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Google eBooks

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

While I’m enjoying my Cr-48, it has a few drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is that you can’t install any programs on it, other than Chrome extensions and apps. This is a big hurdle towards reading eBooks on the device – Amazon’s Kindle requires an application to be installed on the device, whether it’s a PC, Mac, or mobile platform.

Luckily Google saw this too, and came up with Google eBooks. As most of Google’s products, this is completely web-based. And as thus, it’s easy to see how they can provide a seamless reading experience between different devices: you can read a book on your PC, then continue exactly where you left off on your smart phone.

The selection of books is pretty broad. Google eBooks touts 3 million selections. And not just Computers & Internet, but also Mystery, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc.

 

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , ,

Get Cr-48 camera working again with YouTube

April 12, 2011 By 4 Comments

I played around with the Cr-48 camera a few weeks ago, and noticed that you can easily upload video to YouTube. Today I noticed it was broken – YouTube said that no camera was detected.

Luckily the fix was only a Google search away. It turns out that on the about:plugins page there are two Flash players shown. Disable the one that has version number 10.2.158.6, path /opt/google/chrome/pepper/libpepflashplayer.so. Reopen the YouTube upload page, and all should be well.

(Thanks to Google Groups, Cr-48 Test Pilots)

Filed Under: Network Tagged With: , , ,

Google bringing Google I/O to the world with I/O Live

April 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google announced Thursday that they will be bringing Google I/O to the web, naming it I/O Live.

After the tickets to Google I/O sold out in under an hour, Google decided to do the same thing several other companies (notably Progress with their Exchange conference) and bring the presentations to the web. They will be streaming live video from the two largest conference rooms, capturing the keynotes, but also session from Android and Chrome. There will be real-time captions of the live streams courtesy of Google Translate. And last but not least, you can submit questions directly to the sandbox developers.

Google I/O 2011 starts at 9AM PDT on May 10th.

Filed Under: Features, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , ,

Latest updates for Google Chrome OS

April 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Last week a few updates came through for both the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, and for the Cr-48 netbook.

Two major changes made are the change to use the click functionality of the Cr-48 mousepad to eliminate the problems with the tap, and the capability of the Chrome to accept voice input.

The ‘click’ functionality is actually a change to the default settings in the Chrome OS. The initial installation of Chrome had Enable Tap-to-click enabled as far as I remember. The new default for this is disabled, which prevents accidental clicking by resting the mouse of your hand on the mousepad. I feel the disabled option is working a little better.

The biggest thing is that Chrome OS is now capable of speech recognition. Currently there are a few fields that are enabled for speech recognition, mainly simple text fields. This is new functionality being developed in HTML5, and is a preview from the HTML Speech Incubator group. I have the Speechify plugin enabled, which shows a little microphone next to any field that allows speech input. I can’t wait for it to be enabled on multi-line text widgets, so I can dictate blogposts… :-)

A minor change is the Chrome logo, which has become a little simpler: the old logo sported a 3D look with a small reflection on it, the new logo sports a more 2D look with clearer colors.

 

Filed Under: Network Tagged With: , , ,

ICT MxR lab responds to Google’s April Fools joke by implementing it

April 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

ICT MxR lab responded to Google’s April Fools joke by implementing their gesture interface in about one hour. To accomplish that, they used a toolkit called FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) and implemented the program SLOOW (Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving). It uses the XBox Kinect system to capture the human motions. See for yourself what a simple prank can lead to:

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , ,
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