ThinkBoxly: 1 Month, 100 Readers

It’s hard to believe, but ThinkBoxly is already a month old, and even more amazing is that in its first month, ThinkBoxly managed to pull in just over 100 viewers! As just a small way to say ‘thanks’ for the terrific support, I’ve added a new entry to the Bonus Materials page: the promised set of ThinkBoxly-styled cursors (screenshot)! Now I know you might not want to have a ThinkBoxly themed desktop forever (even I like to change things up every once in a while…though the ThinkBoxly themed art is pretty cool, you’ve got to admit) so I designed the cursors specifically so that they’d work with a variety of different desktop schemes while still maintaining that iconic Boxly flair. Currently a Windows set is available, and a Linux set is on its way just as soon as my Ubuntu box finishes updating to 12.04.

• Download the Windows cursor scheme!

• Click here to go to the Bonus Materials page where the Linux set can be found once it’s ready!

As a side note, it appears Google is celebrating today, too, for if you head over to their website and run a search for “Zerg Rush”, you’ll be greeted with a little something special! I’ll warn you though: make sure your trigger finger* is ready!

Thanks for checking out ThinkBoxly, and I hope you’ll continue to visit the site from time to time for more great content from my DropBox for Tech Thoughts!

(*and your scrolling finger, too. Those little buggers are everywhere!)

Self-Driving Google Car Gets its First ‘User’ (News)

Over the past couple of years, Google has been carefully making progress on the world’s first true “driverless” car. Up until now most public information about the car portrayed it as an awkward collection of tech three times the height of the average car. A few days ago, however, Google revealed to us a very streamlined and efficient model that is far more than just a concept or tech demo. In the video below you will see the story of the Google Driverless Car’s first ‘user’: a legally blind man with only 5% of his vision remaining. Clearly he is well past being able to drive anywhere, but the Google Car shows promise in changing that for Steve Mahan and others in situations similar to his. For them, this isn’t just a step forward in technology, it is a change of lifestyle. And really that’s what any good technological innovation does, right? Although it’s easy to get distracted with the fastest CPUs, most powerful GPUs, largest capacity hard drives, and so on, it is improving lives that technology is really all about.