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thewordis

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I use Secure Shell ChromeOS app to connect to a DigitalOcean machine for all my terminal stuff. Works surprisingly well. The default ChromeOS terminal is far too restricted for me, and Dev Mode has quite a few hurdles.

The Browser is just like regular Chrome, only with better integration with the hardware, meaning power usage is better. You can play or open all files I've tried, though I haven't tried mkv. The battery life is phenomenal - it's changed how I view what it means to be portable as much as the iPad did.

Unpleasant surprises? I have to restart my ASUS Chromebook every few days because the wifi starts to fail. Something about my usage pattern fills up the 2GB RAM and the first symptom is spotty wifi. And the CPU isn't strong enough to smoothly Chromecast a tab with acceptable quality video. This Pixel should overcome both of those.

Amazon Fire TV 12 years ago

Fire TV lacks iTunes and Google Play. Apple TV lacks Google Play and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Chromecast lacks iTunes and Amazon Prime Instant Video.

And now we have a million and one ways to watch Netflix.

I propose musicians and artists become salaried positions. They get an office, instrument, materials, and a manager, jam rooms and display rooms instead of conference rooms, etc.

From the Penny Arcade blog on this incident, specifically Gabriel:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/09/04/some-clarification

"So let me start by saying I like the Dickwolves strip. I think it’s a strong comic and I still think the joke is funny. Would we make that strip today? Knowing what we know now and seeing how it hurt people, no. We wouldn’t. But at the time, it seemed pretty benign. With that said I absolutely regret everything we did after that comic. I regret the follow up strip, I regret making the merchandise, I regret pulling the merchandise and I regret being such an asshole on twitter to people who were upset. I don’t think any of those things were good ideas. If we had just stopped with the strip and moved on, the Dickwolf never would have become what it is today. Which is a joke at the expense of rape victims or a symbol of the dismissal of people who have suffered a sexual assault. the comic itself obviously points out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation. Oddly enough, the first comic by itself is exactly the opposite of what this whole thing has turned into."

I went to college there and live one city over (25 minute drive). There are a lot of wealthy people living in the area, multimillionaires in the suburbs, but also a lot of poverty. A _lot_ of poverty. I'm glad to see someone trying something new, even on such a small scale. I was almost tempted to look for housing within the Kzoo city limits because of the Promise, but I don't plan on having children any time soon. We need more such experiments and resultant data.

They're adding 'click-to-play' as an option for plugins like flash in the default browser settings (no extension required) in version 18. It's allowed people to turn on the radio button using about:flags for more than a year.

Once enabled, go to wrench menu > Settings > Under the Bonnet > Advanced Settings > Privacy > Content Settings > Plug-ins

What to Wear 14 years ago

"Function over form." But the form of clothes is very functional: it determines who you can easily associate with, what strangers think of you, who is attracted to you, what sort of jobs you can have, your promotion potential, and your general likability. There's a lot to be said for "looking good" and how it can positively impact your life. And regardless of how you might wish to treat clothing, know that others will treat it as important.

It works pretty well for me.

My feature wishlist:

  * iOS native app
  * nested playlists  
  * smart playlists 
  * playlist pictures 
  * playlist export 
  * gapless playback 
  * built-in scrobbling to last.fm 
  * volume control in android store 
  * music manager instant recognition

I'm curious why no one ever brings up the legal status of VLC. It's an incredibly popular program, and is likely illegal in the US. Their FAQ (http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html) used to make this explicit, mentioning who and where you'd have to send payment for patent royalties and that decoding DVDs is against the DMCA, whereas now any mention is relegated to the legal section (http://www.videolan.org/legal.html), where they encourage you to make your own judgment.

Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20091201230711/http://www.videola...

I'm using Google Music Beta, primarily because it's free (for now), but also because they sent me a Cr48 and my first question when I got a Google Support Ninja on the phone (had to deal with a 3G problem) was about the best music app. They didn't have one at the time (he suggested lots of Google Ninjas use Grooveshark), but now they do, so I'm beta testing that as well.

My biggest problems with it:

- Frequently loses the 'play' button - the bottom control bar disappears after a while of leaving the tab open.

- No play counts in several of the views (album, for instance).

- No scrobbling - but there's a great Chrome extension called Better Music Beta which does it for you.

- No nested playlists or smart playlists.

- Uploading needs a lot of work - after uploading my entire library, I realized that a lot of the genre metadata was wrong, so I changed it in iTunes. The music uploader then started re-uploading a few thousand songs...

Things I like:

- It has all of my music!

- It's currently free...

- It sync'd my iTunes playlists (the non-smart ones anyway).

- It's good quality playback, and I've never had a display or playback problem that a page refresh didn't fix.

> 4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update.

A forced update only occurs on the first turning on of the machine, presumably in case it's been on the shelf a few months. I vaguely recall having to do the same for my CR48.

It's a fun little machine, extremely secure, but with a lot of growth still required.

1) Setup took several days and a call from a Google Chrome Ninja (support team) between me and Verizon, since the first time I signed up, it went to a crashed page due to checking 'disallow third-party cookies', and I submitted twice. After that, it was seamless, with a little indicator just like wifi.

2) Camera is bleh, uploading to Picasa was okay with stuff downloaded from the Web browser, though I didn't try any SD cards.

3) Battery life was good, though I don't move around a lot with mine.

4) No prompts really, just a tiny little green up arrow. If you ever turn it off, you'll never even notice. It's so bad I sent in feedback asking for them to send more info about changes...

5) Google apps run okay. Offline still isn't here, which will be a major improvement. Docs, Music, Gmail, etc. all operate well, but seemed to suck down CPU time, even going so far as to turn on the fan (CR48 was single core though, the new ones have dual core). Offline is my number one requirement which isn't fulfilled yet now that Google Music is available.

One of the best things I found about using the Chromebook was that I had migrated most of my stuff to "The Cloud" so I could use it full time as my main computer. When I installed a new hard drive in my desktop and reinstalled Windows, all it took was loading Chrome and hitting 'sync', and I was 90% back to where I was.