Wii U Fails, Google Chrome Fails, COS Fails, Windows 8 Fails [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Nintendo admits the Wii U has failed, Chrome extensions are loaded with adware, the China Operating System is revealed, Paramount dumps 35mm film, Windows 8 is condemned as the new Vista, and Amazon wants to become the Nostradamus of online shopping. Nintendo Wii U Failure, Future Should Nintendo go software only? I’m on the fence. Seems inevitable. But: Atari & Sega. http://t.co/fSAOrhfqpi — Chris Dixon (@cdixon) January 20, 2014 Nintendo has admitted the Wii U is a complete and utter failure, announcing an operating loss for the current financial year and lowering its sales forecasts...

Read the full article: Wii U Fails, Google Chrome Fails, COS Fails, Windows 8 Fails [Tech News Digest]

Feedly Launches URL Shortener For Sharing What You Read With RSS

Feedly has come out with a new URL shortening service that it hopes will foster more sharing and also promote its own RSS reader service. You can recognize it as feedly.com/e. A default URL shortener built into the popular reader application will also help Feedly users pack in more when they share something via Twitter. The feature is available for both free and pro customers of the service. You can activate it from Preferences and switch it off if you don’t want Feedly to gather link sharing analytics from your activity. Respecting the right of publishers to their content, the...

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POLL: How Much Free Space Did You Manage To Get From Dropbox?

Last week we asked you about CES, and gave you a chance to tell us what was your favorite new gadget this year. Personally, I thought this CES was pretty exciting, but it seems that most of you don’t agree. Nevertheless, one cool gadget did come out on top, and by quite a margin. There were 12 options in this poll, including the option to vote for “other”. To save you from having to read through an endless list of results, I’ll focus on those that did significantly better than their counterparts: Out of the 229 votes on this poll,...

Read the full article: POLL: How Much Free Space Did You Manage To Get From Dropbox?

What Is Creative Commons, And Should You Use It?

While writing out your next academic paper, you look online for various images which are appropriate for what you’re talking about. Once you find something you like, you simply copy and paste it because, hey, who’s stopping you? More than likely, doing this is technically illegal. Not only that, but it applies to most content that you can find online — including posts/articles and videos. To make things easier on both content creators and consumers, Lawrence Lessig created the suite of Creative Commons licenses, a set of copyright licenses which clarify what you can do with content licensed with one...

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Watch Out StubHub, Razorgator Is Coming For The Second Hand Ticket Crown

The best way to get tickets is to get them the moment they go on sale. Sadly, this just isn’t possible all the time, as some events can sell out in a matter of seconds, and then you’re left with an empty feeling, knowing that you are going to miss out on what could be the event of a lifetime. Or are you? There is a massive second-hand ticket market — where people end up not being able to attend an event, or those who just bought the tickets with the intent of flipping them for a profit — go...

Read the full article: Watch Out StubHub, Razorgator Is Coming For The Second Hand Ticket Crown

Chrome Doesn't Delete Old Extension Folders

There's something very annoying about Chrome. It now keeps all the old versions of your extensions and apps. I remember that Chrome used to only keep the current version and the previous version, just like it handles Chrome releases.



If you've installed many extensions and apps, it's likely that the Extensions folder from your Chrome profile uses many hundreds of megabytes. Some apps are pretty big now: for example, the latest version of Polycraft uses 76.6 MB. It's obvious that a single application could use 1 GB after a few updates.



Here's another example: the LastPass extensions. I've checked my profile folder and Chrome keeps 11 versions of this extension since October 2013. Total disk usage: 107 MB, instead of 9.6 MB for the latest version.

Obviously, the old versions are useless and this is a bug. There's a bug report from a Google employee here and it mentions that "the Google+ Photos app is a fairly large app (56MB) which updates frequently (weekly?). It does not appear that older versions get deleted. For the G+ photos app which takes 56MB, I had over 700MB of old versions on my drive."



Until Google fixes this bug, you can manually delete the old versions. Go to your profile folder and open the Extensions folder. Every extension and app has its own folder with a cryptic name (the extension ID), so you can open each one and delete all the subfolders except for the most recent one. For example, LastPass's folder is named hdokiejnpimakedhajhdlcegeplioahd and it has a subfolder for each version. You can sort them by name or by date and keep the most recent version (3.0.22_0).

Google Chrome 32 Brings Data Compress To Mobiles, Website Shortcuts to Android

With each new update of the Chrome browser, Google brings something new to the table. Chrome 32 for mobile has a significant new feature though: the ability to automatically reduce your data consumption. Additionally, Android users can create shortcuts to websites on the homescreen and iOS users get a taste of the Translate feature. But the big news, of course, is data consumption. The new data compression and bandwidth management feature claims it can reduce data usage by up to 50% on either Android or iOS. There are already ways to curb mobile data usage, but this promises to be...

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tinySpell Adds Spell Check To Notepad, WordPad, And All Windows Programs

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



The Notepad program has been the part of all versions of Windows operating system ever since its introduction with Windows 1.0, back in 1995. While Microsoft has enhanced and overhauled most of the areas of Windows operating system in the recent versions of Windows, the Notepad program hasn’t seen much love from the developers at […]

Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google reveals its smart contact lenses for diabetics, the NSA is accused of collecting millions of random text messages, Facebook announces Trending, Spotify kills its listening time limits, Rdio goes free on the Web, Google Chrome gets a fancy update on Windows 8, and Cecelia Abadie is cleared of driving while Glassing. Google Reveals Smart Contact Lenses I can’t even look at my Google Glass now. Told ‘em, “Why are you so big? Why can’t you be contact lenses.” They’re feeling all bad now. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 17, 2014 Google has revealed it’s...

Read the full article: Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google reveals its smart contact lenses for diabetics, the NSA is accused of collecting millions of random text messages, Facebook announces Trending, Spotify kills its listening time limits, Rdio goes free on the Web, Google Chrome gets a fancy update on Windows 8, and Cecelia Abadie is cleared of driving while Glassing. Google Reveals Smart Contact Lenses I can’t even look at my Google Glass now. Told ‘em, “Why are you so big? Why can’t you be contact lenses.” They’re feeling all bad now. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 17, 2014 Google has revealed it’s...

Read the full article: Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google reveals its smart contact lenses for diabetics, the NSA is accused of collecting millions of random text messages, Facebook announces Trending, Spotify kills its listening time limits, Rdio goes free on the Web, Google Chrome gets a fancy update on Windows 8, and Cecelia Abadie is cleared of driving while Glassing. Google Reveals Smart Contact Lenses I can’t even look at my Google Glass now. Told ‘em, “Why are you so big? Why can’t you be contact lenses.” They’re feeling all bad now. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 17, 2014 Google has revealed it’s...

Read the full article: Smart Contact Lenses, NSA Text Collection, Facebook Trending Topics [Tech News Digest]

Find Legal Images On Google With A New Filter

Contrary to popular belief, pictures found on Google Images are not free to use any way you want. Google has recognized this belief is widespread, so they have now implemented a new filter in their search results that will show you the images which are legal to use. Using it is very simple. After entering your search term, click on the “search tools” option in the menu bar. That will drop down to reveal more options, including “Usage Rights“. Then choose the license you are looking for, and the search results will update instantly. The first results are often from...

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No More Google Notifier

Google Notifier will no longer be available. It was an app for Windows and Mac that displayed notifications for Gmail and Google Calendar in the system tray, while also allowing you to set Gmail as the default mail client for your computer.

Google sent this message, which suggests some alternatives:

We're writing to let you know about an important change to Google Notifier Beta. Starting on 31 January, Google Notifier Beta will no longer be supported, meaning that the app will no longer show recent emails and calendar events.



Since Google Notifier Beta was launched in 2005, a lot has changed. Smartphones can now notify us of new messages wherever we are, and improvements to web technology enable similar features to be built right into the browser.



If you want to continue to receive notifications, you can use any of the following alternatives to Google Notifier Beta, using the Chrome browser. To see the number of unread messages in your inbox at a glance, install the Gmail Checker Chrome app. To preview new messages on your desktop, go to Gmail's settings and enable Desktop Notifications. You can uninstall Google Notifier Beta by following these instructions.

It's funny to see that the app was still in beta.



{ Thanks, Koen. }

Google Music Timeline

Google found a great way to use the data from the people who uploaded songs to Google Play Music. Google Music Timeline "shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre."

The timeline starts in 1950, data is is normalized by the total number of albums from a certain year and there's no classical music.



Mouse over a genre to find popular albums, search for an album or artist.



{ via John Mueller }

Google's Experimental Search Box for Financial Sites

Google experiments with displaying a search box next to sites like Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, Reuters. There's a button with the following label: "get quotes" and you're supposed to use this feature if you want to search for share prices.



For example, when you type [Google] or [GOOG], you're sent to the right page from Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and other financial sites. If you search for [computers], you'll get a search results page from the financial site. Is this the first time when Google shows a search box and doesn't return its own results?

I checked the source page and it says that it's a rich snippet, just like those that are used for reviews, music, events, products.



{ via Rubén }

Read Feedly Offline: Download Unread Items To An Ebook

The Google News downloading service NewsToEbook now works with Feedly. With it you can download your unread items from Feedly to an EPUB or MOBI ebook file, which you can then read on your offline e-reader. Kindle, Kobo, Nook and even your tablet all support one format or the other, so this will work for you. The ecosystem of apps surrounding Google Reader didn’t completely collapse when Google shut down the service in July, 2013 – but it did take some applications longer to adjust than others. NewsToEbook, which could download your Google Reader feeds as an ebook, was basically...

Read the full article: Read Feedly Offline: Download Unread Items To An Ebook

First-Time Shopper On Ebay? 5 Important Things You Need To Know

Welcome to Ebay Shopping 101. You are the select few, chosen to be trained as sharp-shooting Ebay bidders, capable of finding the best deals and winning every auction. So pull up a chair and let’s get started. Shopping on Ebay isn’t really like shopping on Amazon or any other shopping site. On most sites, you search for the product you like, find it, and if there are enough left, you buy it at the best fixed price you can find and then wait for it to arrive in the mail. On Ebay, not so much. There are a few important...

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Google Updates Chrome For Windows 8, Adds Noisy Tab Feature And Desktop-like UI

Chrome users on Windows 8 can expect an update rolling out to their browser today that includes a “Noisy Tabs” feature and Chrome OS-like desktop environment. The largest visual change is only noticeable if you run Chrome in “Windows 8 Mode”, a special mode Microsoft has set up for Web browsers that allows them to run in a pseudo-Modern app form. Chrome now appears visually like Chrome OS in this mode. There is a grey background and multiple Chrome windows can be opened within the environment. There’s even a “shelf” that can run along the bottom, left, or right side...

Read the full article: Google Updates Chrome For Windows 8, Adds Noisy Tab Feature And Desktop-like UI

Google Updates Chrome For Windows 8, Adds Noisy Tab Feature And Desktop-like UI

Chrome users on Windows 8 can expect an update rolling out to their browser today that includes a “Noisy Tabs” feature and Chrome OS-like desktop environment. The largest visual change is only noticeable if you run Chrome in “Windows 8 Mode”, a special mode Microsoft has set up for Web browsers that allows them to run in a pseudo-Modern app form. Chrome now appears visually like Chrome OS in this mode. There is a grey background and multiple Chrome windows can be opened within the environment. There’s even a “shelf” that can run along the bottom, left, or right side...

Read the full article: Google Updates Chrome For Windows 8, Adds Noisy Tab Feature And Desktop-like UI

Google Works on a Fitness API for Android

Wearables are now the next big thing. A lot of companies develop smart watches, smart glasses and head-up displays, smart headphones, smart clothes. They all include low-power sensors that can obtain information about your health, your activities, the things you see.



Android 4.4 supports some new sensors for detecting and counting steps. These sensors are implemented in hardware and are only available on Nexus 5.



Google now works on a Fitness API for Android which will allow applications to view and edit fitness data. They can "view and edit your fitness tracking, health and activities data, including reading and writing raw and transformed data". This might allow Google to store data obtained from multiple sources to your Google account so that other applications can process it, show charts and other useful information.

It's not clear if this new API will be available in the next Android release or in Google Play Services.



{ Thanks, Florian. }