Tiny bytes of tech
Google announced yesterday the release of a new DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. This is a product in direct competition to OpenDNS. With Google Public DNS, Google aims to bring speed, security and validity to DNS lookups. Try it out and see if you like it better than your ISP!
Google and Microsoft are on a spree lately in terms of search engine news and features. In answer to cool and interesting new features in Bing, Google is showing that they will not be out-done!
Google Swirl is new labs feature that groups similar images into a fun-looking swirl of images. So if you search for Washington, you’ll get images of the white house, the Washington Monument, etc. Click on one of those and a swirl of related images will pop into view!
Looking for an official Google blog? Google has so many products and services and just about every last one of them has a blog too! Luckily, you can easily find the official ones by visiting the Google Blog Directory. Here you will find everything from the main Google blog to the Mac blog, Chrome blog, AdSense blog, Docs, blog and tons more!
Google is pretty much always adding new features or optimizing their already awesome search engine. In November, added a couple of notable new changes. First, you can get help finding a place to get flu shots by checking out their Flu Shot Finder.
Secondly, they introduced a new feature whereby you can lock your SafeSearch settings, which means you’ll have to enter your password to change the setting again. Mostly useful if you have kids.
Thirdly, the search results for movie showtimes has now been enhanced so that the movie poster is included along with a more comprehensive summary of the movie.
Lastly, they’ve added a bunch of World Bank data to the search engine, which means you can now find cool facts like life expectancy, birth rates, and electricity use by country! You can also compare countries too!
Google SafeSearch is a feature that you can use to block out explicit results from your regular Google search results and image search results. It’s useful if you have kids and want to make sure nothing bad comes up in the search results.
Now you can lock the setting, so that it can only be changed if the person enters the account password. To lock SafeSearch, click on Settings, then Search Settings on the Google home page and then click on Lock SafeSearch under SafeSearch Filtering.
Need to store a bunch of pictures online and don’t want to spend a lot of money? Well, Google recently announced huge price cuts on their Picasa online storage service. Now for only $5 A YEAR you can get 20 GB of storage space. You can also go up to a whopping 16 TB of storage, but if you take that many pictures, you should work for NASA.
So you just bought a new Droid phone? Or maybe a HTC Hero? Android phones are becoming more popular every day and so are the number of apps! So if you own a new Android phone and need some help with which apps you should install, check out the list of the Top 10 best apps for new Android users.
One thing you have to love about Google is all the free services they provide! This holiday season, you can add free WiFi to the list too! From November 16th, 2009 till January 2010, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports around the US. Sweet!
Keep getting junk emails from one person over and over again? Wish you could block their email address in Gmail so it won’t show in your Inbox? Easy! Open the email and click on the More Actions button and choose Filter Messages like these.
Now click Next Step and check the box that says Delete it. Click the Create Filter button and you’re done!
Now when an email comes from that address, it will automatically be deleted. Enjoy!
Google Map Saver is a sweet little utility if you ever wanted to convert a Google map to an image and save it to your hard drive. Just download the program, type in an address, choose a resolution, an image format and click Save Image! It’s also standalone, so no install necessary. The watermark can be removed by accepting the license agreement when you click the About link.