Geek and a Half

September 4th, 2008 by Jake

So by now you’ve all heard about Google’s new browser, but here are some nifty little (and some useless) things that you probably didn’t know about it.

All of these must be typed manually, they cannot be linked to with an <a> tag, as far as I’ve seen.

• The “New Tab” page, the smart page that shows your most visited pages, can be accessed by going to chrome-internal:
• Easter egg: Type about:internets into the Omnibox. The title of the page says “The Tubes are Clogged!”, and the page is supposed to show the old Windows screen saver of the tubes going in various directions, however it doesn’t appear to be working for me on Windows Vista. Google has a great sense of humor nonetheless.
• As of the initial release version, 0.2.149.27, typing the following into the Omnibox will crash Google Chrome: “:%”, no quotes.
• about:stats will produce a page entitled “Shhh! This page is secret!”, and also give you some scripting statistics.
• about:plugins will produce a page showing you plugin information.
• about:version will obviously display information about the browser itself, similar to the About dialog box.
• about:memory is the same as clicking the “Stats for nerds” link in the Chrome Task Manager.
• about:histograms will show connection times.
• about:dns will show lots of DNS info, like precaching and access times.
• about:cache brings up a HUGE list of your Internet cache.
• about:network brings up a menu and a few output windows for various network tests and monitors.
• view-cache:stats brings up what appears to be memory addresses for various things.
• chrome-resource://favicon will display the binary data for a PNG file, presumably a favicon. The code does not change if you visit different websites before or after.

Some of these are more for fun, while others are more for diagnostic purposes. Take of it what you will.

Have your own that isn’t listed here? Let us know in the comments!

October 23rd, 2007 by Jake

I’ve dealt with a lot of video converters over the years, a lot of which were utter crap. But recently I stumbled upon a converter that did it all, for free. I’m actually impressed that other converters aren’t as simple as this one.

It’s called Any Video Converter. No, I’m not getting paid to write this, I just wanted to tell the world that I think this is a great program.

It’ll convert to/from MPEG, AVI, FLV, or MP4. There are even advanced options for customizing size, aspect ratio, bitrate, and start/endpoints. It even works with the custom codec and unusually high bitrate used by Fraps, so I can take a 1GB game video and compress it into a 15MB MPEG-2 video for YouTube with a few clicks. And while there’s a “nag screen” after converting is complete to buy the Pro Edition (the standard version is freeware), it’s a small price to pay for a solid, working video converter.

To all the other video converters out there: Take a page out of this program’s book.

October 9th, 2007 by Jake

I’m happy to report that I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and made my site iPhone/iPod Touch accessible (It was only a matter of time, right?). Hey, if there are going to be ten million of these things by 2008, I might as well start now, right?

To view the site in iMode, just visit us on an iPod Touch or iPhone (or tell your browser to pretend to be an iPhone). Enjoy.

(I promise, the next article will not be about anything related to Apple.)

October 7th, 2007 by Jake

I usually don’t like to relay Digg stories here, but I thought this one was important. This is a step in the right direction for the iPod touch, and if this email is really from Steve himself… well, let’s just say my hopes are a little bit higher.

Article Source (MacWorld Forums) | digg story

October 1st, 2007 by Jake

I just posted some pictures I took of my new iPod in a Flickr Photo Set. The iPod came on Friday, Sept. 28, the day that it was supposedly officially released by Apple nationwide. Good timing Apple.

I really like it a lot. It’s exactly the way I envisioned it, too. Of course… some of the gripes that you’ve seen circulating the Internet still hold true (crippled Calendar app, anyone?), but most of them are fixable. And my iPod is thankfully a Week 38 iPod, so I can confirm it does not have the infamous screen defect. And, despite what people are saying, I didn’t ever expect this device to be or act like an iPhone (however similar it is), so I’m quite happy with it.