5 day forcast for your local zip code. In addition, it can connect to remote temperature sensors, and will use the average temperature. (This would be great for us, since the thermostat is downstairs but our upstairs gets very hot.) Also, the thermostat can be configured to send email alerts when there is a tempertature high or low. Also the thermostat can be controlled remotely