.::REALITYRECALL::.

Jose Bautista is Toronto’s single-season home run leader after smacking his 48th home run of the year, eclipsing George Bell’s mark set in 1987.

One of the best way to take full advantage of your solid state drive (SSD) is to use the performance-maintaining TRIM command. Technology blog GHacks shows us how to make sure TRIM is enabled in Windows 7. More »

Plans for a Saskatchewan children’s hospital got boost Thursday – a $200 million cheque from the provincial government.

Posted by Serge Lachapelle, Product Manager

If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they’re turned on for everyone. Visit the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, turn on “Video chat enhancements,” and right away, you’ll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.

The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you’re chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.

We plan to add more video chat enhancements to this lab in the future, so if you have it on you’ll automatically get those too. Feel free to post your comments or report any issues you encounter in the video chat forum (we also follow #googlevideochat on Twitter).

Halo: Reach and Halo 3 go head-to-head in this graphical comparison between the two.

Bad news, folks: not only is the Sprint Samsung Galaxy Tab a 3G-only device, but Samsung just confirmed to us that telephony was cut out of the Tab for the US market. That means you won’t be able to pair up a Bluetooth headset and use the Tab as a really large phone like you can on the Euro model. That’s super lame — telephony features might have been the only way the inevitable two-year carrier contract would have been justifiable. Suffice to say, we’re even more curious to hear about official pricing now, but it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting it until Samsung and its carrier partners are good and ready. We’ll let you know.

Samsung Galaxy Tab loses voice capabilities in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows, Mac and Linux users can now access the 64-bit beta version of Flash Player. [Adobe via 9to5Mac] More »

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Halo: Reach, the latest installment in Microsoft’s wildly popular video game franchise, is proving to be the fastest-moving title in the series yet, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

In the first 24 hours that Halo: Reach has been available, it has pulled in more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe, making it the fastest-selling game Microsoft has ever released.

“Every major installment has grown in scope and popularity, firmly cementing the ‘Halo’ franchise as one of the most popular entertainment properties in the world over the past decade,” Microsoft Game Studios’ corporate vice president Phil Spencer said in a statement Wednesday evening.

Indeed, the popularity of the franchise appears to be enjoying unabated growth, and each new release has broken the records set by its predecessor, (at least according to Microsoft’s tallies.) Halo 3, for example, earned $170 million in its first day of availability when it launched in 2007, which broke the $125 million record set by Halo 2 in 2004.

By the end of Halo 3’s first week of availability, it had earned $300 million, and Halo: Reach looks to be well on track to break that record as well.

Tony Bartel, President of video game retailer GameStop predicted that Halo: Reach will be the “biggest title in the series as well as one of the biggest titles in 2010.” GameStop held midnight launch events in 4,000 of its stores on Tuesday, and eyewitness accounts tell of lines more than one hundred customers long waiting to get the game at stores all over the U.S.

GameStop is hoping to stretch out that first day excitement a bit longer by hosting a post-launch Halo: Reach tournament called “Melee by the Bay.” The tournament has participating GameStop locations hosting one-on-one tournaments beginning on September 24, which are then followed by a national four-on-four online tournament with a $15,000 grand prize.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010















microsoft game studio – Halo 3 – Halo Reach – Video game – Microsoft

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): If you’ve got multiple Firefox installations across different computers, or just find yourself setting up Firefox often, Siphon is a must-add. This extension simply syncs a list of add-ons between browsers, with easy installation and deletion buttons for each. More »

The NHL confirmed Wednesday that the city of Ottawa will host the 2012 all-star game.

Fast Company got some preview time with the Internet Explorer 9 beta, due out today. The big change-up? IE9 will offer customized, stand-alone app-like experiences through Microsoft’s partners, like Amazon, Twitter, IMDB, and others, along with fuller HTML5 support. More »

At yesterday’s Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona, CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed that the company will roll out a new social service, internally dubbed Google Me, sometime this Fall. They basically want to give your web a social booster shot. More »

Shootouts will be a little less important in the NHL next season as the league’s board of governors approved a bylaw revision Tuesday for use when teams are tied in the standings at the end of the season.

Microsoft‘s Principal Researcher recently sat down for a very long interview with The Globe and Mail. The next big thing in tech, he says, is something like Microsoft’s already available (but super expensive) Surface. So what does the next version of the Surface look like? Well, it’s going to be much thinner — “no thicker than a sheet of glass,” but most importantly, it will cost much much less. The man who helped design what ultimately became Surface says that soon enough, the cameras will be embedded within the device itself, making it a low-cost, in home product rather than the niche product it is today. Buxton also said in the interview that he thinks we’ll begin seeing home implementation within the next three years. We sure hope that he’s correct.

Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton: Surface will be in homes within three years originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted by Jonathan Sposato, Product Management — Photos Team

It used to be all or nothing when it came to sharing a new Picasa Web Album in Buzz. If you created a public album in Picasa Web Albums, it created a public Google Buzz post. That was great for when you wanted to share your photos broadly. But for those times when you wanted to share with a smaller circle — no Buzz.

Now when you create a private album, the select people you choose to share your photo album with will see a notification in Google Buzz as well.

Just make sure you have Picasa Web Album as one of your connected sites in Buzz to take advantage of this easy way to share your albums.

One of the primary features that kept me using Outlook’s calendar was the desktop notifications that popped up to remind me when it was time for another boring meeting. Now with Google Calendar and Chrome notifications, I’ll never miss the chance to sleep through another meeting.

Seriously, meetings are boring.

But more to the point, if you’re using Google Chrome there’s a built-in desktop notifications feature, and all you have to do is enable a Labs feature in Google Calendar to get it to start showing notifications on your desktop.

Make Sure Chrome Has Desktop Notifications Enabled

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that Chrome is set to allow desktop notifications. Head into Tools –> Options –> Under the Hood –> Content settings.

Next, select Notifications on the left-hand side, and then make sure the middle option for “Ask me when a site wants to show desktop notifications” is selected. You may want to click on the Exceptions button and make sure Google Calendar isn’t blocked in there.

Enable Desktop Notifications in Google Calendar

Now that we’ve made sure Chrome is configured properly, you’ll want to head into Google Calendar, open up the Settings link in the top right, and then go to the Labs section.

Find the “Gentle Reminders” item in the list, click the Enable button, and then Save at the bottom. If the option is already enabled but you aren’t getting desktop notifications, you should disable it, Save, and then Enable it again.

Once you’ve clicked the Save button you’ll see a bar show up across the top of the window, and you’ll need to click the Allow button.

As soon as you do, you’ll see a sample notification to show up on the bottom of the screen.

You’ll have to manually close out of the notifications, which is slightly annoying sometimes, but it’s probably a good thing so you won’t miss an important reminder.

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