Lightsaber Battle in Chrome

Very cool!

Wield your lightsaber to escape the First Order in this #ChromeExperiment: https://t.co/D7vpCk6qzG #lightsaberescape pic.twitter.com/QDSpM3QSi2

— Google Chrome (@googlechrome) December 15, 2015

Chromecast

An appropriately titled lifehacker post: Four Things You Didn't Know You Can Do With Your Chromecast:

"Forget your TV remote—if you have a Chromecast hooked up and always powered on through the usb adapter, you can turn your TV on and even switch to the Chromecast's input with your mobile device."

Sure enough, it worked like magic. I had always been turning on the TV and switching the input.

Computer Update

So, I never did get my desktop working, but the good news is that my wife is getting a new PC at work. They are letting the employees take the old computers home (after wiping the software/data, of course).

Funny how things work out.

On a somewhat related note, I stumbled across a post about Chromebooks for use in portable ham operations. Which lead me to the video below. I don't take computer advice from Rick, but I thought it was pretty funny.

Chromebook Deal

Lifehacker says this $149.99 (free ship) re-furb Acer C720 is a steal of a deal if you are in the market for a Chromebook. Obviously being a Chromebook, it would push me toward Google Drive.

HBO Go on Chromecast

My Chromecast just became more valuable to me - it now works with HBO Go!

Chrome - Audio in Which Tab?

Excellent... a feature to identify which Chrome tab is playing audio. I'm bad about having lots of tabs open and sometimes a page will auto-play a video. This will eliminate a lot of searching and scrolling to find the offender.

Chromecast

Some have complained that the Chromecast is too limited, but I bought it to stream Netflix. If it does anything else, than that is just gravy.

I hooked it up this morning. It took about 10 minutes. Like my thermostat, it advertises a wireless network that you connect to from a laptop/phone/tablet. Once you've connected, you supply the information for your home network and the Chromecast will connect to it.

Once I got it on my network, I opened Netflix on my iPad and told it to send the stream to the TV. It worked like a champ!

The only thing that is a bit clunky is that you have to plug the dongle into a USB charger for power. That keeps it from being 100% wireless all the time, but that's a minor quibble in my book.

Chromecast Humor

Check out the model numbers on Chromecast and its charger.

Chromecast Teardown

Chromecast Teardown

(So this is how you take something apart without trashing it.)

Chromebook Pixel

Sexy, probably impractical for what I do, expensive, but I'd love to play with one.

googlechrome Introducing the #Chromebook Pixel: goo.gl/9Tc2L Thu, Feb 21 14:05:54 from web retweeted by google

Chromebooks

Two posts today about Google Chromebooks... more momentum for the cloud.

Mike really likes his and Martin is trying one, too.