So fire up Spotify and feel just fine with a little R.E.M.

Not my screenshot, just so you know.

Downloaded the 32bit Windows 8 Consumer Preview last night and gave it a spin on a VirtualBox VM. Initial impressions were pretty good but also pretty limited.

I don’t overly care for the Metro UI one way or the other.  I’m sure, if subjected to it outside the terrible, in my humble opinion, Xbox dashboard update, I’d get on with it well enough.  The operation of the interface was smooth enough to use, even on virtualised, and it was straight forward enough to understand what everything did.

Most of  the features in Windows 8 Consumer Preview are largely focussed on the Windows Live environment including, optionally, your user account on your local machine.  If you’re well involved the Windows Live world with your email, calendar, photos and so on then Windows 8 will slot into all that like a glove.  Now I can’t really fault Microsoft for this as that sort of integration is exactly why I get on so well with the Android platform but as I live in a Google world rather than a Microsoft one it all the exciting integration was out of my reach for quick testing.

That said I wouldn’t be surprised if Google and Yahoo et al put out their own Metro UI versions of their products to integrate nicely with the same look and feel which could, thinking about it, result in a uniform look and feel but also a stifling of design freedom.

The classic desktop is there, as expected, and looks pretty much the same as the Windows 7 desktop with the major exception of the missing ‘Start’ menu.  The Windows key now toggles you right back to the Metro UI which looks like it’s going to act as an application launcher even for those programes that require the traditional desktop interface to operate.

There’s not an awful lot more to test without getting embroiled in Windows Live so I’ll wait on for now until there’s some more Metro versions of applications and services that I regularly use.  So, in all, kinda ‘meh’ but at least the OS appears to be as light on resources as hoped.

You can grab ‘Keep My Opt-Outs’ here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe

Fortunately there’s a whole community out there that would click a Facebook ‘like’ button about that activity just so they could smugly click ‘unlike’ and these people are here to help!  There are two particular extensions for Google’s Chrome browser that have been cooked up that are worth using.

Ghostery

First up is Ghostery.  Ghostery, also available on Firefox, detects and allows you to be aware of what processes on any given website you may be on are actively tracking what you’re doing.  It gives you a wealth of information about these processes (sometimes you may actually wish to leave some tracking services active if they’re trusted and do, actually, enhance your online experience) but more importantly it allows you a straight-up block those you don’t approve of leaving you clear to browse with confidence!

Facebook Disconnect

Next up is Facebook Disconnect.  This one deals only with Facebook but then they’re one of the major headache causers so it’s useful to have something dedicated to their unique brand of privacy.  You may have seen on some websites, maybe sites you’ve never been to before, that they may show information about you from Facebook.  They’re able to do this by looking at information about your Facebook account that’s saved in your browser then ask Facebook themselves for the details who tend to be only too happy to offer it up.  This extension puts a stop to all of that meaning no more Facebook personalisation on sites.  Unlike Ghostery this is a blanket-ban so sites like TripAdvisor that make half interesting use of Facebook data will lose such features but I prefer to keep as much control as it possible (this is Facebook after all) over personal data.

Bonus note: If you have multiple computers and have allowed Chrome to sync with your Google account adding these extensions to one of your Chrome installs will result in them being automatically added to the others.  Add once then forget.  Good times.

Windows 8 is intended to run on both tablets and full desktop systems which could be a fantastic boon when it comes to application design and making working on both a tablet and a PC simple and useful.  However Gizmodo are reporting that Windows 8 tablets running ARM processors (commonly used in many Android devices) are going to have solidly locked bootloaders with no option for manufacturers or end users to legitimately disable the ‘SecureBoot’ process.

Firstly this kills the idea of easily dual-booting a Windows 8 tablet with Android but it also hampers the sort of innovation and advancements that come from a vast community of interested, and capable, people being able to really tinker with a system.  It will also no doubt be poorly received by the more technical folk of the world who revel in tweaking and highly customising their kit to their needs.

Then again the market Microsoft will likely be aiming Windows 8 tablets at is probably not that technical end which is foolish as such folk often help push popular use of technical kit (except Apple kit, of course, which is pushed by shiny shiny marketing )

In very short they’re better than Facebook or Flickr but not as good as Mobypicture and Imgur. In simple terms when you upload a photo to Google+ / Picasa Web Albums you grant them the rights to use and adapt that image for display in any of Google’s services and for use in “promoting Google’s services”. What’s nice about this vs Flickr, for example, is that the “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license” in this case is specifically limited to within Google’s services rather than including “partners”.

Additionally, unlike Facebook, when you delete photos from Google+ / Picasa Web the licence you’d granted to Google will become revoked “within a commercially reasonable period” (i.e. giving Google a chance to catch up with removing content they may have used for promotion purposes).

A very nice touch is the “Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed” wording. So the terms of service are pretty reasonable. As always exercise caution with any content you feel particularly clingy about the rights of and always backup your photos elsewhere but as far as social photo sharing goes Google+ is totally acceptable. Now nip over to Facebook and grab your photos and content here and choose “Download your information” for happy transitioning to Google+.

But don’t take my word for it read the Term of Service for yourself here.

When I signed up to you’re once genuinely interesting and good service I was required to have an email address. So I think it’s safe to say that you know I have an email account my own. Kindly explain to me why the dogs I would want to complicate my increasingly muddy online communications by adding an @facebook.com email address into this?

No enough it enough. Your services were once useful and fun but now you appear to be attempting to become the messenger of all my social communications – photo sharing, instant messaging now email. I would not entrust such things to a proprietary third party service who’s privacy intentions are, to say the least, shady.

While Google+, strictly speaking, actually is offering a similar service it’s the attitudes have always been better and it’s critical services, like email and instant messaging, work on open common standards that don’t lock my data away.

Thank you for being better than MySpace several years ago and tak you for bringing social networking into the mainstream but the time is coming for us to part ways. I openly admit I shall remain on facebook while there are people I want to communicate with who, annoyingly, use it as their main messaging platform but more and more people are drifting to alternative services that will return things, for a while at least, to a less complicated more enjoyable social space.

Regards,
Me.

Samsung are doing the whole scifi to reality thing by teasing us with their working foldable 4″ AMOLED screen.  What’s better is that it doesn’t even suffer any noticeable ’creasing’ from a test of 100,000 openny-closey tests (technical term).  I’m a little more interested in those crazy rollable screens that seem on the edge of reality  so I can have me a stack of digital scrolls but a foldable screen makes an awful lot of sense when screen real-estate (to use a silly term) on mobile devices is becoming more of a premium while the devices are try to limit their physical size.

Next up Nicholas J. Bryan has cooked up a pretty nice use of the iPhone4′s gyro by mounting it to a record on a DJ turnable then, presumably, feeding the data back to a Virtual DJ type desktop application.  It’s not a finished thing but the idea is very cool and probably a lot more accurate that using the crazy (but equally impressive) special vinyles that tell the Virtual DJ desk where the needle is and how fast and which direction it’s moving based on encoded sound.  Seem, however, a little costly.  For this to work you would need an iPhone4 (or, I suspect, a current gen iPod Touch) for each turntable.  Love the idea of taking the iPhone’s motion sensing and using it in a totally new and unintended way but the reality of it seems probably shiny but impractical (but then it is using Apple products so…).

*takes a bite from tasty Pek chopped pork sandwich*

What else was there?  Oh yes, Apple up to their shenanigans again.  If you’re looking at the new line of iMacs but considering switching the hard drive at some point in the future then beware!  Apple no longer use standard SATA cables for their drives but some newfangled proprietary 7 wire mutated beast.  The extra wires seem to be related to, among other things, monitoring the drive temperature and feeding back to the internal fan controls.  ElReg note that switching out a drive for a non-authenticated standard SATA one results in the system fan ramping up to permanent, noisy, full power along with the bonus of the replacement drive causing the iMac;s Apple Hardware Test to fail.  The up side will be Apple ensuring their hardware works exactly as it should but it does also remove the ability for end users to easily conduct some repairs on out of warranty machines without costly visits to the Apple store.

In other Apple news they’re patented a keyboard that blows air at your fingers as a response to them bit hit.  It seems Apple don’t trust their users to use the feeling of actually hitting a key as evidence enough that a keystroke has taken place.  The keyboard also, like pidgins, sucks.  Literally.

Really hope Nintendo sort it out. Theyve been the dominant force in handheld gaming since the dawn of portable games, for good reason, but starting to feel like they’re failing to keep up in the face of casual games on Android and iOS and the quality of developments in the pipeline for the new Sony PSP.

Expect I’ll end up with a 3DS at some point as there will be just about enough games I’ll want to play to make it worthwhile but I’m very much more interested in non-Nintendo efforts now for the first time in a very very long time.