Bruno Silva

Lost in translation

De 25.000 pontos para 75.00 ainda vai um bocado.

Descoberto a navegar no site XBox Live ao trocar a lingua de pt-PT para en-US.

New “gadget” from Microsoft Research

Surface on a sphere. It’s kind of a different interface.

Microsoft Surface Sphere

Cuil - Search Results

See the first result? It’s this website. See that foto associated with my website? It is not me. It is some other Bruno Silva which is a professional football player. Bad association…

See the second result? It is a webproxy, linking to my website, not relevant either. Oh and the photo isn’t mine either.

Have you heard about Cuil?

It’s a new search engine that claims to be the world’s biggest search engine (at least concerning the number of indexed pages). There is a lot of people interested in this potential new Google rival.

Cuil is supposed to be read as “Cool”, don’t ask me how and in which language. I love the interface is really appealing and innovative in searching engines (at least I haven’t seen anyone similar). The suggestion system is nice too.

The search engine has some flaws, though. When the system is restored I’ll leave an example.

Stay tuned at www.cuil.com.

QR-Code + Windows Mobile

Some time ago a friend told me about QR-Codes. Before that I had already seen some of them in instant messaging avatars, without knowing the meaning of those images. QR-Codes look like this:

This is a kind of barcode like the ones that you see in the super market, but that can store a lot more information. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry about QR-Code.

An interesting thing about this format, is that there is a lot of software available for mobile phones and even windows mobile, that allows you to read these barcodes using your mobile phone’s camera. It is a nice way of sharing contacts (phone number, e-mail, URL’s) or a simple message (how about wearing a t-shirts, allowing your geek friends to read the message? )

A nice software for Windows Mobile is i-nigma barcode reader. Just point your camera at a QR barcode, and read the message!

A nice usage of this technology is present in the Windows Mobile free software directory freewarepocketpc.net. You can browse for software in your computer, and when you want to install an application in your device, instead of connecting it to the computer to transfer the cab file, or copying the download link by hand, just point your camera at the QR-Code in the download page, and download the software using the link encoded in the barcode image, reading it with i-nigma, or other similar software.

Believe me, it works pretty well. I wasn’t convinced until I tried it by myself.

Thanks for the introdution to QR-Codes, Nelson and thanks for showing me i-nigma, André!