Google movies/films screenshot

Ever heard of Google Films? If you don’t have a sure, fast and informed way of knowing about movie showtimes near you, Google Films might just be what you are looking for.

Google Films does not only provide you with a list of most movies showing in theatres near you, it also allows you to search for a specific movie’s showtime.

Each movie listed on Google Films comes with a short summary. It also carries the movie’s genre, duration, rating (watch out for the little yellow stars), a link to its IMDB page and sometimes a link to its trailer on Apple.com. As the experience would not have been complete without a map, Google makes sure to provide you with one so you can visually access the proximity of theatres showing the movie that you are looking for.

A slight drawback of Google Films, however, is that it provides data for big towns mostly right now, so you wouldn’t be finding cinema listings near you if your town is a small one.

This is what you get if you click on “I’m feeling lucky” on Google’s homepage without entering any term in the search bar.

It is a countdown clock and it is counting down the seconds left till the 1st of January 2010.

Google is obviously up to something to celebrate the coming new year. Speculations are varied. While some are wagering on yet another prank on the part of the search giant, others are expecting a major surprise release for this new decade.

No statement has yet been made on the part of Google and this certainly is feeding all the mystery around this countdown clock.

It should be noted that the countdown clock is visible only on English-based Google homepages such as Google.co.uk, Google.au or Google.mu, as in my case. The same thing on Google.fr, the French homepage, gives this:

Will the surprise be in English only? We could bet it will. Is Google Chrome OS English release under way? The question remains…

More than one year after its release for Windows in September 2008, Google Chrome is now available for Linux and Mac users since December 8, 2009.

As an Ubuntu user, this felt like an early Christmas gift and I guess that’s just what Google Product Manager Brian Rakowski meant too as he announced: “It’s been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users’ wish lists.”
As expected, Google Chrome for Linux is lightweight. The minimalist design without the unnecessary and clustered toolbars, gives more space to actually view web pages.

Google Chrome for Linux also includes themes that are tightly integrated with native Linux GTK themes as it’s always great to have a personalised browser!

A very useful feature in Chrome is the little upload bar found down on the left that shows the percentage upload. This works great with sites that do not provide the percentage of completed upload, like Facebook album picture upload, for instance.

The launching of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac lays yet another stone towards the ultimate release of Chrome OS, Google’s forthcoming operating system, which focuses on speed, reliability and security. For instance, Google Chrome is expected to crash rarely as each tab operates in isolation and therefore a buggy page code would only crash a single tab and not the entire browser. Chrome also possesses a multiprocess architecture that protects users from malicious or badly coded extensions.

According to Statcounter, since its release in September 2008, Google Chrome has surpassed Apple’s Safari with a 5.1% of the total share of the browser market.

Google Chrome is a very performing browser and it is free to top it all. It is expected that in the coming years it might gain a more considerable size of the market share and equal Mozilla Firefox or surpass it and compete with Internet Explorer.

Get Google Chrome for Linux: Google Chrome download page.

The news that if a false picture is reported on a social networking site, the website will have to remove it. There is nothing new in that, except for the fact that, according to Times Online, this has to be done in 24 hours.

Personally, a little part of me dies when I see a false picture on a social networking site. These sites are for people who want to open up, who want to share their life. If you were to be incognito, it would completely void the fact of being on such a site. But how will a site like Facebook with “more than 350 million active users” (Facebook statistics) cope with such a measure?

Surely, they will find a way. But that would mean having an eye on your site 24/7,  implying a huge cost and, in most cases, neglecting other departments.

There is, however, a cost effective solution. The problem would come when there are lots of pictures to moderate. The simplest solution, would be to reduce that. It may be hard to achieve, but it costs less than moderation. I think Facebook does a great job at this. Everyone noticed that most Facebook users put their own picture. That’s because the example was set from the start. Surely, this costs less than a 24/7 eye watch.

This has been bugging me for too long now. My work PC never seems to remember me on any site. At first I thought there was a problem with that specific Firefox instance on my work PC until some weeks back, I experienced the same problem on my notebook.

I made some Google searches, thinking that it would be a common issue but it turns out that it’s not. I managed to get the solution though. And its quite an easy one.

The problem seems to come with the “cookies.sqlite” file in your Firefox settings folder (C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random characters>.default\cookies.sqlite). The solution is to simply delete that file. If you feel that this is a too risky task for you, then just rename it to “_cookies.sqlite“. That’s what I did.

I have tested this on Windows, but I guess it would work on Linux too. For Linux, the path would be “/home/<your username>/.mozilla/firefox/<random characters>.default“.

Hope this helps some of you out there.