Launched in 1980, Pac-Man is one of the most successful arcade games of all times. This year, Pac-Man turns 30 and Google created a playable Pac-Man doodle on its homepage on the launch day (22nd May).
Not only that, it is estimated that world over, 4.82 million hours have been spent playing the Google Pac-Man on the launch day alone, translating in $120 mn loss in economy. Nothing short of any record, the next time your company sends out those lay-off notices, you know who to blame. While that happens, all you need to do is Insert Coin to be a part of the Google doodle community.
From time to time, Google has added functionality to its products, particularly Gmail. It is quite worth keeping an eye on that ‘Labs’ link on top.
Today, I tell you about an exciting new use you could put your Gmail account to, reducing the number of open browser tabs (or windows) and making your Gmail box a step above others. You can add iGoogle gadgets into Gmail, and the best way to start off is to add the two hottest social media gadgets, Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s a step-by-step to enable the gadgets. You can find and add pretty much any gadget but the two below work best for me. Of course you can view them full-screen in place of your email rather than in the sidebar:
To install them, just do the following:
1. Go to Settings –> Labs, find “Add any gadget by URL” and activate it.
2. Find a XML gadget for Gmail or iGoogle.
3. Go to Settings –> Gadgets, enter the gadget URL into the text box and click Add.
These are the gadget URLs:
Twitter – http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml
Facebook – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml
That’s it!
Share other cool gadgets that you use in your Gmail box in the comments.
This one’s for all you gamers out there. While there are many genres of games available, each with their respective fan followings, driving games seem to enjoy a cult status as there are not many who *understand* the fun in going left right left right without any bloodshed!
Spike TV has announced a chance for all those driving games fans to vote for the best one out there. The nominees are:
Google has officially announced the upcoming launch of its much awaited lightweight Operating System, the Google OS. The operating system will be open-source and based on its Chrome browser.
Google intends to target the netbooks in the first phase.
The OS release is not to be confused with a remixed version of the Android phone platform.
Here’s an excerpt from the Google’s official blog post regarding the Chrome OS’ goals:
“We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”
More specifically, Chrome OS is planned to run on x86 and ARM-based processors, and its architecture is described as “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”
No specific launch date has been announced yet but surely, we’ll be updating as and when there’s any word about the availability.
I have posted about USB devices inspired by Transformers here & here. Not meaning to overdo the never ending list of gadgets inspired by Transformers, here’s a roundup of some cool USB gadgets to go with the Transformer craze.
An excerpt from Mark Burnett’s 2005 book Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, here’s a table of the “Top 500 Worst Passwords Of All Time.”
