dashboard

Google is listening.

As Marguerite Reardon and Tom Krazit reported on May 14 in CNET's Signal Strength blog, the search giant has swept up wireless-network addresses, along with other data its Street View vehicles have been collecting on their unprecedented world tour.

Google or some other company may have already plotted the location of your home or office wireless network, but you can make it more difficult for the next nosy megacorporation--or a neighbor or passing stranger--to discover your hot spot by disabling its Service Set Identifier (SSID).

By default, wireless access points transmit their presence to let wireless … Read more

This week, we told you about a contest that tasked high school students with envisioning the car dashboard of the future--with an eco twist. Participants came up with some great ideas that 10 years ago would have sounded like science fiction but today make you kind of go, "Well, yeah, of course."

I don't drive. But if I did, I'd want all of these as standard features. What about you? Which of these would you most like to see? Some of the options in the poll come from semifinalists in the contest, others from me. As … Read more

If you're the kind of person who likes to trace your own footprints, you may be interested in the new experimental feature that Google introduced Wednesday for mobile phones.

When you opt into the Latitude location feature on Google Maps and enable Location History, you'll find a brand-new beta dashboard view that doesn't just report your meanderings in a linear, chronological way, but will attempt to group your visits by trends, like trips away from home. The addition of map thumbnails helps keep data visual, liberating your history from traditional text-based constraints.

Privacy has been a key concern of late, … Read more

If Ford's MyFord Touch and the Chevy Volt's digital instrument cluster are any indicator, future vehicle instrumentation may be much more complex than the handful of analog gauges to which we're all accustomed.

Judging from the ideas of high school students tasked with designing conceptual dashboards that encourage green practices, teenagers may have a hand in shaping that future dash.

Their suggestions include an in-dash avatar that coaches drivers toward efficiency, a smart navigation system that tells you when it's better to skip the car and take public transportion, and a Web-connected dash that rewards the … Read more

iPhones can be great driving companions--unless you routinely tweet, text, or otherwise fiddle with the device while behind the wheel. That's a surefire way to get yourself--and possibly others--killed.

Aha Radio for iPhone helps you keep your eyes on the road. The app provides a dashboard-friendly, oversize interface for everything from podcasts and local traffic to Facebook and iPod playlists.

That interface consists of four giant icons per page, the idea being to make them more at-a-glance accessible to drivers. You can customize the arrangement of these icons to your liking and choose exactly what content Aha Radio should … Read more

Garmin has released a new, more compact version of its dashboard friction mount for Nuvi portable navigation devices.

Where the old dashboard friction mount consisted of a cluster of beanbags with a rubber base and a fixed mounting arm, the new friction mount uses a flexible rubber pad with a tacky temporary adhesive base that better conforms to dashboard surfaces and, despite weighing less than the old model, holds its position much better. The new friction mount also features a movable mounting arm that folds flat for storage and is adjustable for more precise positioning of your Nuvi device.

Although … Read more

Google encountered problems with Gmail Thursday morning for a "significant subset" of users using POP to get messages into Gmail.

The company posted a notice on its Apps Status Dashboard that was picked up by Techcrunch notifying Gmail users of "difficulties or delays receiving mail fetched via POP from external mail providers to Gmail." The problems began at some point this morning, and a more recent notice said that Google has fixed the problem for "a majority" of users.

Google said your e-mails that get imported from other accounts aren't lost; they're … Read more

If you're not already a pro at using the command line, OnyX is a solid choice for conducting routine maintenance and tweaking the interface on your Mac. This free utility shares much of the functionality of applications like Cocktail (which its help files suspiciously resemble), and it can help you with everything from checking SMART status on your disks to configuring the Dock, Finder, and Dashboard and Expose to your liking.

OnyX can even help you run Unix utilities, change your desktop to an animated background, and unlock hidden functions in apps like Safari and iTunes. As with all … Read more

Number conversions are always convenient to have around. There are many times when you may need to convert grams to pounds, miles to kilometers, or see the latest exchange rates. In OS X there are some convenient ways to convert numbers that are readily available.… Read more