Hasta La Gadget!

The voting machine has had a pretty bumpy road to widescale
adoption–a fact which hasn’t really been helped along by a number of close call
elections in the past decade. New York
State has been having a particular
tricky relationship with the devices, as of late.

Back in September, the state replaced its unwieldy
80-year-old lever-based machines with some slick new ATM-like voting kiosks for
the primary election. The transition didn’t go off without a hitch, however. Poll
sites opened late, and many workers proved to be less than helpful when it came
to using the new devices.

The machines are getting a second chance during today’s
midterms. It turns out that this second attempt isn’t that much an improvement.
A CBS affiliate in Albany is
reporting “hiccups” at a number of polling locations. “One of three
ballot-scanning machines was out of service at the church in Mount Kisco where
the Democratic candidate for governor, Andrew Cuomo, voted Tuesday morning,”
the station reports. 

Above: an example of the content that was unavailable to Turkish users up until last week.

Following a two year ban, the government of Turkey has lifted its ban on YouTube. Finally, millions of Turks can find out what all this “Double Rainbow” hoopla is all all about. I hope it lives up to the hype.

The ban originally came into place in May of 2008 when users complained that there were posted videos that were insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who founded the nation in 1923. It is a crime in Turkey to insult Ataturk.

After meetings with Google, YouTube’s parent company, the “offending” videos have been removed and the ban was able to be lifted.

Turkey has implemented many reforms on the economic and human rights realms in its bid to join the European Union. It has still faced many questions about its record on free speech issues.

via PhysOrg

It seems that there’s no end to Google’s usefulness. You can add yet another piece of important information to that seemingly unlimited resource: polling place locations. The search giant offers a simple way to find out where you need to go in order to vote in tomorrow’s mid-term elections.

You can either just type “polling place” into Google or visit the Google Voter Info page over at maps.google.com. From there, just type in your full address, and Google will let you know exactly where you need to be tomorrow, in order to play your part in democracy.

The service also offers a good deal of additional insight into the election, including a list of candidates and information about your location election office.

Azio, a manufacturer of computer peripherals like USB hubs, hard drive docks and external drive enclosures, and home networking peripherals, is getting into the keyboard game with five new wireless and wired keyboard models the company will release tomorrow. Among the five new models are one standard wired USB keyboard, three Bluetooth wireless models (including one Mac-specific model,) and one “Long-Range RF” keyboard, which promises users full functionality up to 100-feet from the receiver.

The USB wired keyboard will debut at $19.99 list price, with the Bluetooth keyboards ranging from $49.99 to $79.99 retail. The special Long-Range RF Keyboard will set you back $69.99 list, and includes a multi-touch trackpad on the right side with two mouse buttons for use with a home theater PC or conference room computer. Azio says the new models will be available tomorrow and will ship in time for the holiday shopping season.
 

You know how URL shortcuts like bit.ly and is.gd always feel like they’re looking down their noses at you and your links?

Well, it’s not just in your head. They’d all so much rather be processing truncated links to fancy URLs like profiles of vegan food trucks and In Treatment episode recaps than wasting their resources on cat videos and delusional sightings of time travelers in silent movies.

Snooty site-based apps.

Thankfully, their days of judging us and our tweet-sized links are over. We now have Bu.tt. A URL shortener for the rest of us!

The service comes from creator John McKinnon and the good people of the Trinidad and Tobago domain registry. The service’s catch phrase: “The URL shortener that kicks it.” Classic. And the “B” in the logo looks like a certain part of the human anatomy with lipstick on it.

There is no possible way this service could look down on anything that anyone would ever post.

Finally, I am free to tweet and IM without worrying if tiny.cc thinks my link to a video of grown man getting kicked in the testicles by someone dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is worthy of being disseminated to the internet. See: http://bu.tt/9xi

via TechCrunch