The Buzz Media » Google

Official Google Search Results Domain Blocklist Chrome Plugin

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 03:28:28 +0000

Ben Vanik sends in some great news; Google has officially released a Chrome extension that allows you to ban certain domain names from your search results. If you don’t know why this is good news, consider when you search for something like “best diet pills” or anything starting with the phrase “how do i…” leading [...]

QN: Google’s reCAPTCHA has been Cracked

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:39:11 +0000

You know those reCAPTCHA anti-SPAM boxes you see on every other site’s signup page or story-submission page for social sites? Well it looks like it has been cracked for a while and even though Google continues to deny it, a researcher has proven that it has in fact been compromised.

Chrome Dev Adds Support for ICC v2 Color Profiles

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:47:53 +0000

Grant Gochnauer sends in news that Chrome Dev (the development branch of Google’s Chrome browser) just added support for ICC v2 Color Profiles. You can enable the new functionality using the –enable-monitor-profile command line argument when launching the Chrome browser, for example: C:\[PATH]\chrome.exe --enable-monitor-profile Let the graphic folk out there rejoice, you now have another [...]

Apple Relaxes iOS App Dev Restrictions – Xcode No Longer Required

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:51:47 +0000

In a surprising move that may open the door to Flash developers on the iOS platform, Apple has released revised App Development Guidelines today that remove the restriction on iOS developers being required to use Xcode exclusively. We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and [...]

Google Celebrates 25 Years of the Buckyball With Helacious Markup

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:37:09 +0000

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 [...]

Google Accounts Adds Multiple-Account-Sign-in Support

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:56:30 +0000

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

Gaurav Kheterpal — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:14:03 +0000

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

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:05:02 +0000

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 [...]

FFmpeg Team Implements a WebM/VP8 Decoder in 1400 Lines of C

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:20:31 +0000

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 [...]

Google Adsense is Hilarious Sometimes

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:41:21 +0000

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 [...]

Funny Opera Browser Speed Test

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:14:53 +0000

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 [...]

Digg Rewrite Drops MySQL in Favor of NoSQL Apache Cassandra Backend

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:03:02 +0000

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 [...]

Nexus One Owners Reporting Cracking Screens During Charging

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:01:46 +0000

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

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:13:20 +0000

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 [...]

Myriad Announced Dalvik Turbo – Android Gets 3x Speedup

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:38:08 +0000

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, [...]

HTC Unloads Nexus One Clones with Updated Custom Sense UI

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:12:59 +0000

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 [...]

Would Google Buy T-Mobile?

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:18:39 +0000

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 [...]

My Experience with HTC Nexus One Support was Mediocre

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:29:13 +0000

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 [...]

Google's Unsubsidized Nexus One on T-Mobile is NOT $49

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:41:55 +0000

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. [...]

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Default Search Switching to Yahoo/Bing

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:08:36 +0000

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, [...]

Nexus One 'Poor T-Mobile 3G Signal' Issue Discovered

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:44:06 +0000

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 [...]

Google Docs Sharing – Unsharing Documents is Impossible

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:56:48 +0000

(Caution: This is a venting-rage post… there is some technical merit to this, but it’s mostly me going insane using Google Docs sharing facility) For the last 3 days I’ve been trying to un-share a large set (About 100) Google Docs that are shared with me that I no longer need access to. For 3 [...]

Slow Nexus One Sales Do Not Matter to Google Right Now

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:33:09 +0000

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

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:54:02 +0000

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 – [...]