Just what it says. Once installed, your browser will no longer send data back to Google’s tracking servers. Kind of defeats the purpose of Google Analytics, but it’s nice to see Google thinking about privacy.
Gmail recently changed its API so this great Greasemonkey script (which I rely on more than I realized) stopped working. The author updated it this week to accommodate Gmail’s recent changes, so once again it’s displaying my message count right in the tab’s favicon. Sounds trivial, I know, but it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it - and miss it when it’s gone!
Related: Firefox Space Savers
With all the fuss on the internet about Google Wave invites, here’s an excellent short video that explains pretty clearly what Wave can do for you. I’m really looking forward to it. (via lifehacker)
Related post: More geeky detail here.
Wow. Google’s upcoming web-based communication/collaboration application is looking very promising. It combines standard email-type communication with real-time instant messaging in an innovative model that mimics — and I think improves on — real conversations. People who join a conversation mid-way through have the ability to replay what they missed (no more trying to rebuild an original email from multiple edited replies!). There’s an excellent video preview of the product from this week’s Google I/O conference, which gives you a good idea of how it could change the way you communicate electronically. (Don’t be put off by the 1h20m length of the video. It’s very interesting, understandable and entertaining — albeit perhaps in a geeky way — and you could always just watch bits of it.)
Spring is here and I’ve started walking again. Wolfville has some absolutely gorgeous walking trails, and before winter arrived I really loved my daily walks - an hour or two to myself with just my thoughts and my iPod for company. With the snow finally disappearing from the forests, it’s time to start the habit again. On top of that, I discovered today (via a metafilter commenter) this great online pedometer that lets me map my route to calculate how much I’ve actually walked, and how many calories that burned (assuming I even understand about burning calories, which I don’t. But I apparently burned around 300 on today’s walk.) I like.
Thank God. Firefox users can get rid of Google’s un-opt-out-able SearchWiki noise/garbage using a simple greasemonkey script. Mind you, I admit to getting a chuckle out of all the comments like “First post!” and “How do these comments work? Are they really public?” What was Google thinking?!
“In John Varley’s upcoming scifi novel Rolling Thunder, everyone has a brain implant that lets them google information constantly. And many futurists are saying this technology will become a reality long before we colonize Mars. The question isn’t whether we’ll have google brain implants (or the futuristic search engine equivalent), but how we’ll handle them.”
Great tips and tricks for finding information quickly and easily - such as tracking flights, doing conversions, or just finding the local time anywhere in the world. The user comments add to the list, so there’s more than just ten ideas here.
Despite the controversy surrounding privacy implications of Google Maps’ new Street View, the internet community has embraced Google’s tools, offering up interesting new ways to see the world without leaving your desk. Some examples:
