Category: GReader

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers plans to take Canada Post to court to challenge the federal government’s legislation forcing its members back to work.

Study after study has told us to watch out for those empty, sugary calories in sweetened drinks like soda, but two new studies remind us about the dangers of diet soda – they too can lead to weight gain and may raise your risk for developing diabetes.

The studies were presented at a diabetes conference this weekend, and together they show that drinking diet soda may just be another thing in our diets that is making us fat. One study followed 474 older-age diet-soda drinkers and found that their waistlines grew 70 percent more than non-diet-soda drinkers, even when the researchers accounted for differences in age, physical activity level, and diabetes status.

The news gets worse; read on for how bad a two-diets-a-day habit is for your waistline.

Team Lifehacker has been playing around with Google+ all morning, and so far the coolest innovation we've seen—particularly from a productivity standpoint—is the Hangouts feature, which creates rooms for you to hang out with your friends, coworkers, or any of your social circles. It's great. More »

The popularity of Android is growing everyday. Yesterday Google’s Andy Rubin tweeted that “there are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day”. At Google I/O execs stated there was 200,000 apps available, but what about downloaded apps? According to Ian Carrington, Google’s mobile advertising sales director for northern and central Europe, said the Android Market has reached 4.5 billion total downloads. “A year ago that was one billion, and that first billion took two years to happen. The last billion took 60 days”. Any guess on when the 10 billion mark will be reached?

Source: Gizmodo
Via: Phandroid

Related posts:

1. Android Market seeing 128 apps downloaded every second
2. App Store reaches 10 billion downloaded apps
3. 103 Android apps are downloaded every second

An organic lawncare product developed in Saskatoon has just been approved for use in Canada.

A lot of people paid a lot of money to hate Transformers 2. The movie made enough money for Michael Bay to bathe in the blood of supermodels every hour, for the rest of his life. But people loathed it. More »

Q: Name another place outside of the soccer field where an extra four minutes can seem like an eternity and mean the difference between making someone scream in ecstasy or sending them home disappointed?

A: The bedroom.

This folks, is great marketing.

WARNING: This video contains strong graphic content. If you have to demolish a building, you really need to use experts. Destroying pillars with a pneumatic hammer is never going to end well, as this video demonstrates. More »

We’ve long known that exercise is good for your brain and stimulates brain activity. A recent study shows that aerobic exercise—in particular, walking—can actually increase the size of the part of the brain responsible for memory. More »

SaskTel already Tweeted that they will release the Samsung Galaxy S II. However, today they officially wrote it all down in a press release that it’ll be available “in the coming weeks”. The same formal info as Bell, but a couple differences. Missing from the SaskTel branding of this Android 2.3 device is the “4G” status (Bell will call it the Samsung Galaxy S II 4G). Next, Bell didn’t give any pricing but SaskTel did! No word on the no-contract price but the “Samsung GALAXY S II is available at any SaskTel Store or SaskTel Authorized Dealer for $79.99 on a three year voice and data term”. Perhaps this is what we’ll see Bell come in at too.

Source: CNW

Related posts:

1. SaskTel to release Galaxy S Vibrant at $150 on 3-year
2. SaskTel to release the Incredible S “sometime in April”, along with the Samsung Galaxy 550
3. Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant hitting SaskTel August 25th

Well, lookie here! Seems that ThinkPad Tablet’s getting more real by the hour. For what it’s worth, Lenovo hasn’t exactly done a laudatory job keeping its next major Honeycomb tablet under wraps, but flaunting it in public? Now that’s just asking for it. According to ZTOP, the enterprise-centric Tablet will arrive within three to four weeks boasting Tegra 2 silicon, a 10.1-inch display (1280 x 800) and an optional folio / cover that might just steal the show. According to the report, it’s a leather-wrapped case that contains a full-on keyboard and optical tracking sensor, presumably using a USB connector to make the magic happen. Think Clamcase, but tailored for Lenovo. There’s no mention of a price on that one, but we’re guessing it ain’t gonna be tossed in gratis. Tap the source for one more look, and expect to hear more on the whole kit and kaboodle as July draws closer.

ThinkPad Tablet shown off with keyboard-laden folio cover, could ship within a month originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 06:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mail dropped through door slots across the country on Tuesday as postal workers made a small dent in the millions of letters, bills and flyers that went undelivered during the rotating strikes and lockout at Canada Post.

It’s hard to argue with Google’s track record. The company has scored a hit in nearly every space in which it’s dabbled: search, email, ads, office software, etc. There’s always been one glaring exception to this rule, however: social networking. The company hasn’t made much of a dent in a world dominated by Facebook (and, once upon a time, MySpace and Friendster). For Google+, however, the company dove in with both feet, launching a multi-faceted service that brings a lot to the table with features like Circles, Hang Out, and Huddle. Is it enough to end Google’s streak of misteps in the social world? Join us as we take a dive deeper into Google’s latest attempt to find out.

Continue reading Google+ invite received, we go hands-on

Google+ invite received, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before

After

And take a nice drive to get to there…

Before

After

Whether you use Google Maps to discover new places, or to seek out destinations you know well and love, we hope you’ll find our updated look as familiar and reliable. It’s simple polish with focus on what’s most important—your map.

Posted by Evelyn Kim, Visual Designer

A Saskatoon street could soon bear the name of reality TV star Shannon Tweed.

The best calendaring applications make it easy to add, manage, and remember appointments, so its no surprise the top five were all popular players. Last week we asked you which calendaring application you preferred when managing your appointments on your desktop. You answered, and we put the top five to a vote. Now we’re back to highlight the winner. More »

Starting today, you might begin noticing that things look a little different across Google products. We’re working on a project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the next few months, you’ll continue to see more updates to our look and feel. Even our classic homepage is getting a bit of a makeover:

The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and consistent online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you’re using or what device you’re using it on. The new Google experience that we’ve begun working toward is founded on three key design principles: focus, elasticity and effortlessness.

• Focus: Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
• Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
• Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.

Constant revision and improvement is part of our overarching philosophy. For example, last year we introduced an updated look and feel to our search results, and if you compare the original Google homepage to today’s version, you’ll see that a makeover every so often can certainly be refreshing:

Starting today and over the course of the next few months, look for a series of design improvements across all our products, including Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail.

Posted by Chris Wiggins, Creative Director, Digital

You can blame Beau Hindman from Massively for this article and most likely my possible disappearance for the next few hours. After watching his live streaming of Gameloft’s Order and Chaos, he had to go and post an article detailing a new application for mobile devices that, aside from being productive, will let you play games on your mobile device from your PC.

Read more…

Fresh on the heels of today’s Google+ announcement (and likely because of that announcement), the search giant just launched Google Takeout—an update to their previously mentioned Data Liberation Front that allows you to export your data from several Google products in one simple download. Currently Takeout supports mass exodus from Buzz, Contacts and Circles (the latter of which is new to Google+), Picasa Web Albums, your Profile, and Stream (also part of Google+). More »

Rumours of the 10-inch BlackBerry “PlayBook 2″ had it potentially coming thinner, 4G/WiFi only and in black and white. This was expected to be released in time for the 2011 holiday season, but it now seems the plans have been completely scrapped. The reason is apparently due to RIM putting all their focus on producing some kind of BlackBerry “Superphone” that’s powered by their QNX OS (same as what’s in the PlayBook). No word on a possible release date but rumoured specs include the same single-core 1.2GHz processor that’s in the upcoming Bold 9900. Hopefully this gets bumped up to a dual-core processor because that’s what RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said the “Superphone” would include. In addition,  the upcoming Berry might come with a 4.3-inch touchscreen with a high res display that’s over 900+ pixels (iPhone 4 has a screen resolution of 640 x 960 pixels).

We want RIM to massively succeed and we’re hoping the upcoming devices over the next couple years will put them back on the positive track. Jim Balsillie, the other RIM co-CEO once stated that “we absolutely have a whole next generation of smartphones, so strategically we feel fantastic”… bring these on and others will feel fantastic too.

Source: N4BB
Via: CrackBerry

Related posts:

1. Global “Superphone” shipments to reach 100 million units by 2015
2. BlackBerry Torch 2 to have a 1.2GHz processor and NFC
3. Rumour: “Nexus 4G” will run Android 4.0 and possibly come with a dual-core 1.5GHz processor