On Thursday, Google rolled out an update to its personalized home page service, iGoogle. Among other UI updates, the major new features were increased flexibility in what “gadgets”, the personalized “chunks” that make up an iGoogle start page, can do. This, in turn, allows developers much more freedom with what they can provide to the user through an iGoogle gadget.

Previously, gadgets could only occupy a small box that took up only a third of the screen. While this was okay for reading headlines or perhaps glancing at stock prices, it limited the usefulness of gadgets and the information that could be provided. For more detail, users would often have to click a link in the gadget that would take them away from iGoogle. While this is perhaps the proper use of a “start page”, Google may now see things differently.

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Yesterday, Rock Band 2 was officially released for Playstation 3 across North America. I managed to snag a copy of the SE Bundle after some looking around. Here’s a brief overview of what you get along with my initial impressions. Expect a full(er) review later. And yes, I am going to be lazy and link to the Wikipedia article on Rock Band 2 for those of you in need of some background information. (For those of you looking for just unboxing photos, we have those too, along with a comparison between instruments of Rock Band 1 and Rock Band 2)

For $190 US/CAD (the CAD version actually being cheaper with the exchange rate changes of late), you get the updated guitar, improved wireless drums, microphone, and of course, the game. For comparision, the original Rock Band SE bundle cost only $170 US when it was released 11 months ago. So, where is the extra $20 going to?

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Today was voting day in the 2008 Canadian Federal Election. I just got back from voting, and thankfully the polling station was nearby (just as with the Ontario Provincial Election last year), being only a five-minute walk away from my building.

I headed over there right after work and was surprised to see that the polling station was not busy at all. It was in the gymnasium of a secondary school and I was the only person voting at the time. (Though I did see people coming in on my way out) Perhaps this was to be expected, as Belleville is a community with quite a few retirees who probably voted earlier in the day.

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Today was the PEC Marathon, something I’ve been looking forward to for the past little while.

Yesterday, I was very anxious and somewhat nervous. Ate a decent breakfast, a small lunch and a huge pasta dinner around 5 PM. I may have overate, as I felt somewhat bloated, however I knew I had to since big breakfasts and running do not go well for me. I woke up just past 5 AM, having almost overslept (something turned off my alarm clock, well at least I don’t remember turning it off…) and ate a small breakfast. (Coffee and a smoothie) Thankfully my bathroom schedule was in order. Continued

I recently signed up for the PEC Marathon, which this year is on October 5th. This will be my first marathon and I’m looking forward to it.

I actually have not been doing any strict “marathon training” per se, but have just been running my regular schedule for most of the summer, which consists of a 10K run three times a week. I usually run it at a relatively quick pace (for me), finishing it in around 41-42 minutes. Continued

The Acer Aspire One has certainly taken the world by storm, proving itself to be the first viable competitor to the dominance established by Asus and their Eee PC. The so called “netbook” market has also exploded, less than year after Asus introduced the first Eee PCs. Netbooks, also known as subnotebooks, are low-cost laptops designed primarly for Internet usage and other tasks that don’t require lots of power.

It’s been some time since I first unboxed the Aspire One and then got a 6-cell version to test and compare with. The 6-cell version will be the one I am reviewing since it’s the one I’m currently using.

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Since Chrome’s official release some two days ago it certainly has gotten a lot of press, both positive and negative.

What’s good

On the positive side, there are some reports that Chrome’s market share has already surpassed that of Opera, coming in at close to 2.5% when I last checked. These results should be taken with a grain of salt, as Clicky’s web analytics might only be used by websites that tend to be visited by those more technically-inclined and thus more likely to try out something like Chrome. (Though Chrome’s visibility on Google’s main page no doubt has some small part in its fast growth)

For what it’s worth, Google Analytics on my lowly-trafficked site amounted to over 4% of hits in the past five days. (Google Analytics has since started identifying Chrome as a specific browser type, no surprise)

Chrome browser share on my site

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After much speculation yesterday, marked by a leaked web comic and finally an acknowledgment by Google, Google Chrome, the much anticipated web browser, is here.

I encourage you to download it and give it a try, as I did as soon as it came out. Here are some of my initial impressions.

Overview

Google released a fairly long web comic that delves into quite a bit of detail about Chrome – it’s not your typical comic! Touted as being built “from scratch”, Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, the same one that powers Safari and Konqueror.

The first thing you notice is how minimal the “Chrome” or UI of Chrome is. If you’re used to a half-dozen toolbars, buttons and widgets all over the place, Chrome will seem like a greenfield to you. By default, there is only a tab bar and then an address bar containing back, forward, a combined reload-stop button and the address bar. There are also buttons for bookmarking a site and for page and browser settings. The bookmarks bar is not displayed unless you specifically change that setting.

Keyboard shortcuts are also present so that you don’t have to click through context menus. If you’re used to the keyboard shortcuts of Firefox and IE7 you’ll be pleased to know that most of them transfer over without change: Ctrl-T opens a new Tab, Ctrl-W/Ctrl-F4 closes a tab, Alt-D focuses the address bar and Ctrl-J opens Downloaded Files.

The address bar also functions as a search bar, and this combination just makes sense. It’s something I’ve always been doing using Firefox Quick Searches

By default the home/start page is set to set to show an Opera-style “Speed Dial” page containing most recently-accessed pages/bookmarks. You can also configure Chrome to restore the previous tabs/websites on startup, which is my personal preference ever since I started using Firefox.

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Since my initial unboxing of the Acer Aspire One, I’ve managed to get my hands on a 6-cell version for testing. I was interested in seeing what this unit was like, considering that most complaints stemmed from the inadequate battery life of the 3-cell version, which was also evident to me. Here are some comparison pictures to help you decide whether the extra bulk is worth the additional run time. My opinion follows.

Update

I’ve since completed my full review of the Aspire One. Please read if you’re interested.

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I finally received my much-awaited Acer Aspire One this week and have been enjoying it ever since. I ordered the 1 GB/120 GB HDD/Windows XP Home edition from DirectCanada.com last Friday (an online store that is most likely a front for NCIX.com, which I’ve also ordered from) and the package arrived on Monday – this was with the free shipping option!

Update

I’ve since completed my full review of the Aspire One. Please read if you’re interested.

I’m still forming my final opinion of the device but my initial impression was very positive – I don’t have any major complaints. The device is well-designed, stylish, easy-to-use and very snappy. The 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 that powers the laptop is more than enough for the things you’ll the Aspire One – and it supports hyper-threading and so shows up as “two” cores in Windows.

The Canadian Keyboard

The one downside to the Aspire One that is specific to the Canadian version is the inclusion of a “bilingual” keyboard layout. Apparently, it is required(?) that laptop vendors sell a version of the laptop with this layout in the Canadian market, so many laptop vendors are just switching completely over to this layout for their Canadian versions in order to simplify things and not have to deal with multiple models. This keyboard layout differs from a standard “US” keyboard layout in two ways:

• The left-shift is shortened to half-size and a pipe/backslash key is placed to the right of it, between the left-shift and the ‘Z’ key.
• The enter key is not on a single row, but is instead an inverted L-shape. Another pipe/backslash key is placed to the left of it, in between the enter key and the quote (“) key. Thus, the pipe/backslash key is moved down from the “QWERTY” row to the “ASDF” row.

This is an absurd layout and probably no one more than I hates it; it makes no sense that a “bilingual” layout would require such a ridiculous change. However, after typing on it for a bit, it becomes apparent that it’s not that horrible. The biggest problem is the poor positioning of the backslash key, which makes typing Windows-style pathnames difficult. The extra key near the left-shift can hopefully be remapped using the registry editor or some helpful utilities.

Photos

Expect a full review in the future. In the meantime, check out of some of the unboxing photos below or see the full set in my Zooomr photostream.

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