Meet Pixel, Made by Google

Posted by Boffill Thursday, October 6, 2016
This month of October, Google officially announced their new product named Pixel. If you were a follower of Google product, Pixel might sound familiar to you because they used it before in their consumer hardware products. Pixel was created by Google from hardware to software. It boasts a 12MP camera and f/2.0 aperture to brighten up your photos and an 8MP secondary camera that can record 1080p videos. That’s not bad for a secondary camera specially to the selfie addicts. Google claimed that Pixel has the highest rate for the smartphone camera. I don’t know yet because up until today, I’m still a big fan of Nokia808 Pureview. :D

Google Assistant

I saw it in one of their Youtube videos that this phone has a built-in Google Assistant. It’s like their own version of Siri but you can chat with it. I tried Google Assistant via Allo, Google’s version of Whatsapp. You can ask the Assistant to set your reminder, schedule a meeting, ask for weather, etc.

The phone can be pre-ordered via their Google Pixel's Website and is expected to be released this coming October 20, 2016 at a price range of $769 for the 32GB variant and if you want an extra memory, it will cost $869 for the 128GB variant.




My New Old Model Chromecast

Posted by Boffill Thursday, December 10, 2015



So, I’m sure to some it’s an old gadget to brag about but I’m new to this and this is my first time using it. I heard about Chromecast when a friend of mine posted it on his Facebook that he has one. I inquired everything about it but didn’t really think of owning one because I don’t have a TV yet in my room back then. That was like a year ago from today. Last week, this friend of mine posted a new photo of his Chromecast 2, the latest model and I was still curious about it so I inquired about it again. After doing a little bit of research about it, I think I’ll love this little HDMI Dongle because I really love to watch movie on my TV with my Pioneer Home Theatre attached to it. This very friend of mine told me that he has a spare one but the 1st generation of Chromecast that is. It didn’t really bothered me owning an old model because I love the idea of not connecting my laptop directly to my TV via HDMI, a wireless connection between them is cool. So, after I sent him the money, my New Old Model Chromecast arrived and immediately tried it. Setting it up was easy, you just have to connect your Android Phone or iPhone and your Chromecast to the same network and set your WLAN Password and that’s it, you can enjoy watching Youtube videos or videos saved on your local disk, streaming music, viewing photos and etc. So, all I can say is that it’s a good deal buying a Chromecast dongle if you enjoy watching movies a lot. Just last night, I tried the one month free trial of iFlix (well, we don’t have Netflix here in the Philippines) and everything seems to be working fine with them and the Chromecast. So, if you love to watch movie and have the feeling that it’s a bit of a hassle connecting laptop to the TV or maybe plugging in a USB Stick to the TV, Chromecast is a good buy for you people. Thanks and Cheers!


How Do You Know if Google has Crawled your website

Posted by Boffill Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Sometimes I get this question to some of my friends online who are not really certain if Google has crawled their website. One friend asked me if how you would know if Google crawled your website, simple question with simple answer. I will give you tutorial on how to check if Google crawled your website. There are actually two steps on checking it thru Google’s search box.
Google Crawler

Step 1

First. Go to Google.com

Second. At the search box, type site:yourwebsite.com

Third. The search result should give you all the indexed page of your website.

Note: You can also add a backslash with the sub-directory path so that only all the sub-directories will be shown on the search result. Example is site:yourwebsite.com/example/. That will give you just the stuff about “example” on all yourwebsite.com website. It can help you filter so you can avoid the items you don’t want to see on your search result.

Step 2

First. Go to Google.com

Second. Type your website at the search box

Third. On the search results, you will notice there’s a link named “Cached” next to your domain name. Click on it and you will see the date of the last time Google Crawled your website.

With the steps provided, this should help the webmaster know if Google is crawling his website and the last time it was crawled.

Google Now Offers Free Zone to South Africa

Posted by Boffill Friday, November 16, 2012


Google now offers free Internet to South African mobile users. This has been dubbed as "Free Zone”. Google partnered with Telkom, South Africa's leading telecommunication company, to give access to mobile users of South Africa. Around 80% of the population of South Africa is using mobile phone and all of them may enjoy "Fred Zone". Google's "Free Zone" has been offered to Filipino users by Globe. Now together with Filipinos, South Africans can now access Google Search, Gmail and Google+ for free up until the end of May next year.


*note: Data charges applied to external links.

Preventing unauthorized login to your Google account

Posted by Boffill Sunday, November 4, 2012

Just recently, I was exploring some features of Google's privacy settings after my Paypal account has been hacked. I was traumatized of what had happened to my Paypal so I didn't waste any time to change the settings of my primary email. I found out a cool feature somewhere on the settings. When logging in, Google doesn't asks for just the password only but also for the code being sent to you thru your mobile phone. So, after you login using your account name and password, you will then be redirected to a page where it will ask for the code sent to you. If you have not received any code in your inbox, you can choose to be called by Google's automated message and the code will be dictated to you over the phone. This kind of feature from Google is really helpful specially when you have a lot of confidential email on your mailbox. I can't create a tutorial right now because I am creating this post using Blob. So if you want to have a double protection on your Google account now, browse your settings and activate the phone verification now.

New Interface for Google Adsense

Posted by Boffill Friday, November 6, 2009
Google Adsense is really innovating to help publishers online manage their business. A beta version of Google Adsense interface has been released and for limited slots only. With the beta version, you can be able to view daily stats in graphical formats. Amounts earned from various ad, targeting and bid types has been added to the metrics. Some options has been modified so it can be a more user friendly interface. With the screenshot from the Adsense blog, the interface looks similar to Google Analytics and with regard to my experience using Analytics, everything is simple.






Limited beta has been rolled out today in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. The limited beta can not be limited for the next coming weeks because the Adsense will roll out this test to thousands of publishers from all over the world. They will just be sending an email notifications to the participants for them to be informed. I will have to wait for the email then and maybe I will be one of the lucky participants.

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How to find password for Rar / Zip Archives.

Posted by Boffill Thursday, December 4, 2008
A lot of us are enjoying the free downloads that we see over the internet. But there are some free downloads that are in Rar or Zip format that are encrypted with password. For me, its so useless sharing a software or a download link that has a password on it. I've found a simple solution that was posted by a co-member in a mobile forum and right now, I'm about to reveal what's the secret on how to be able to get the password of those encrypted archive. The solution is very simple, ask "Pareng" Google. First, all you have to do is to search for the filename of the compressed file using Google. Just read carefully of all the results that was provided to you and there you will see the password of the compressed file. Below is an example.

Filename : dap9beta_cw.info.rar ( http://rapidshare.com/files/166155974/dap9beta_cw.info.rar )

Try to Google the filename (only the filename not the whole link) and read carefully on all the results. Some results will say Pass: or Code: and the next line is the password of the archive. If you don't get any password from your first result, try to put the word "pass" after the filename and this time, it should give you the archive's password. This trick will really work 99% guaranteed!





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Gmail Themes

Posted by Boffill Friday, November 21, 2008





Hey, Hey, Hey, What do we have here. I have just signed in to my Gmail account and noticed this very cool feature that they've added to their page. Introducing the "Gmail Themes". What does this thing do? Well, it will only let you personalize the look and feel of your Gmail Inbox once you login. Is this thing cool? Of course it is. It has 31 ( and I hope they'll be adding some more ) default themes that you can choose from. I hope soon they will let us set our own pictures to be the background or we they will let us set what colors of fonts we want to use or the tabs etc. etc. As of now, let's just appreciate the feature that Gmail is offering us and praise the Gmail Team for doing a great job for their users!





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Google Adsense Postcard

Posted by Boffill Thursday, October 30, 2008

Before, I was really confused if Google do really send postcards to their Adsense account holders for the Pin verification. I'm really disappointed because I requested the Pin to be sent to me for about 3 months in a row. At first it was addressed to the province and nothing came and then to my current address and still nothing came. Thank God for the 3rd time and my very last request, I already got my Pin when I changed the address to my Auntie's residence. Right now, my blog is back to normal now since Adsense ads are back.




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Gmail for Mobile Phone with big Icon

Posted by Boffill Monday, September 22, 2008

Just got this cool Gmail application from a forum where I am also active. I just wanna share this to you. I personally hate that tiny icon of Gmail App on my phone so I decided to search for some application that could satisfy me and have my Gmail App a new look. Fortunately, I saw this one and it was a very big satisfaction for me. Now I want to share this application to you all and I hope you'll like this. Its the original Gmail App but with a modified icon. This app is compatible with mobile phones that supports J2ME.



Download Here
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Google Chrome

Posted by Boffill Friday, September 5, 2008


Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.




Visit their Homepage Here

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he's confident Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.



Here's the site description of the speed tests:

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).


Download:

Mirror 1
Mirror 2
Mirror 3


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Google Audio Search

Posted by Boffill Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Are you having a hard time looking for your favorite songs over the internet? Even a P2P application can't bear your cravings to your desired songs and artists? Maybe this solution will help you with your misery. I have been using this trick for months now and been very helpful to me. I tried using this when I was looking for some rare Bone Thugs collections and this one helped me with my problem. Let's take advantage of the benefit that Google Search is giving us. Right now I'm gonna share you a script that could help us locate files on some website's database. Just try this trick and you won't be losing any dime.

Step 1 Go to www.google.com
Step 2 Type this on Google's Search Bar
?intitle:index.of? mp3

Step 3 Put title of the song or name of artist after mp3 (color in red).
Example: ?intitle:index.of? mp3 Bone Thugs N Harmony

Step 4 Enjoy search results with the list of your favorite artist.

NOTE: You can change mp3 to other file extension like doc, xls, avi, 3gp, mpeg, etc.




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GMail Beta Labs

Posted by Boffill Monday, August 4, 2008
GMail labs are the testing ground of GMail Engineering team. On this feature, you can see all the experimental tools that Gmai engineers have made. Since all of this tools are in beta version, it is still subject to change or be removed permanently to Gmail. Listed below are the current available addons for your Gmail Account.

Quick Links
by Dan P



Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.

Superstars
by Kai H & Julie W



Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature:
(1) Go to the "General" Settings page to choose which superstars you wish to use.
(2) Use either the keyboard shortcut ('s') or click to rotate through your selected superstars.
(3) Use the search operator "has:" to find all messages with your superstar (e.g. "has:red-bang", "has:blue-star"). Learn the name of a superstar by hovering over its image in the "General" Settings page.

Pictures in chat
by Dave C



See your friends' profile pictures when you chat with them.

Fixed width font
by Keith C



Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font.

Custom keyboard shortcuts

by Alan S



Lets you customize keyboard shortcut mappings. Adds a new Settings tab from which you can remap keys to various actions.

Mouse gestures

by Erik A




Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows.

Signature tweaks
by Keith C and Dave C



Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures. Can't use this and the "Random signature" Labs feature at the same time.

Random signature
by Chad P



Rotates among random quotations for your email signature. Can't use this and the "Signature tweaks" Labs feature at the same time.

Custom date formats
by Emil E



Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07).

Muzzle
by Chad P



Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends' status messages.

Old Snakey
by Dave C



Kick it old school with Old Snakey! Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit '&' from the main page to play a game of snake.

Email Addict

by Michael D



Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat.

Hide Unread Counts
by Matt M



Hides the unread counts for inbox, labels, etc.

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How do I Fully Use Google?

Posted by Boffill Sunday, July 13, 2008
ARE WE REALLY USING THE FULL POTENTIAL OF THE GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE?

Heres HOW:

Google has become THE icon of the internet. This search engine has so thouroughly transformed navigation of the internet that its name has become a verb. Yet most people do not know how to use this tool to its fullest extent. This TUTORIAL focuses on the advanced commands available on Google. For readability's sake I put search terms inside of <> aside from having it in BOLD Text. So entering 7900gt voltmod into the search field in google will appear in this FAQ as <7900gt voltmod>.

Quotes - The simplest advanced command is the quotation. Google's engine typically ignores word order. Searching for will return about the same results as . The results will be slightly different because of how google searches its servers, but it will still look for sites containing these elements regardless of order. Entering <"X Y Z A B C"> will search only for sites containing the string X Y Z A B C, with all elements included, in that order, one after the other.

site - Sometimes you will want to search a site that does not have a search function. Don't worry - google will come to the rescue. In order to search for the string overclock on symbianize.com, simply enter
<"overclock" site:symbianize.com>. No http:// or anything like that is required, just <{search terms} site:{URL}>. Don't forget the ":" between "site" and the url

filetype - Just as you can use google to search on a particlular site, you can use google to search for a specific filetype. To search for PDF files on Intel products search for . The format for this search is <{search terms} filetype:{extention}>. Extentions do not require "." before them. To search for, say, a daa file - search <{st} filetype:daa>.
*NOTE - Google does not go all-out to index every file type. Searches for anything other than .pdf, .ps, .doc, .xls, .ppt, or .rtf (thos listed in advanced search under filetype) will not return vary many results.

inurl - Searches the URL of a site rather than its contents. To search for sites with overclocking related url's - enter . This can be used in conjuction with other searches. For example, will search for sites with url's containing overclock for text containing intel.
Similar to this is the allinurl command. This will allow the user to search for more than one word in a url. The search will behave like the search above, and will search for both intel and overclock in a site's url.

intext - the intext command searches the actual text of a website rather than its tags. It can get annoying when you search for a word/phrase - find a promising website - then find out that what you searched for is not actually on the site. The intext command solves this. The related allintext works in the same way as allinurl.

.. - the ".." command searches for ranges. Searching for any GPU in GeForce's 8 series can be challanging, so you can input to get results of any Geforce from the 8500 to the 8850.
*NOTE - This search will also search for 8501, 8502... It does not (to my knowledge) allow for incrementing.

- - the "-" or minus command excludes terms from a search. Let's say that you want to search for a game called "World War II" but you want the game and not the War. Many sites about the War will have the word Nazi in them. So search for <"World War II" -Nazi> to search for sites including "World War II" that do not contain the word Nazi.

~ - Including a tilde in front of a word searches for that word and its synonyms. A search for <~angry> will search for angry, mad, furious, etc.

OTHER GOOGLE TRICKS

Google cache - When the googlebot visits a web page, it takes a picture of it and stores it on its server. If you have the url of a site that has been taken down, google the url. If you are lucky, google has a cached image that you can view. This is also useful for looking for sites that have been changed recently.


In the right hands Google can be one of the internet's most powerful tools. Knowing exactly what google can do will make finding exactly what you want much easier.

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Gmail Custom Time™

Posted by Boffill Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Google's Gmail is now having a new feature. You can now set your email to your desired time and date. You won't be having a late emails now and everything will be more convenient to you. Say for example you have to send an email tomorrow to your friend but you can't really send it to her tomorrow because you have an appointment at your office, you don't have to worry no more because Gmail has solved your problem. You can now set your email's schedule. It's great and it's fun! Thanks to Gmail! Gmail the best!
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