kbps » Google

Full Movies on Google Video?

Jay — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:15:03 +0000

Last night I watched Network on Google Video, because Moonlight, Novell’s open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight, isn’t quite ready to do Netflix streaming.

How is it that people are getting away with posting full, copyrighted movies on Google Video?

New Firefox Badges!

Jay — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:03:44 +0000

I felt that these didn’t get specific enough, so here are some custom messages for users of other browsers.

Google’s Left Margin or: Hey, Twitter’s Good for Something

Jay — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:41:46 +0000

I noticed a short while ago that the left margin on Google’s search results pages seemed to have increased, and the logo’s size decreased. I asked a friend if he’d noticed, and he said that he hadn’t.

I searched Google for ‘google left margin,’ turning up no results. Of course, if it only happened this morning, nothing written about it would likely have been indexed by Google yet — unless they blogged about adding a dozen pixels to their margin, which seemed unlikely. But I had a hunch that if other people were noticing it, they must be talking about it, somewhere.

That somewhere, of course, is Twitter, where my suspicion was confirmed. The tagline for search.twitter.com (See what’s happening — right now.) is right — there’s really no better place to go to find out what people are saying about something that happened between five minutes and a couple hours ago.

Weird Text Shadows on Google Reader in Firefox 3.1/3.5 Betas

Jay — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:58:42 +0000

Does anybody else get these? When you navigate to your labels or subscriptions using keyboard shortcuts, the highlighted item in this modal window thing has a text “shadow” or duplicate sitting ten pixels over to the left. It’s been bothering me for a while now and I can’t find anybody else talking about it. I guess I’m supposed to file a bug?

Google using inline CSS?

Jay — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:05:30 +0000

With only one font-family? And it’s Arial? The nerve!

Celebrating 5 years of Gmail

I don’t have Arial installed, so this shows up as my default serif, because they don’t even bother to include the generic ‘sans-serif’ font-family.

Waiting for Android

Jay — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:37:15 +0000

After playing with Ben’s iPhone for several minutes this weekend, I became convinced that I needed one. My two-year-old Motorola has started to get to me, and while I know that it will need to be replaced soon, maybe out of necessity, I don’t want to rush into anything until I get a better idea of the kind of potential there is in Google Android. Right now the only phone running Android is on T-Mobile, so I may have to wait until next spring or later to learn (a) whether Android has any promise as an iPhone competitor, and (b) whether it will be available on a decent phone on AT&T. Until then I’m trying to swipe up my sister’s old first-generation iPhone for a small price to keep me afloat. The text-messaging interface alone will be worth it, 3G or not.

Google favicons

Jay — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:52:20 +0000

Almost everyone must have noticed by now that Google has a new favicon for its search/news/maps/etc. pages. I personally hate it, I think aside from being drab, it actually doesn’t immediately evoke “Google.” That lower-case ‘g’ is not as recognizable as they seem to be hoping. It’s unfortunate for them that they’ve ended up with few and meager iconic brand signifiers. Their full ‘logo’ (if you can call it that) doesn’t scale well; maybe the most they have going for them is their color scheme, although it is strikingly similar to Windows’/Microsoft’s long-standing color scheme. It’s really got them handcuffed until they can gracefully re-brand with something more versatile. Good to know, then, that it’s only temporary.

I’ve also noticed this Google Reader favicon showing up momentarily as the site loads, though only in Opera. It resembles the large logo on the official Google Reader blog, and I can’t figure out what’s causing it — what is it that Opera is loading before the stylesheet tells it to look elsewhere?

No, I didn’t.

Jay — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:44:25 +0000