commands
Latest
The best commands for Google Home
Researched and written by Libby Plummer The Google Home speaker finally went on sale in the UK in April and while it's a neat little smart speaker, it has some catching up to do. The Amazon Echo has already managed to garner more than 10,000 skills and the Home has very few. While the search giant works with developers to build up its selection, there are still some very useful things you can do with the smart speaker. Here's a selection of what we think are the best.
Great Siri search commands
TUAW reader Harris Rydal sent in a bunch of terrific suggestions for using Siri's built-in search features without having to do a lot of typing. These are exceptionally useful ways of taking advantage of Siri-to-Safari tasking. Sports scores - Look up the current score for in-progress games and find the team record, last game score, and the upcoming game. Say "Yahoo team name score". Rydal points out "There is a 'Yahoo' here because mobile Yahoo formats the results better than Google." Flight Times - Say "Search the web for flights from City/Airport to City/Airport". In Google, this brings up a list of flight times that day and the associated airline. Movie Times (and Ticket Purchasing) Say "Search for Movie Name showtimes Optional ZipCode", or if Siri will let you, you may get away with simply "Movie Name showtimes Optional Zipcode". You can also "Search for showtimes Zipcode". Rydal points out that if you've set Google in Safari to use your current location, you don't even need to specify an area code. Google's Fandango integration allows you to click the showtime and hop over to the ticket purchasing page.
WoW Rookie: More tips, tricks and tidbits
New around here? We've got your back! See all our collected tips, tricks and how-to's for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. Though I've been playing since open beta, there are still things that I stumble upon that I either didn't know or had forgotten. There are also many little conveniences that took me forever to figure out. So while these tips, tricks and tidbits say they are for rookies -- well, even long time veterans have a few holes in their knowledge of the workings of Azeroth. Lisa tackled some tips just a couple months ago, so I've scavenged in the comments there as well as in this guest breakfast topic. I am also going to touch on some subjects that come up a lot in the WoW.com guild, <It came from the Blog>. Built-in Talent Calculator If you, like me, have a tendency to click the wrong thing when choosing your talents, there is a way to set up a safety net. Just go to Game Menu (ESC), Interface, Features and click the Preview Talent Changes box. After that, you will be able to play with your talents a bit before accepting them.
Tweets (and whatever else you want) on the desktop with GeekTool
Mat posted a while back about the magic of GeekTool -- it's an app that allows you to run Unix scripts and show logs in a good-looking pane right there on your desktop. Mac OS X Tips recently did a post about how to put your iCal events up there using a script called iCalBuddy, but industrious reader Ben G. has taken this even a step further, and sent along a link to a similar script called twitterbuddy, which -- as you may have guessed -- will send your latest tweets to GeekTool.As a result, he's got the desktop you see above -- both tweets and iCal events sitting in a transparent pane on top of his desktop background. It will require a little Terminal tripping, but it's pretty easy to do. Just install and set up GeekTool the way you like it, and then make sure the buddy scripts are installed. From there, you can create a New Entry in GeekTool, and run whatever commands you want. It's incredibly flexible, too, because it'll put any Terminal commands you can throw at it right there on your desktop. If you're looking to fill in some of that unused Desktop space, give it a look.
Enough with the yelling
I had a great time at the Stormwind Stampede yesterday (and pictures and videos from the event should be up soon). But here's a little tip we all picked up from running almost 500 Tauren around the world: to shut down all the yelling, you can just right click on the title of your open chat window, and then go into the "Channels" menu to shut down /yells just like any other chat channel. You can also turn off Guild chat this way as well, just in case your guildies start threatening to spoil Harry Potter, but you don't actually want to /gquit to get away from them. Unfortunately, turning off yell won't get rid of the big red text bubbles when people are near, but all you have to do then is just turn around.Of course, /ignore still works, and my little level one Tauren now has a bigger /ignore list than any of my other toons, thanks to some rowdy spammers yesterday. And /leave General will get you out of Barrens chat (just as /join General will get you back in when you finally arrive in Ashenvale). And I don't have that much of a problem with this stuff (only when I group up with 500 cows), but if you're really tired of chat spam, Devnull might be an addon worth looking at.It's not real complicated-- those of you who are experts at chatting (or have just been given a headache before by all the yelling) probably already knew it. But it was definitely a helpful little tip yesterday to sort through all the spam in the channels.
Control your laptop by hitting it
They say that you only hurt the ones you love, which may be why even the savviest computer users still resort to physically striking their laptops out of frustration or in futile attempts to fix a problem. Well a recently-posted article at IBM Devworks shows you how to take those punishing blows and channel them into something more productive, by allowing you to input commands on select ThinkPad notebooks through rapping your knuckles on the case in specific sequences. Using a script called knockAge, owners of post-2003, Linux-powered ThinkPads with the Hard Drive Active Protection System can leverage the sensitivity of their machines' built-in accelerometers to perform almost any task imaginable simply by whacking the side of the LCD screen. Once the software is properly configured, you can program your lappy to accept a specific knock sequence for unlocking the screensaver, for instance, or to change tracks in your music player; and if you set up a command for initiating remote troubleshooting, why, for the first time you'll have a way to actually fix your computer by landing a few well-placed blows.[Via Slashdot]
iPhone software found in iPod updater?
Yeah, everybody's been grasping at straws (including us) for possible info on the iPhone for, well, the last couple of years now, and the latest adds fuel to the speculative fire without providing any answers. So what else is new? Anyhow, in the June 28th iPod updater package, apparently if one were to analyze a few particular files with a hex editor, one would produce some very peculiar and anomalous commands, like t_feature_app_PHONE_APP, kPhoneSignalStrength, clPhoneCallModel, clPhoneCallHistoryModel, prPhoneSettingsMenu, and so on. They're confirmed to have absolutely nothing to do with the Moto iTunes phone line, which makes sense, and we will concede that such a find seems highly unusual. Still, we'd hardly be willing to call this type of thing nascent evidence of an iTunes phone; on the other hand, if there was one around the corner, WWDC would be as good a place as any for Apple to announce. After all, what better place than Apple's own developer conference would there be to announce a new mobile device platform, hm?[Via AppleInsider, thanks William]
