Here’s a cool little Java plugin for your browser that allows you to plant bombs in places on a website and experience the joy when a bomb explodes, rendering the text unreadable and leaving a “hole” in the page. Pretty fun way to waste time.
fontBomb - Stylishly destroy the web from Philippe-Antoine Lehoux on Vimeo.
A friend of mine posted this on my Facebook wall. It’s a really cool chart showing the market share of internet browsers over the past 8 years. IE and Firefox own a majority but Chrome (my browser of choice) has taken quite a chunk in its short life.
Check it out in all its glory here: http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html
Want to try out Chrome OS a little? Well now you can – via Virtual Machine. There has been a virtual version of Google Chrome made available completely free, you just have to have VMWare or VirtualBox (free) installed. You can head over to GDGT.com Google Chrome Virtual Machines to get image files for VirtualBox and VMWare. (I was only able to successfully install the VMDK (VMWare link) version so I'm not sure what the "VirtualBox" link does).
A few things to keep in mind, I did not create the image, it came from a torrent. This means that some open source guy could have injected some code to steal your Google info, probably not, but it could happen. Just use alternate/junk Google account credentials and that potential threat is nipped. Second, this is virtual machine, hopefully the people reading this blog are experienced enough to know that with a virtual machine, the OS will never run natively and the performance will reflect that. There will be no 10 second boot time and you may find things to be more sluggish than the native OS (running on a SSD no less) will perform way better.
OK, so I don't have VMWare so here are instructions on how to do this on VirtualBox. Download VirtualBox for whatever OS you have from here: VirtualBox Downloads. Install VirtualBox and start it. Click the "New" button:
A wizard will start and walk you through the OS setup process. Click Next:
Type in the name for your OS and select Linux for the OS Type and Ubuntu for the Version. Click Next.
Select the amount of RAM you want to give the machine and click Next.
Now extract the compressed VMDK image file you downloaded because it needs to be loaded into VirtualBox.
Select to "Use existing hard disk" and click the folder icon to navigate to the VMDK image file you just extracted. Click Next.
Review the settings and click Finish.
Now you can highlight the OS you just installed and click "Start"
The OS comes up as "chromium os" and the log in is via a valid Google account.
Have fun!
Google previewed Chrome OS, a new operating system based on Linux and the Chrome browser. It's very early on, as there's not even a beta available for it, but it seems pretty exciting. The OS runs within a Chrome browser. The idea is to provide an OS for people who just get on the internet, it boots up in about 10 seconds, has no file system, and no installing of apps. The OS can detect USB devices like external drives, or smartphones and uses a notepad which can create Google Docs documents. Web apps can be launched from persistent app panels and things like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, and others can be minimized to "panels" and run in the background. Google is very up front in saying that Chrome OS is focused on very clear use for people who primarily use the web and they are not at all trying to "do everything".
Google has talked details on a launch but they say that "by this time next year" it will be available and it won't run on just any device – there are going to be some specific hardware requirements. For example, the biggest thing is that Chrome OS won't run on anything other than solid-state drives. This means you will have to have a "Chrome approved device" which is an interesting move by Google. But since the thing is open source, there can potentially be many different hacks that allow it to be installed on anything.
For more info, check out the coverage on Engadget.com:
