.::REALITYRECALL::.

This holiday, we wanted to enable the Chrome community to work together for a good cause. Starting today, we invite you to support five worthy causes by counting and “donating” the tabs you open in Chrome.

Everyone’s total tabs will determine a charitable donation made on behalf of the Chrome community, up to one million dollars. Here’s what your tabs can do:

• 10 tabs = 1 tree planted
• 10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
• 25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
• 100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
• 200 tabs = 1 person’s clean water for a year

To find out more about this effort and the organizations we’re partnering with, visit google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/.

Want to participate?

• Get the Chrome for a Cause extension
• Browse the web with Chrome between December 15 – 19
• At the end of each day, you’ll be prompted to click on the extension to submit your tabs
• Choose which charity you’d like to support with that day’s tabs — you can always support the same charity, or pick a different one each day

Next week, we’ll be sharing the details of the good deeds you’ve enacted. In the meantime, browse away!

Posted by Sarah Nahm, Product Marketing Manager

Back pain, migraines and other chronic pain hinder about one in 10 Canadians aged 12 to 44, Statistics Canada says.

Focusing on work you really want to do is probably the best way to get more done. But for a small side benefit, try adding something sweet to your caffeine breaks. A new study shows glucose and caffeine could work better together. More »

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been named Person of the Year by Time magazine. Yep, Mark Zuckerberg. Not Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Not imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Not even the Chilean miners. Mark Zuckerberg.

Time’s Lev Grossman wrote that Zuckerberg received the honor “[f]or connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.” The inconvenient truth, of course, is that Zuckerberg basically did all that about six years ago, when he created Facebook. But he did have a movie made about him this year. And it was really good. Besides, Zuckerberg’s young, and young people use Facebook, and Time magazine wants to stay hip with the kids. So it totally makes sense. You can find Time’s full explanation here, and read about things you probably already knew.

Time Magazine Names Facebook’s Zuckerberg Person of the Year. Seriously. originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Google Docs offers up to 1 GB of free space, but only file-by-file uploading. Amit Agarwal shows us how to use a free tool to upload entire folders of documents or images to your Docs space. More »

We’ve featured quite a few Windows downloads throughout 2010. Here’s a look back at the most popular free applications to help you tweak, customize, and enhance your Windows experience More »

Saskatchewan Roughriders slotback Andy Fantuz was scheduled to participate in a workout Tuesday with the Pittsburgh Steelers and has another session booked Saturday with the Minnesota Vikings.

For the first time, a man has been declared officially cured of HIV. The remedy may nearly have killed him, but it opens a door—just a crack—to hope that we may someday kill off the scourge for good. More »

Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer

There are many times in life when a do-over can come in handy. Perhaps you clicked “Send” on an email that was better left unsaid, or “Delete” on a contact before realizing you still needed it. Just like Gmail lets you unsend a message, you can now have a second chance with your contacts too.

We’ve added a new feature to Google Contacts that allows you to revert your contact list and undo any mistakes made up to 30 days in the past. Let’s say you accidentally deleted a bunch of contacts or wiped the contact data from your Gmail account by mistake while syncing to another device. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to.

Your contacts will be restored to exactly the same state they were in at that time — any contacts that didn’t exist then will be deleted and any that have since been added will be deleted. Don’t worry, you can always undo this change by restoring again if you didn’t get the time right.

Despite a huge dropoff in cable subscribers this year, Forrester Research’s 40,000-strong survey pegs consumer TV consumption at about 13 hours weekly, same as it ever was. But lo and behold, reported internet use has also risen to 13 hours weekly, a veritable tie to which we naturally reply, “what took it so long?” This number represents a 121 percent uptake in the past five years and attributes its success to multitaskers and those who are spending less time with radio, newspaper, and magazines — again, nothing too mind-blowing to our perception of reality. If the survey has revealed anything surprise to us, it’s that email is only used by 92 percent of those questioned, leaving at least eight percent classically trained in case the post-apocalyptic world of Kevin Costner’s The Postman ever becomes reality.

[Image Credit: ICHC]

Shocker! Internet use now ties TV in time spent avoiding outdoor activity originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  WSJ, Forrester  | Email this | Comments

Every December for as long as I can remember, I’ve come home to something like this:

If you couldn’t already tell, that’s a list of things my dad wants me to teach him how to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching my dad how to do stuff on his computer—and he’s fairly tech-savvy as far as dads go—but sometimes trudging through that to-do list gets tedious.

Talking to fellow Googlers, I learned that I wasn’t alone in my role as the one-man family tech support team. In fact, I was hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t have a similar story about getting their parents up to speed.

This got a few of us thinking. Why isn’t there a site designed to help “kids” teach their parents about computer basics? So we put our heads together and built a new site: TeachParentsTech.org.

TeachParentsTech.org lets you select from more than 50 basic how-to videos to send to mom, dad, your old college roommate, your neighbor or anyone else who could use a little help with tech tasks—whether it’s how to copy & paste to how to share a big file. Wrap up your video with a custom email and off it goes! The recipient will receive your message and a link to the video(s) you selected.

As an added treat, the first 10,000 people who send tech support care packages will also be able to send a real tech support care package in the (snail) mail to the recipient of their choice (U.S. only)—on us.

I hope this shaves off an hour or two of your family tech support duties this December—and beyond!

Signatures of bubble collisions in CMB

Stephen Feeney at University College London and colleagues say they’ve found tentative evidence of four collisions with other universes in the form of circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background.

In their model of the universe, called “eternal inflation,”  the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where the laws of physics may be dramatically different from ours.

Ref.: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1995: First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation

Also see: Penrose claims to have glimpsed universe before Big Bang

By now you’re probably familiar with this slate, seeing as how Google’s Andy Rubin recently unveiled it on stage, but we’re willing to bet you’ve never seen the top edge — you know, the part now bearing a front-facing webcam and a conspicuous Verizon tattoo. Yes, this is Motorola’s 10-inch Honeycomb tablet, and it’s playing for Team Red just as foretold, though the tipster who obtained these images isn’t sure whether it will bear the name Stingray, Everest or even potentially “Trygon.” Spec-wise, we’re told our previous tipster was right on the money, and it’ll have a 1GHz Tegra 2 T20, a gyroscope and 32GB of storage underneath that 1280 x 800 multitouch screen, as well as 512MB of RAM and a slot for an up-to-32GB microSD card. It also sure looks like there’s a micro-USB jack, a mini-HDMI port and a 3.5mm headphone socket, as well as some contacts for a likely dock, though as always Mr. Blurrycam’s handiwork is such that we can’t quite tell. No matter — see for yourself in the gallery below.

Update: What’s that button on the back of the unit, right next to the speaker and dual LED flash? Why, it’s the power toggle, of course.

[Thanks, wnrussell]

Motorola’s 10-inch Honeycomb tablet meets Mr. Blurrycam, shows off Verizon logo originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

After a massive blizzard dumped 17 inches of snow on Minneapolis last night, the inflatable roof of the Minnesota Vikings’ Metrodome just couldn’t deal with the weight. Watch an entire stadium buckle before the force of nature. More »

Kind of like the one kid at school that breaks the rules and ruins the fun for everyone, the WikiLeaks scandal has forced the US DoD to ban the use of CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives on SIPRNET computers. 

read more