Chrome - Googles new Internet Browser

It's a bit hard to go on about Chrome.  It was launched very quietly and had it not been for a friend pointing it out to me, I probably wouldn't have discovered for a while yet.

Google have launched their own Internet browser.  My first thoughts were "Why do we need another Internet browser with so many others like Safari, Internet Explorer and my beloved Firefox?".  Like most software from Google, it's very spartan, yet usable.  Most of what's special about it is under the hood.  To the end user, it's a very basic browser with very few features.  It has more screen space than any other browser.  It's faster and more stable than any other browser.  It looks pretty good too.

Google have created a comic style help file/manual for those that are interested in the inner workings of Chrome.  It was the comic that convinced me to give it a serious try so I'm using it as my default browser for a while.  So far the only thing I miss from Firefox is the GoogleBar addon because it allowed very good access to Google Bookmarks, Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps but the single search/address bar seems to have an uncanny knack of knowing what I'm asking of it.

So far, so good.

Genius Bar on the side

iTunes 8 has been released and has a new feature called "Genius Sidebar". It's a playlist creator for people with large music collections. Our music folder fills out to a respectable 40GB and I'm sure I've only listened to about 10% of the entire collection. The Genius Sidebar lets you start playing a song you like and when you click the Genius button it populates a playlist of 25, 50, 75 or 100 songs that you might enjoy. It's quite impressive although it doesn't work with every song I choose. I work up this morning feeling like a little classical music and thought the Genius Sidebar might be able to pick out some compositions that might satisfy, but every time I chose a piece by Mozart the sidebar informed me that it doesn't work with that song. It's worked with pretty much everything else I've chosen so far. But for the songs that it does work with it does a good job.

Atom Smashing Machine

Billions of bits of currency to build a machine that can fire two beams of protons in opposite directions and bend them around a 27 kilometer circle track buried 100 meters beneath the surface of our planet to smash into each other so scientists can check out what the big bang was like.

Some say the machine will create dark matter, others say it'll give God a rash. The health and saftey mob gave the project the go-ahead and said if it creates a black hole, no-one will notice because everyone will be dead.

All good then!