Chrome OS

The Week in Geek

TARDIS from Wikimedia, by Sceptre, CC 2.5 license

TARDIS from Wikimedia, by Sceptre, CC 2.5 license, click to view source.

The big news is the series six premiere of Doctor Who. We just finished watching it, because we have the Internet, and we’re not afraid to use it. It’s awesome. Is there a bigger word than “awesome”? “Epic awesome,” maybe? It’s pretty damn good, how’s that?

A major cast member dies in the first ten minutes, leaving the Doctor and friends in a race to… prevent it? Make sure it happens? Find out what’s going on? Probably all three. We finally get to see the Silence, although their appearance explains exactly diddly-squat. Amy’s sitting on a couple of big secrets, one of which she spills at the first available opportunity, and the other she has to sit on, lest she destroy all of time and space, because with the Doctor around, you know the consequences can’t be anything less. Rory is in fine form as the sensible one, because someone has to be the grownup, and that’s his job. River turns up, too, and the innuendo between the Doctor and River Song is stepped up a notch.

River: “Oh, I’m quite the screamer. Now there’s a spoiler for you.” With Steven Moffat at the helm, you know the show was rife with fantastic one-liners and plenty of timey-wimey stuff, but the best line?

The Doctor: “You aren’t going to shoot me.”

River: “Doctor, they’re Americans!”

The Doctor: “DON’T SHOOT!”

We’ve waited months for the premiere, so of course it’s a cliffhanger. I’m already dying for next week’s episode!

The other big Doctor Who news is that Elisabeth Sladen died this week. She was my favorite companion. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith was the team I grew up with, so this was sad news.

In other geeky news, science found actual physical differences in the brains of self-described liberals compared to self-described conservatives. I read a study a few years ago — can’t remember where, anymore — saying that chemical differences had been found, and although both are indicative of people being at least a little predisposed to one mindset or the other, it probably doesn’t mean humans are hardwired one way or the other and never the twain shall meet. (That’s one interpretation I’ve heard a few places.) If we were, you’d see a lot less of people changing their political opinions over time, I’d think.

There’s a rumor floating around that Google may start renting Chrome machines for as as little as ten dollars a month. It’s an interesting proposition. I’ve been wondering what Google was planning to do with the Chrome OS. The rumors have been flying thick and fast, so grain of salt, but I’ve heard that they’ll use Chrome OS to make cheap tablets, that they’re bringing out a line of netbooks similar to the CR-48, that they’re mothballing it all together, that they’re contracting out to Acer to release Chrome OS netbooks optimized for web-surfing, etc.

Of all the ideas I’ve heard, the rental idea sounds like the best use to me. I love Chrome as a browser, and I’ve been quite pleased with the CR-48. It’s still a bit glitchy, but it’ll do just about everything a standard laptop will do. Since I do a lot of graphic work, and I occasionally wander off to spots where the wifi or 3G connections are sketchy at best, the CR-48 can’t quite be my main machine, but with a standard laptop or desktop at home, this could easily become my sole traveling machine. So, it’s not quite what I’d need for it to be my only computer. The tablet idea could work, since the idea is that Google would install Chrome OS on a cheaper tablet instead of Honeycomb, and bring a low-cost tablet computer to the market as an iPad competitor and/or an Android tablet alternative, but with tablets and smartphones gobbling up so much of the market, I wonder how much longer netbooks and/or laptops are going to be around, really.

Meanwhile, they broke physics again. Researchers at U of M just discovered that, very, very basically, if you beam light through glass in a special, but not very difficult to do sort of way, it makes electricity. Lots of electricity. As in, way more electricity than people ever thought it could. This is huge news for the solar power set in particular. This could make solar power cheap and viable. I’m not sciencey enough to explain it well, so just click through to the article and read for yourself. It’s a quick read, and it’ll blow your mind.

 

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Featured image from Wikimedia.

Living in the Cloud

Cloud Computing

Image from Wikipedia. Click to view source.

My laptop is getting old. I’ve had it for about two years, and age and use are starting to catch up to it. Mostly use, I suspect. It’s been dragged across America a few times, banged around to school and work and back daily, and taken all over the house with less than perfect care. It’s held up pretty well, but I noticed a couple of weeks back that it was starting to get slow and wonky, and hanging up a lot when it really shouldn’t.

I’ve done all the proper things to it — virus scans, malware scans, defrags, updates, maintenance, etc. I finally decided I’d try reformatting the sucker, and see if that helps out. I do an awful lot of work to my computer — installing and uninstalling stuff, adding plugins and extensions and shiny new programs, stuff like that, and it seems like about once a year or so, it’s best to just reformat and start fresh. So, that means it was time to back up the hard drive, which usually means backing everything up on disks and cleaning out all the crap I’ve saved for no reason I can remember anymore.

Astute readers may recall that back just before Christmas, I got a spiffy Chrome OS netbook, though, which is all about the cloud computing thing. So, instead of backing up to disk and so on, I’ve spent the last few days transferring all my crap to the cloud.

Photos went to Flickr, and graphics I need for one thing or another went to Picasa. Documents and spreadsheets and so forth went to Google Docs, except for the extensive Black Alice files, which went to Box.net. (Largely because I was too damn lazy to upload that many files to Google Docs, and the bigger ones kept failing to upload.) Music went to Amazon’s new Cloud Drive. I’ve got two or three more file folders I need to find a home for… they may possibly go to Dropbox, if Dropbox’s free service has the room for them. Once that’s done, all my files will be in the cloud.

That’s useful for a couple of things. One of the irritating things about having both the Chrome machine and my laptop has been trying to work on various projects with both machines. Writing, in particular, has been a hassle, because I keep having to transfer things to Google Docs so I can work on the Chrome machine, and I keep forgetting to do that. The other useful thing will be having access to all my junk wherever I go. (One handy and unexpected upside is that Amazon’s Cloud Drive has a smartphone app, so now I can listen to my music on my phone. The sound ain’t great, but it’s better than nothing.)

The other upside is that if my laptop does up and take a dump on me, as I’ve been rather suspecting it’s about to do, everything is saved and usable on the Chrome machine, which will probably become my main computer. (I’ve found replacements for all my legacy programs, except GIMP. There are a few options online, but so far, none of them work quite right on the Chrome machine. Still, they’re steadily improving, so I’ve got high hopes.) So that’s my latest experiment in the world of computing: living in the cloud. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

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