If you are checking out Google today with a modern browser (Firefox, Chrome and Safari all work) you’ll see a slick animated buckyball draw itself in the place of the second “o” in the word “Google”.
The cool part is that it’s interactive, you can mouse over it and spin it in any direction you want.
Originally [...]
Tag Archives: Google
Google Celebrates 25 Years of the Buckyball With Helacious Markup
Google Accounts Adds Multiple-Account-Sign-in Support
Chris Hunkele sent in news that Google has added support for multiple account sign-in; more specifically if you have multiple Google Accounts that you use (e.g. yourname@gmail.com, companyname@gmail.com, mailinglistname@gmail.com, etc.) and you are finding it a pain to have multiple tabs or browser windows open to check all the mail, docs or calendar events for [...]
Android App Inventor – Do-It-Yourself Mobile Apps from Google
A modern age saying goes “Where there’s a will, there’s a way and there’s a mobile app for that”. It seems Google has taken this saying a bit too seriously. The company has recently launched the Android App Inventor, a do-it-yourself mobile app creation software which lets anyone create an Android app without requiring any programing knowledge.
FFmpeg’s VP8 Decoder 62% Faster Than Google’s
The FFmpeg team has completed the initial implementation of their new VP8 decoder and early benchmarks are showing it up to 62% faster than Google’s own VP8 decoder: libvpx.
A few weeks ago we covered the announcement that the FFmpeg video-codec team had decided to build their own VP8 decoder and did an initial implementation in [...]
FFmpeg Team Implements a WebM/VP8 Decoder in 1400 Lines of C
Some quick background on the state of video codecs:
H.264 is the most popular video codec for online and offline (Blu-ray / HD captures) videos
H.264 is encumbered by patents and licenses required for usage, administered by the privately held company MPEG LA.
Online video publishing/creation/distribution and popularity is increasing at an astronomical rate
Companies hosting and producing huge [...]
Google Adsense is Hilarious Sometimes
If you are familiar with our “Monkey has Way with Frog” post then you know what happens… and it’s not so good for the frog.
What is funny though, is when Google Adsense picks up the context of the post and displays unintentionally funny ads, like so:
Romantic get-away indeed!
For what it’s worth, I have used Oyster [...]
Funny Opera Browser Speed Test
I suppose Google put together a Rube-Goldberg “speed test” of the Chrome browser and Opera decided to 1-up them with what I found a hugely entertaining and funny “Opera Browser vs a Potato” speed test video.
A lot of what I found to be gold about this video was that it’s more like an SNL skit [...]
Digg Rewrite Drops MySQL in Favor of NoSQL Apache Cassandra Backend
John Quinn from Digg recently posted on the Digg blog about Digg’s ongoing rewrite of the entire site — both front end and back end.
One of the biggest performance and growth challenges that John cited for Digg was growing it’s MySQL-based relationship DB across different data centers and keeping the site performant and in sync [...]
Nexus One Owners Reporting Cracking Screens During Charging
It sure seems that Google/HTC’s Nexus One was intended to be the end-all-be-all phone to save the universe from evil, but so far all it’s managed to do is come up short in multi-touch performance/bugs, poor 3G signal connectivity and to top it all off, HTC’s unimpressive customer support. Now added to that list is [...]
Google Finalizes On2 Video Codec Company Acquisition
The Register reports that Google has finalized it’s acquisition of On2 Technologies for a total of $124.6 million ($18 million more than originally offered).
On2 Technologies produced the VP3 codec and open-sourced it as the platform for the Ogg Theora video codec. The company continued development on their proprietary video compression and playback codecs and are [...]
Myriad Announced Dalvik Turbo – Android Gets 3x Speedup
Engadget covered a story about the company Myriad Group AG that was showing off their “Dalvik Turbo VM” product at the Mobile World Congress. At their booth they had an OpenGL demo running on two Google Ion (HTC Magic) phones, about 1/2 the horsepower of a Nexus One.
In this particular “spinning 3D box” demo, the [...]
HTC Unloads Nexus One Clones with Updated Custom Sense UI
For the first day of Mobile World Congress convention HTC decided to take the wraps off of 2 new pieces of hardware that directly re-use the Google Nexus One insides but installed inside some slightly nicer shells with HTC’s much-nicer custom Sense UI running on top of it.
The two devices released are:
HTC Desire (pictured above)
HTC [...]
Would Google Buy T-Mobile?
As of late Deutsche Telekom, European parent to the US’s “T-Mobile” cell company, has been feeling out the waters around possibly spinning off it’s stateside arm into a standalone corporation no longer under the operating umbrella of DT.
T-Mobile, the US-branch of DT, is the 4th largest cell carrier in the US, lagging far behind Verizon, [...]
My Experience with HTC Nexus One Support was Mediocre
Disclaimer: This is a re-telling of my experience with HTC Nexus One support on February 8, 2010 from 9am through 10:30am. I wanted to relay my experience so any potential Nexus One shoppers out there may get an idea of their own experience-to-be if they run into trouble.
I bought a Nexus One 2 weeks ago. [...]
Google's Unsubsidized Nexus One on T-Mobile is NOT $49
George Thiruva, over at Gadgetopolis, has put together one of the most confusing examples of math I’ve ever seen and came to the conclusion that Google’s unlocked, $529, Nexus One is only $49 when coupled with T-Mobile. Here’s a snippet:
So, the real cost of an unlimited everything plan is $99.99/mo for subsidized phone buyers. Compare [...]
Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Default Search Switching to Yahoo/Bing
Canonical, the creators of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, have announced that after negotiating a new profit-sharing arrangement with Yahoo, they will be changing the default search provider in Firefox on Ubuntu 10.04 and beyond to Yahoo Search (from the long-time default of Google Search).
The interesting bit here is that back in July of 2009, Yahoo [...]
Nexus One 'Poor T-Mobile 3G Signal' Issue Discovered
Update #1: Google has responded to the long thread with an announcement that an over-the-air (OTA) update to help make the 3G connections more stable in 3G-covered areas will be coming out, but if you are outside of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage area (which is small) there will be no change in experience for you. Release [...]
Slow Nexus One Sales Do Not Matter to Google Right Now
Google’s brand new Android super-phone, the Nexus One, may not be selling as quickly as one would have hoped after the incredibly persistent marketing strategy by Google. Anecdotally-speaking, for 4 days after the phone was released all I saw on almost any site I visited were “Nexus One” ads being hosted up by Google AdSense; so [...]
Unlocked Nexus One + T-Mobile Unlimited Data-ONLY Plan = $$$ Savings
Was reading through the Nexus One support forums and came across a helpful post by a Nexus One owner ‘bdbd‘ giving people tips on how to save from getting T-Mobile’s $80/month plan for 2 years with their $180 Nexus One. ‘bdbd‘ and another user ‘ldentape‘ both recommend this approach which breaks down to:
$529 – Unlocked [...]
Unpredictable 3G Coverage from T-Mobile on Nexus One
Update #5: Slashdot poster jtownatjunk.net made an interesting point in this comment, stating that cell phones are designed to constantly search for and lock into the strongest signal, not the fastest signal. Which was sensible logic up until about 2005 when high speed data networks started getting rolled out en-mass. Would be interesting if that [...]
YouTube Mass-Video Upload Still Buggy
The screenshot above shows a “failed” video upload from Chrome to YouTube that was actually successful blocking 3 other pending uploads. I’ve actually never used the mass/multi-video upload capability of YouTube in the last 2 years and had it work for me seamlessly.
Before the new Flash-based uploader, the older semi-Web-2.0 mass-upload form had incredible resize [...]
Google Chrome OS Based on Ubuntu
As we type this Google is in the process of announcing their new Chrome OS operating system at a Google Event (TechCrunch Live Coverage). Just like the Chrome browser is based on the Chromium OS project, Chrome OS will be based on the Chromium OS project.
Glancing around the source repository for Chromium OS it looks [...]
Take Google Search 2.0 for a Spin
In an attempt to compete with the oncoming shit-house that is Microsoft’s Bing, Facebook’s real-time Search and everyone else generally wanting a piece of the Google pie, Google has pulled version 2 of Google Search out of the garage for some beta test runs while they tighten the screws over the coming months.
You can give [...]
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