.::REALITYRECALL::.

A Saskatchewan woman now has the distinction of being the oldest known living Canadian.

Posted by Manu Cornet, Software Engineer

When you’re visiting sites other than Gmail, it’s easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window. However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use Chrome’s “Pin Tab” feature that hides everything except the tab’s icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you may like the new Unread message icon we just added to Gmail Labs. It embeds the number of unread messages you have right into the Gmail icon itself, like this:

To turn it on, go to the Labs tab in Settings, enable this lab, and click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom of the page. Note that it’ll only works in Chrome (version 6 and above) and Firefox (version 2 and above).

RIM is set to unleash the next version of BlackBerry Messenger soon – one of the major updates to eventually happen is the addition of an integrated music platform. Today some leaked info surfaced online thanks to Indonesian blog KomBB. They state that the features below will be included in the BBM 6.0 upgrade. Lots of […]

Related posts:

1. BlackBerry Messenger version 5.0.1.45 gets leaked online
2. BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac leaked online!
3. Windows Live Messenger iPhone app now available

Take it from a lady: Nothing gets a gal’s heart racing like longing, hand-written missives, promising sweet nothings and slipped into hands or lockers, bags or under doors. Or, you know, a 160-character text message drunkenly sent at 3 a.m.

Apparently, lovelorn romantics of the digital age no longer sit up all night on the phone, draining the battery on the cordless and then sneaking into Mom’s room while she’s asleep to fetch the old banana phone to keep chatting, hoping that she won’t wake up. (Typical teen experience, right?) Instead, they just text. While this isn’t surprising news, a poll conducted by American Media’s Shape and Men’s Fitness magazines has determined that oft-texted, heavily “poked” (yes, we went there) lasses are more likely to hop in the sack.

Continue reading For Women, Text Messages Mean More Sex

For Women, Text Messages Mean More Sex originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On January 25, 1921, the word "robot" was introduced to the world in Karel Capek's play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots). The play premiered in Prague in the Czech language, but it later came to New York in 1922 in English, and the term robot took off. 

Although Capek used the introduced the word in his play, he gives the actual credit to his brother, Josef Capek. The word stems from the Czech word robota meaning forced labor, drudgery, and servitude. In the play, Capek's robots, which resemble humans and can think for themselves (so, today, they'd probably be called androids?), were created as a means of cheap labor. Eventualy, they rise up, kill all of the humans, and take over the world–that idea also took off: The Terminator, I, Robot, Transformers, etc.

Well, robotics have definitely come a long way since 1921 (and the fear that robots will take over the world has probably increased). We now have the ASIMO, BigDog, the Kawada HRPs, Roomba, and Pleo, and it just wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t call them “robots.”

Happy 90th Birthday, Robot!

See more by Dueling Analogs!

Yesterday, both Mozilla and Google introduced new browser features capable of preventing third-party advertisers from tracking Firefox and Chrome users, respectively. And, while both services aim to give users greater control over their online information, they operate in noticeably different ways.

Mozilla’s new system alerts third-party advertisers and companies whenever a Firefox user doesn’t want to be tracked. Once a user activates the feature, every third-party service attempting to track his behavior will receive an alert, in the form of a ‘Do Not Track HTTP Header.’ As a result, users will get a steady diet of more generic, less personalized ads. The only caveat, however, is that Mozilla’s mechanism relies upon the cooperation of third-party tracking companies.

Continue reading Google, Mozilla Adding New ‘Do Not Track’ Features to Browsers

Google, Mozilla Adding New ‘Do Not Track’ Features to Browsers originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A tiny group of users is responsible for the great majority of BitTorrent activity, according to Spanish researchers.

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Back in November last year, we wrote that the “IPCalypse” is only 100 days away. At the time, this seemed like a long time, but the IPcalypse is coming early, with current estimates that IPv4 addressing will run out in the next 9 days.

As of writing, Hurricane Electric reports that…

Hey, can everyone please stop talking about the iPad? RIM’s been skirting around Apple’s tablet, saying only that its upcoming PlayBook slate would have “comparable” battery life, but now it’s dropped all pretense and called the iPad out by name. Specifically, the Canadian company’s senior business marketing VP Jeff McDowell has promised that the PlayBook will offer “equal or greater” battery endurance to Apple’s device, while using a smaller cell size. The latter part isn’t hard to achieve, considering Apple filled most of its slate’s innards with Li-Pol juice packs, but the promise of matching its autonomy from the wall socket is a big claim to make. Many people consider that to be among the iPad’s foremost strengths, so RIM is surely aiming high by pledging to not only match it, but potentially better it. The PlayBook we saw in person wasn’t quite up to that level yet, but there’s still time until that March launch for RIM to turn bold words into a beautiful reality.

RIM: PlayBook battery life will be ‘equal or greater than the iPad with smaller battery size’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Isaac Hannaford is a concept artist at former Halo developers (and series creators) Bungie, who recently got the all-clear to post a ton of his work on his personal site. Good news for us! More »

We’d been wanting to build a fun, useful, app-like way to display weather information on our search results pages in the mobile browser. So we pulled together a user experience designer and team of engineers and built a new weather search results snippet that lets you actually play with the results. To try it out, just go to google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered device and search for ‘weather’.

At first glance, you’ll see content that we’d previously shown you before: current conditions and a forecast for the next few days. But by moving the slider over the next 12 hours, you can now see a detailed hour-by-hour breakdown of the changing weather conditions. As you do this, keep an eye on the temperature, wind speed and humidity and see how all these conditions are expected to trend across the day. You may also notice that the background color changes throughout the day. Of course, as you scroll further down you’ll see our regular web search results for your query.

This new weather search experience is available only in English, but we have more updates on the way. We hope you’ll enjoy using it!

Posted by Nick Fey, User Experience Designer and Michael van Ouwerkerk, Software Engineer

You’ll still need to have that Windows PC acting as an intermediary, but folks looking to use Google’s Cloud Print service now at least have considerably more devices at their disposal to print documents from. Following up its roll-out to Chrome OS netbooks last month, Google has now announced that it’s begun rolling the service out to its mobile Google Docs and Gmail sites, which you’ll be able to use to print documents from most mobile devices that supports HTML5 — those running Android 2.1+ or iOS 3+, for instance. What’s more, while you will still need that Windows PC connected to your printer for the time being, Google now notes that both Mac and Linux support are “coming soon.”

Google brings Cloud Print service to mobile Google Docs, Gmail originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though we’ve already had a chance to see what they might look like, a new wave of leaks from PreCentral suggest that HP’s 9.7″ webOS tablet will have a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and wireless docking features like whoa. More »