Pages Tagged “Google”
Reviews
- Chromium (Web Browser) ★★★☆☆ The basis for most web browsers these days, driven mainly by building Google Chrome. Less tracking and branding, but stable updates are only available on Linux.
- Gmail (Android App) ★★★☆☆ Works well with multiple accounts and display modes, but tracks you more than it should.
- Google Chrome ★★★☆☆ There was a time when Chrome was the fastest web browser available. It isn’t anymore, and over the last few years it’s felt less like a user agent and more like a Google agent.
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (Phone) ★★★★★ Much as I like newer phones, there are a few things that I really miss about the S4, especially the ergonomics.
- Ungoogled Chromium ★★★☆☆ This takes Chromium and removes everything that connects to Google services…including things like safe browsing and the extension store.
Tech Tips
- Geary With Gmail, (Mostly) Without GNOME Install GNOME, add Gmail to your online accounts, then uninstall the rest of GNOME. But keep gnome-online-accounts!
- Gmail on SeaMonkey Yes, you can still connect it after the switch to OAuth2. You need to create a placeholder account first, and find the right settings, which Gmail doesn’t seem to tell you anymore.
- Google Drive insists “A newer version is already installed” (Solved) Drive wouldn’t reinstall because the uninstall had failed. What finally worked was copying the program files from another computer and re-running the uninstaller.
- Google Toolbar AutoFill is Weird (Obsolete) This form had name and e-mail fields, but AutoFill only recognized e-mail. I figured, OK, people might be using this, let’s see if I can adjust the page and make it compatible.
- Move Email Archives to a New Account Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Apple Mail and Outlook can move messages from one IMAP account to another. Just drag and drop! But Gmail makes it a bit more complicated.
- Thunderbird Gets a 400 Error Setting Up Gmail Normally there’s no good reason for your email client to accept cookies. Except here.
- Toolbars That Phone Home (Obsolete) I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.
- Using Bookmarklets on Android You can’t use menus for bookmarklets, but you can use auto-complete.
- What Can You Build With the Google+ API So Far? (Obsolete) Google Plus has released the beginnings of its API for third-party apps. All you can do so far is read a user’s public activity. What can you do with that?
- What do GNOME Online Accounts Do? It’s not obvious which services GNOME will use from each provider. Here’s where to find it.
- Why Google Buzz Won’t Run on Your Android Phone (Yet) (Obsolete) Buzz relies on several HTML5 features which were added to the browser with Android 2.0. Older versions support Gears instead, which may be the way to solve it.
- Workaround for Gmail being blocked by “Temporary Error” in Firefox on Fedora (Obsolete) In this case it was a Fedora-specific issue, but it could be worked around by holding down shift and hitting reload.
Blog Posts
- Privacy and Trust: Threads, Twitter and the Fediverse
Privacy has many layers. Keeping cloud files from leaking to another account is one layer. Not data-mining those files is another entirely!
- Tired of Eventbrite Spam
Eventbrite has worked well for buying tickets to events I’ve attended… But over the last few months I keep getting spam for events that are not only not remotely interesting, they aren’t anywhere NEAR me. Sorry, but I’m not hopping on a plane for a pub crawl on the other side of the continent or […]
- Oh, that’s NOT a Hammer!
From an ad Google sent out today for their new Pixel Tablet, where they’re plugging it as a hub for controlling “smart home” devices. At first glance, it looked like she was about to smash it with a hammer. I suppose that says something about my attitude toward IOT? (At second glance, it looked like […]
- Tech Giants’ Core Strategies
The Verge makes an interesting point about Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda: for the most part, Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you run their stuff on, they just want you to buy the software. So it’s less likely to be about trying to gain Xbox exclusives and more likely to be about getting more games for […]
- Internet Explorer Goes Chromium
Microsoft has confirmed: They’re building future versions of Edge on top of Chromium, bringing the web another step closer to monoculture.
- High-Rise Night: Trying out “Night Sight” on the Pixel 2 Camera
Google has a new camera mode on its Pixel phones called Night Sight, for handling low-light conditions. The short version is that instead of taking a long exposure, it takes a series of short exposures and stacks them to avoid motion blur from hand movements (plus a lot of additional processing). The long version is […]
- Not impressed with the Google Assistant
I’ve had the “Google Assistant” on my phone for a few weeks now. Since I don’t use the always-on voice activation, this means it’s pushing extra notifications based on what it thinks I want/can use. Fortunately it doesn’t do audio alerts, so it’s a lot less intrusive than it could be. I figured I’d give […]
- DST Google Photos Fail
Google Photos is overcompensating for the Daylight Saving Time switch on yesterday’s pictures. Photos taken at 6:00pm are labeled as 7:00pm. Everything from this summer/early fall (which might as well have been summer) is off, in the app anyway (the website shows the right time in PDT), which at least makes more sense than if […]
- Rediscover THIS Day, But Maybe Not THAT One!
Google Photos has been sending me its usual “Rediscover this day!” collages from Comic-Con 2013. On Tuesday it sent me a collage built from July 18, and on Thursday it sent me a collage built from July 20, marking Thursday and Saturday of the event. Wait, what about Friday? Well, here’s the interesting thing: Friday […]
- Google GPS Navigation Needs Traffic Prediction
On a long trip, traffic conditions change. Google Maps uses historic data to show weekday averages, so why not factor it into travel time in navigation?
- That’s Not What I Said!
Things Google speech recognition came up with when I searched for ‘The Lost Bean.’ You’d think that wouldn’t be too hard.
- G1 Will Get Android 2.1 After All (Update: No)
Android and Me is reporting that all Android phones in the U.S. will get Android 2.1 updates — even the G1 — but that they may be missing some features and some models will need to be wiped as part of the installation. That makes sense, because it would allow developers to reassign some of […]
- Nexus One Thoughts
Google’s Nexus One could well be my next phone…but I’m not ready to give up my physical keyboard just yet.
- Browse-o-Smart
After a week of playing with Chrome as my main browser, I’m back to Firefox. Chrome’s fast, but often won’t let me do really simple things I actually need.
- First Look Through Google Goggles
I tried out Google’s new Goggles app. Basically it lets you use the camera on an Android phone to do an image-based search. The examples include landmarks, book covers, artwork, logos, contact info, and places. So I played with it for a bit at home tonight. It’s good at picking out book covers and logos, […]
- Google It!
Whenever my site gets hits from Google’s Italian site, my brain insists on reading it as “Google It!”
- The Network PC Returns
So if I’ve got this right, Google Chrome OS is essentially booting your computer directly to a web browser? Thin clients really are back.
- Google Goats
It’s official: Google mows goats – er, mows with goats. Google’s Mountain View headquarters has fields that need to be kept clear of fire hazards. This year instead of mowing them, they took a low-carbon approach: they hired a herd of goats to eat the grass for a week. “It costs us about the same […]
- Social Bots
Amazing how many “people” are sending Facebook messages to the postmaster account, offering helpful links to resources for *ahem* improving uptime. On a related note: Google’s Social Graph thinks I own Cute Overload. It seems to treat all LiveJournal syndication feeds as one profile, and I linked to K2R’s LJ feed with XFN.
- Does That Have a Hyphen?
Why is it that Firefox consistently truncates the title “Google Analytics” at the worst possible spot?
- A Month with the G1
It’s been a little over a month since I upgraded to a T-Mobile G1. Overall I’ve been very happy with it. The Internet-related features are great, I’ve gotten used to how most of the functions work, and I’ve tried it out under various circumstances and played with a bunch of applications. The only problems I […]
- The G1: First Impressions
You may have noticed I’ve been looking for a smartphone for a while, and looking at the T-Mobile G1 more or less since it was announced. Well, I finally went for it. I was going through piles of papers on my desk and realized I had almost enough cashback bonus on one of my credit […]
- First Impressions of Google Chrome
Now that it’s live, I’ve downloaded the Google Chrome beta on my Windows box at work. Thoughts so far: Good: Site compatibility seems to be fine so far, with a couple of minor issues (see the “Bad” section). Mostly I’ve tested it with a couple of forum sites, LiveJournal, Slashdot, and WordPress. I like the […]
- Do No Evil?
Catching up on Slashdot this morning, I found the article on Google Chrome. Check out the number of comments:
- New Browser: Google Chrome
Google Chrome seems to be a multi-threaded open-source browser based on WebKit (with some code from Firefox as well), focusing on making a browser that will work well with web applications. It’s got built-in support for the Gears API (not surprising). And, like Firefox 3, IE8, and Opera 9.5, it’ll do full-history search & auto-suggest […]
- Foolish Links
IE9 to include alternative CSS.2012 standard instead of following anything remotely like the rest of the world. Social tagging initiative from WaSP to physically tag bad web designers. Opera hits 106/100 on Acid3 after discovering an Easter egg in the test. The openSUSE mailing list announced OpenSUSE 4.1, with KDE 4.1, GNOME 4.1, MP41 support, OpenOffice 4.1, XEN 4.1, VirtualBox 4.1, […]
- Not so Random
I wanted to take a look at Firefox’s error page a few minutes ago, so I selected the address bar and hit some random keys. Due to a lack of sleep last night and a day of caffeine, I’d forgotten that if it can’t find a site with a given hostname (and still can’t find […]
- Corporate Evolution
Hixie’s Natural Log: Evolution in the species “Companies” – Microsoft’s dominance of the industry has killed off or absorbed many smaller companies. Those that have survived are those with strategies resistant to Microsoft’s tactics. The article looks at Mozilla, Google, and Apple.
- This isn’t going to last long
Did a Google search just for the heck of it. I wonder how quickly those numbers will climb…
- On Google Moon
Google Maps has been extended to the moon, with all the Apollo landing sites marked. Be sure to experiment with zoom for full effect.