Saturday, February 19, 2011

Google Knows That "He's Dead Jim"

Okay, this was cute.


Annoying that the page broke, but this made me smile. Cheers!

Is this just a Chromium OS thing? Or do we get the same message in the Chrome browser? The wording is definitely different than the usual crash page I've seen.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

HTML Entities The HTML Entities

So I was changing some documentation earlier and it had some UTF-8 characters grabbed from a database that I needed to encode and show the HTML entities. For example, I want to display the HTML entities of "básico" (excluding the quotes). I was already doing an htmlentities, but the string was displaying the encoded version on the site.

Five Minutes of Scratching My Head...

Duh! htmlentities(htmlentities()) Tada! "básico".

My ID:10T moment of the day that I figured I would share!

Cheers!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Holy Spam CR-48 List!

Hi all. We wanted to apologize for the emails that were sent to this group tonight.
A bug in our script to invite users to a Chrome notebook discussion group accidentally signed everyone up to receive email by default. We have turned off all posting to the group for now while we try to see what happened.

From the Chrome Notebook Pilor Users Group

I, like the rest of the CR48 testers, was added to the CR-48 Google Group and got emailed a good ~68 or so emails. It's Saturday morning and I usually just catch up with sleep on the weekends so I slept through all ~68 or so CR-48 Google Groups spam. So though my G1 battery is in need of charging (I'm used to it since the G1 battery is horrible), I now know that there's an official Google Groups for the CR-48 users!

Next time, one email and a heads up would suffice. ;)

Cheers!

P.S. I like the redesign of Google Groups!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

CR-48: Sound Not Working

This may be fixed now that I've updated to the latest Chromium build, but if anyone else has this issue, please do chime in.

So occasionally when I have a video up or even streaming music, the sound will just be static and fuzz. The quick fix (yet annoying) is to close the laptop and re-open it, then the sound will work just fine.

I'll post an update if this happens again with this latest build.

Cheers!

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Geek Culture Will Never Die...or Be Popular | Will Greenwald | PCMag.com

Popular Geek Culture

So this article PCMag has about "Geek Culture" was in my feed this morning on Slashdot. If you've got the five to ten minutes, I suggest you give it a quick read.

The article dives into another view on geeks and how some may argue that it has hit the mainstream. This is a similar topic I wrote about a little while back.

Get It Right

More or less, I have to agree with the article; a lot of the "geek culture" that is dramatized in popular television shows or movies is really just ridiculous!

Take for example the popular television show, 24. I was a fan, and I was very sad to see it go, but I would always laugh at their usage of technical terms. It would sound more or less like, "they've subnet'd our firewall and ping'd our VPN!" Which, if you're a technologist like myself, you would probably laugh, shake your head in disgust, and shrug it off. But on the other hand, 24 was a very successful show and entertained millions of viewers.

Geek Credentials

Okay sure, the term "geek" is up for debate. I'm not here to define what a geek really is or how you can determine if you are one or not. The term "geek" just seems to have become less offensive over the years and has become part of our culture.

In response to Will Greenwald's view on the topic, I for one am not a gamer, though I can build a computer (actually, just installed a new video card on my parents' PC two days ago), I've written code on VAX, et cetera, et cetera. Am I a geek? I do believe so. But because a small percentage of people know what I'm talking about, that's why geek culture is truly not in the mainstream.

I think Greenwald got it pretty accurately when he said, "There is no thin line between geek culture and pop culture. There's a big, thick wall between the two". Geek culture never really was popular, a few things here and there are a bit more popular, but nothing in depth.

Geek Culture Will Never Die...or Be Popular | Will Greenwald | PCMag.com

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Fiabee: Files In the Cloud

I just wanted to drop a quick line about Fiabee. If you haven't messed around with storing files in the cloud yet, check these guys out.

Files On All Devices

They support Android devices (which I haven't tried yet, but will) and [obviously] Chrome (perhaps other browsers too, but they're in the Chrome Web Store). I previously found out I can upload videos in Google Docs, so that is wonderful, but Fiabee gave me 15gb of space (early adopters only; apparently it's only 1gb of space now) and that is a wonderful amount for me to play with.

Online Streaming

I uploaded a couple of MP3s to test around and awesome, I can stream them online! I can't seem to build a playlist, so that's kind of lame, but this site has a lot of potential.


There is a 7mb upload limit which is horribly low. So, I'm searching for a small video to test.

Buggy

When I first installed this on my CR48, I had some odd layout issues after installing it, but I ended up installing it on my other computers and it is working fine.
Like I said, I uploaded MP3s; I only see one listed under "Music". Though, I do see all of my files in "My Files". Odd.

Anyhow, not bad for cloud storage. By the way, the AJAX on that site is phenomenal! Cheers!

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Google Docs Supports Video Uploads Now

Videos in the Cloud

I logged in to Google Docs yesterday and a nice little pop-up had notified me that I can now upload and watch videos in the cloud!


Now this is all good and fine, but with such a limited amount of space on Google Docs, is Google going to give me an increase of space? How does copyright permissions affect this? I wouldn't mind putting up some DVR videos so I could watch it wherever I would like instead of wherever the file is.

This is definitely a helpful thing on my CR-48. It is also something that can possibly support my [lack of] DLNA issue. Maybe I'll try and upload a movie or tv show that I have to see if Google Docs supports it (and/or if I'll get in trouble for doing so).

This is still a cool idea. Thanks Google! Cheers!