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I came across this “potentially exciting” announcement in Mashable today. After all, anything from Google is worth at least a look, particularly as it was seen (in the comments) as akin to Aardvark.
So, I tried it.
But, it only works through Google Talk which only works in Windows. As the title of this blog suggests, I’m not a big Windows user.
However, I do have it on one computer. So, I installed Google Talk which is very easy. Then I sent a chat invitation to guru@googlelabs.com and got set up to use Google Talk Guru.
After about 10 minutes using it, I knew I was never going to use this. First, there’s basically no new information available here. Nearly everything can be more conveniently obtained by simply typing a query in the Google Search Bar.
I also tried the translate command but found it to be very limited, in the Portuguese language at least which is what I used. About half the words I tried to translate from English gave me “Sorry, no results”.
In summary, I would have expected something better from Google but maybe it’ll be expanded.
If you’re an ardent command line user in Linux (or any other *nix OS for that matter), you may want to take a look at a great and ongoing thread on this subject in Quora.
There are a huge amount of tips and tricks included.
I’ve had this happen quite a few times to me using the Chromium browser in Ubuntu. Fixing it is easy — once you know how.
I found out how after I stumbled upon this thread.
All it involves is:
1. Using the chown command to reclaim ownership (to yourself from root) of the file /home/user/.config/chromium/Local State.
2. Doing the same with the file /home/user/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences.
Then reboot and everything should be fine. It was for me. Details in the link.
As most modern computers now have processors with more than one core, it’s surprising that Windows 7 boots without enabling all of them. Only one is used.
However, it’s very easy to reconfigure matters to get all of your cores to work during the boot as explained in this post from Lockergnome.
Actually, right now the only version of Windows I have on any of my computers is Windows XP which 10 years after its launch still works very well. However, no option to enable more than one processor core during boot is available for this ancient OS.
I might have a chance to try this out on a Windows 7 machine tomorrow. If so, I’ll add an edit to this post to let you know if my boot became faster or not.
There was a scare a week or so ago where a number of Gmail losers (temporarily) lost all of their stored emails. OK, it was only a short-term issue but maybe the next time it’ll be permanent.
Rather than waiting to find out if this prediction is true or not, it’s probably better to prevent this problem dumping your archived emails by doing a backup.
Lifehacker posted this article about backup apps for any type of email (web-based and programmed) which is useful. However, for sheer simplicity MailStore has got to be the choice app.
Unfortunately, it only works in Windows but it still free. I used it today to backup to my HDD the 2 GB of 5000 emails I’ve amassed over the 5 years I’ve been using Gmail. This took about one hour and a very through job was done.
I’m impressed and relieved that I got that done.
