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Posts Tagged ‘google’

Well, I had to say something eventually, didn’t I?

Google’s alledged accidental launch of the new webkit-based browser has all the hallmarks of guerilla marketing, but let’s not hold that against it. I downloaded Chrome on it’s day of release, installed it and was thoroughly non-plussed. Nothing much I hadn’t seen before – pretty, granted, but that was about it.

However, after a week or two of playing with Chrome, it does seem to start up faster than virtually any other browser, renders pages quickly and works well on widescreen displays – you don’t feel so height-constrained as very little screen real estate is stolen by menu bars, address bars and the like.

It’s compatibility with plugins such as Shockwave is great, and the ‘incognito’ mode is great for logging in to two Google accounts at once. Running each page as a seperate process is also kinda cool – meaning that if one page dies, the whole browser (or OS in the case of IE) isn’t taken down with it!

Biggest issue as far as I can see is the lack of Firefox-style plugin support – specifically for ad blocking and bookmark sync. As a confirmed del.icio.us and Foxmarks junkie, THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! OK, maybe not – but support for Google Bookmarks is rumoured for the next iteration.

Get it here : http://www.google.com/chrome

Back in the day, when 48kbps was scorching fast, we all needed a way to get our internets faster. I remember many a (un)happy hour fiddling about with various “internet accelerators”, caching proxies, and other bits’n'bobs.

It all came rapidly back to me this week as I tried out ‘mobile broadband’, via a Three USB modem. It’s exactly like dial-up, but faster!

It does sometimes drop the connection (especially during thunderstorms), and doesn’t seem anywhere near as reliable as a wired connection. But it’s still pretty impressive. Look ma, it’s tha intertubes with no wires!

So, in an effort to get a little more stability and speed from the dongle, I started looking at the web accelerators and proxies available today. AllegroSurf is still around – I remember that from when Win2K was in beta! Still looks the same, is still a solid app, still costs money. Well that rules that one out then! It does have useful features though – ad blocking and caching being amongst them.

The Google Web Accelerator was a bit of a no-go. It didn’t like my install of Firefox 3. Too bad – I do.

I half remembered something called “webalizer” or something like that – it had an interface a bit like Avast Antivirus, and did caching and prefetching – but it doesn’t seem to exist any more! Perhaps I’ve completely mis-remembered the name.

Best thing so far is a little Java app from toonel.net – it compresses data to and from toonel’s own web based proxy server. I’m averaging 40% compression both ways – sweet! Saves on the 5gb bandwidth allowance, and speeds up downloading too.

But still, does anyone know what happened to this ‘webalizer’ thing – or even what it was actually called?

GoogleMail (or GMail, if you prefer), is great. Google Calendar is also great. In fact, both are modern miracles by virtue of the fact that they offer desktop style applications through a web browser.

Many people are not willing to make the jump and ‘live in the cloud’ as they say, favouring traditional desktop applications such as Outlook or Thunderbird with Lightning to manage their email and calendaring requirements.

The benefit of ‘living in the cloud’ is that no matter what machine you are on, anywhere in the world, you can have access to your email, address book and calendar. But how can you do it with no easy way to synchronise your data to your desktop apps?

Enter GCalDaemon. It works as a bridge between your desktop and the cloud, allowing you to see your Google Calendar in your desktop app, and also synchronises your address book with your Google Mail account!

It can be a little tricky to set up, but full instructions are given on the website.

Works on Windows, Linux and OS X, and requires JAVA. Download it from here.

Please note, I intentionally have not mentioned Boro’s defeat yesterday to Reading from a last minute goal. Nor do I intend to mention it…

I know I’m not the only one that has experienced RC3 (or RC2 for that matter) locking up for no obvious reason, and quite frankly it was annoying me to the point of switching to Opera (!). So it is great pleasure that I annouce…I might have a fix for it!!

It’s quite complex, but here goes:

Uninstall the Google toolbar.

No, that was it. Haven’t had a lock up in 36 hours since uninstalling the toolbar. Hope it works for you too!

Update : 64 hours and counting….

Google finally release a version of Picasa for Linux – before any Apple version surfaces – but it