For those of you who use OneNote, life is getting good.

Recently, Microsoft released mobile versions of OneNote for the iPhone & iPad.

Today, Microsoft released an Android version.

Microsoft is pitching their web apps as a great and free solution to having your data everywhere. I’ve tried their web apps multiple times and can’t get over the slowness and lack of full features. (To be fair, I base that off of my experience with the Excel web app.) I don’t plan on giving up my full version of OneNote anytime soon.

While these mobile apps will only sync with the web app version of OneNote at live.com, I’ve found that the best use of these mobile apps is to use them as another “Unfiled Notes” section. Capture whatever note you want now on any device and periodically move them over to a regular OneNote notebook synced through Dropbox.

After driving my newly acquired Civic for a few months, the time came to replace the wiper blades. I typically do this twice a year on my vehicles. It usually entails picking up a set of Anco replacement blades and swapping them out.

I recalled seeing, while researching my Civic purchase, that most stock replacement wipers didn’t fit the 8th Generation Civics. The stock wiper assembly are also better looking than the el-cheapo Anco units. So I bought some blades online and went about what I thought would be a 5 minute job.

After 30 minutes of trying to yank the blades off the assembly, looking online for a how-to and eventually digging out the manual, I was finally able to replace the blades.

Here are the manual pages on how to change a wiper blade. This is mostly as a reference for myself, but figured it may help anyone else attempting the herculean task of replacing the wiper blades on a Honda Civic.

These instructions are for a 2009 Honda Civic Si Sedan. While the basic installation steps should be the same for multiple years/models, specifics may vary. I think Sedans and Coupes use different blades. Also saw that the type of blade and wiper arm assembly was changed frequently since 2006.

You may also consider buying your wiper blades from your local Honda dealer, who may install them free of charge.

I complained before about the awfulness of the new tab page in Google Chrome.

Today, I found a workaround for this smartphoneish abuse of whitespace.

You can find the fix here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=172036d6e2c73ba2&hl=en

Or if you don’t like clicking, here’s how to fix:

I’ve been using Calgoo Connect to sync my Work Exchange Calendar with Google Calendar for some time. Though a resource hog, Calgoo Connect has worked until lately. Now the website seems to be down and syncing has stopped.

In setting out to find a different way to get work appointments to Google calendar, I came across Google Calendar Sync. The problem with Google Calendar Sync is that it  will only sync from Outlook to your primary calendar. I had two problems with this:

1. I did not want all my work appointments to clutter up my personal calendar.
2. I wanted to maintain the color coding that comes with separate calendars.

I didn’t turn up any other freeware to accomplish what I was wanting to do. Instead, I figured out an obvious solution; create a dedicated gmail account to receive my work appointments and share the calendar with myself.

 Steps

1. Sign up for a new Google account.
2. Give permissions to Manage the calendar to your primary google account.
   (Calendar Settings -> Calendars -> Share this Calendar -> Share with your primary Google account)
3. Download and install Google Calendar Sync.
4. Configure your GCS with your new account from Step 1.
5. Enjoy

Benefits

1. Google Calendar Sync uses far less resources than Calgoo.
2. I don’t recall Calgoo supporting two-way sync. It may have, but being able to create an appointment on my mobile device and have it show up on the office calendar is very nice.

Drawbacks

1. This is Outlook only. Calgoo supported some additional calendar types.
2. The sync app has to be running all the time to sync. The same was true of Calgoo, so not really a drawback; more of a consideration when syncing.

Google is the provider for most of the services I use. I use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader and a bunch of other services they provide. Chrome has become my go to browser lately.

Recently, they have been making some interface changes. Some good. Some bad.

First the good news.

The look is different. Since most of the apps had never received a UI refresh, it was time.

Now the bad news.

I’m not sure the designer of the interface actually uses any of the products.

This person/team needs to reminded of a few of things:

1. My computer is not a smartphone.

Ninety-five percent of my browsing is done on a laptop with a very large monitors. I don’t mind tablets and smartphones; they have their place. But I want a full featured browsing experience when I’m not using a mobile device. The Ipad’s interface is ingenious and simple, but that doesn’t mean it should be everywhere.

Google Chrome’s new tab page now sucks as a result of some Googler thinking they need to make it behave like a smartphone or a tablet. The old New Tab page was extremely useful because it gave a heads up view of my apps, recent closed tabs and most visited pages. It was VERY handy. The new tab page, not so much.

Now I have to scroll between two tabs to see apps and most visited pages. Awful and a lot less useful.

The fix: I’ve seen suggestions to install an old version and turn off updating. So not really a fix.

My wish:

1. Allow apps on the Most Recent tab.
2. Allow more than 8 recent sites
3. Put the Recently Closed back where it belongs

The left navigation of Gmail also suffers from this. I’d prefer to see my chat and widgets in one long window. Why do I now have to click a button to see who’s online, or my calendar widget?

2.White space is not the new black.

I don’t need extra whitespace between detail items just for the sake of having white space. Yes it makes the UI look cleaner. But it wastes a bunch of screen real estate and impacts the usability of the product.

The Chrome screenshot above is good example of purposeless white space. Here’s the image above, but at near full screen.

Google Reader is the biggest victim of this. After the update, I found myself clicking “Mark All As Read” a lot more frequently than normal as I couldn’t focus on the spaced out items. Maybe I’m weird, but I have seen a couple posts on large nerd sites in the past few days soliciting suggestions for the best RSS Reader after the UI updates, so I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I did find a userscript that will help with this Google Reader spacing issue. You can find it here.

New Google Reader without userscript (7.5 items)

New Google Reader with userscript (11 items)

3. Provide a fallback plan

The most maddening thing of all these changes is that Google (who when I looked the other day, still provide a way to show the “Gmail – beta” logo) has been really good in the past of allowing legacy features to persist or giving users the option through application labs to enable/disable suspect changes.

The new UI changes seem to have no options or rollbacks.

Facebook is well known for making interface and feature changes that users hate. They seem to think they know best and that we’ll all be better off for their benevolent tweaking.

Until recently, Google has by and large been the anti-Facebook in making changes that collectively enrage their user base. That seems to be changing and is not a good thing.

By all accounts I shouldn’t be writing this. Even almost 16 hours later, I am still struggling to believe the comeback(s) that the 2011 Cardinals pulled off in Game 6 of the World Series.

The Texas Rangers should have woken up hung over from their post-game celebration. They had the Cardinals on the ropes multiple times . . . but couldn’t knock them out.

Joe Buck said it best last night, “They just won’t go away.”

And as a result, St. Louis is home to a sports rarity tonight. A series-ending, season-ending, winner-take-all single game to determine a Champion.

Let’s Go Cards.

This little piece of magic I posted the other day is getting quite popular. 11,000+ views thus far. And why wouldn’t it with genius like SACK! and slow clap it out?

Only on the Internet can such a piece of crap find a home.

The St. Louis Rams play their home games  in the Edward Jones Dome. The facility leaves much to be desired.

The building was completed in 1995 and there is already talk of replacing it with what should have been built in the first place; an outdoor stadium with plenty of space for tailgating.

When the Rams were under the benevolent rule of Warner the Magnificent in the time of the Greatest Show on Turf, no one seemed to notice the crappy dome as winning covers a lot of faults.

Such winning has gone missing in the last few years. Gone with it is the deafening roar of the crowd throughout the game that was prevalent during the GSOT.

With the lease on the dome requiring it to be in the top 25% of NFL stadiums in 2015, there is an out for Rams ownership if they wanted to terminate the lease and move elsewhere. And off the top of my head, 8 stadiums better than the Edward Jones Dome are: Lucas Oil Stadium, Cowboy Stadium, MetLife Stadium, Reliant Stadium, University of Phoenix Stadium, Ford Field and Soldier Field. This is a problem.

The Rams were poised to make a comeback this season. The injury bug has already hit and it seems the 4th stringers will be taking the bulk of the snaps before long. And I doubt they will guide the Rams back to a winning record, even in a dreadful NFC West division.

Better find a way to whip the masses into a frenzy so no one notices the awfulness of the dome.

The Solution?

So to improve a horrid game experience, the marketing mavens with the Rams have come up with this gem. I believe it played during the loss to the Eagles on Sunday.

I hope that it is a joke, but I fear that is not the case. It originally came from the Rams’ website. Let’s slow clap it out.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for some time. It is a great browser.

I recently started having an issue when viewing Google Maps with Chrome. When viewing any Google Map, I would click to drag the map and the click would hang. I’d let go of my mouse, but the map would still move with my mouse.

As a workaround, I’d right click the map to stop the panning action. This worked, but not very well.

Started looking for a solution tonight and found this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=4de13e2d893a51b4&hl=en

The common thread between my setup and the initial posters was the Fast Access SSO extension. Go to Tools -> Extensions -> Disable Fast Access SSO.

Restart Chrome and you are fixed!