A very happy birthday to PacMan… the friendly yellow gobbler. I love PacMan. Today –to commemorate the 30th birthday of PacMan– Google put a playable PacMan logo/game online. Sooo cool…. You can play it on the google website. Here’s a screenshot. When you leave PacMan in the shown position the ghost will never catch him… small bug?
I already mentioned the upcoming birthday of PacMan before. Click on the screenshot below to play Google PacMan.

This is Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” however more and more it seems to be applicable to you and not to Google. The latest news is that the Street-view vehicles are also registering WLAN’s and MAC addresses while mapping your neighbourhood. Big issue in Germany (here’s a German article from newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’) where this was discovered.

Now the most appalling and worrying is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. Right. “Don’t be evil” also includes to not collect data that could facilitate any evil.

Oh this is very very nice. Google has implemented a feature on gmail to detect suspicious account activity. Suppose you always access your gmail from the Netherlands… and all of a sudden it is accessed from Poland?… Gmail will now warn you about this kind of abnormal behaviour. It’s a good read. Here’s a little teaser…

A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend’s account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend’s whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts.

An article in the Washington Times reports on US cybersecurity experts who claim that the chinese cyberattack last year was targeted at stealing corporate secrets. One of the targeted firms was Google. They discovered the attack and claimed they could trace it back to the Chinese government. This is one of the reasons why Google is moving its business from China to Hong Kong. It’s a good read and I hope more details will follow.

Recently Google launched a new service called Buzz. It’s like a twitter thingy and integrates seamlessly with gmail. When you start a buzz you can select if this is a public Buzz or a restricted –only visible to people you grant access– Buzz. People can leave comments on your Buzz and start a conversation or discussion. The nice thing is that all your Buzzes and comments are stored in your gmail box. When people comment on your Buzz the mail in your mailbox is updated. I use an external email client to read my gmail (iMail on a Mac) and even there I can see the mail that corresponds to the Buzz is updated… IMAP rules

Besides these twitter-like buzzes you can also integrate picasa photo albums, blogs (rss feeds in general), twitter and other stuff. Really nice. Try it out.

I will hang on to my twitter account since I can post to it using simple SMS messages and publish them on my blog automatically… but when I can buzz using my mobile phone I might switch.

Today 50 years ago (29 oct 1959) Asterix & Obelix was first published in the magazine Pilote. Since then many comics have been published. Read more on the history of Asterix & Obelix on wikipedia. Google commemorates this with a special logo on their page:

Unfortunately it’s not on the Dutch page but it is at least on the French, Belgium, German, Norwegian & Swedish pages of Google.

Yesterday Google officially announced Chrome OS, an operating system targetted netbooks (both intel x86 & arm-based). Chrome OS will be built on the linux kernel. Google will reimplement the security architecture of Linux. A new minimal graphical interface will provide an easy to use interface. As google says it: “it should just work”.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Here’s the full announcement. You want screenshots don’t you?

Oh dear. According to the google blog they have crawled over 1.000.000.000.000 webpages. Yup more then a trillion webpages. Ain’t that something? Mind you Google doesn’t count links that lead to the same webpage so these are unique pages. Furthermore they don’t follow up on calendar links so these also don’t count in the trillion pages they crawled. Not all pages are indexed though. Some pages are too similar or contain autogenerated content and these are considered unuseful for searchers.

Today my good buddy Emiel sent me a link to a remarkable video. You’ll see a holographic display of the Earth fed by google Earth. How cool is that? Yes, you are right: VERY COOL!! Please wait for the part where they stop rotating the Earth and start zooming in…

Sure we all visited the google search engine to find some stuff on the internet. It’s a webapp albeit a simple one. You can type your search query and than you have to move the mouse and click shit. Next page. Next page. Click on one of the search results.

Point and click may be your thing but I’m a hardcore commandline junkie. And although I never thought of the concept of accessing a search engine through a commandline it actually works pretty well. Try for yourself. Over at goosh.org you’ll find the unofficial Google shell. Thanks Karel for pointing me towards this. I have a new homepage.

Je zou het haast vergeten maar dankzij Google wordt je met de neus op de keiharde feiten gedrukt. Vandaag is het Koninginnedag. De koningin zit in Friesland en de Friezen trekken massaal naar Amsterdam om daar de rol van onaangepaste provinciaal te vervullen. Vrolijke kinderen verkopen op rafelige dekentjes het afgedankte speelgoed op de vrijmarkt. Achterbakse ouders staan daar ook en verkopen de kleding die ze het afgelopen jaar van de voedselbank hebben gekregen. Hebberige zelfstandigen bereiden hotdogs en hamburgers met de toepasselijke naam “salmonella speciaal”. Fijne Koninginnedag!

Google heeft dit jaar een nieuw logo ter gelegenheid van Koninginnedag gemaakt voor de Nederlandse google website. Ook in 2005 en 2003 heeft google speciale Koninginnedag logo’s gemaakt.