Katie Couric Explains the 1-2-3 of romantic texting

Personally, I’m not from the “texting” generation, so this doesn’t really apply to me, but what about you, younger [GAS] readers? Have you ever used texting to declare your love to someone, or in the opposite extreme, dump someone to avoid a potentially disastrous situation? The comments section is open for your stories.

Breathing Books Look Very ‘Harry Potter-ish’

These breathing books must be one of the most original and awesome mix of old and new technology I’ve seen in a long time. I’d just love to put one of these on the corner of a table in my living room, invite some friends over, and watch their reaction as they lay their eyes on the thing. Hit the more link for an additional clip.

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Study Shows Even Hands-Free Cell Phones Turn Drivers Into Idiots

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A new study (PDF) in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that – gasp! – talking on a cell phone while driving might actually be dangerous. Sure, the conclusion is kind of a no-brainer, but the heart of the experiment was to figure out if there’s any difference between chatting with someone on a hands-free phone and chatting with a passenger in the car with you. After all, it seems like the mechanics are basically the same… Wrong! According to the study (which used 41 drivers), talking on the phone made a significant impact on driving, causing them to drift lanes, miss exits, and just generally drive like the jerks that make you yell “GET OFF THE FREAKING PHONE!” to people in front of you in traffic–even without having a phone in their hands. Meanwhile, talking to a passenger in the car had little or no impact.

This fits perfectly with my theory that talking on a cell phone actually actively sucks away at your brain cells. Okay, maybe not… Actually, if you stop to think about it, the findings do make some intuitive sense. It seems to me like an issue of presence–even if you’re talking to someone, if they’re there with you in the car, your attention is still there in the car. The researchers from the study suggest that the driver may even be getting conversational cues about the surrounding traffic from the passenger. After all, your mother sitting on her front porch on her phone isn’t going to shriek, “OH MY GOD, YOU NEARLY CLIPPED THAT 18-WHEELER,” at you while you’re talking to her while driving.

Strangely enough, the study doesn’t address people who text message or check their email while driving. I suspect this is because they’ve all been in horrible traffic accidents already.

[Image Source: Flickr]

Google Chrome to Get Extensions Framework

The very fact that Google put Aaron Boodman on the Chromium project should have told us something.  Aaron invented the popular GreaseMonkey add-on for Firefox, and on Saturday he announced the publication of a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

The lack of extensions for Chrome has been a major barrier to adoption of the new browser.  I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser since I reviewed it back in September, and add-ons are perhaps my most missed Firefox feature — with the possible exception of RSS autodiscovery and customizable subscription.

Many Firefox users identify a single extension as the main reason they haven’t moved to Chrome: AdBlock.  For Google to allow an extension in its browser that would block its own ads might seem like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it appears that these users may get their wish.  AdBlock is specifically mentioned as a use case in the design document for the new feature.

Many of the design goals seem specifically designed to overcome the frailties of Firefox add-ons.  Here are a few that scream out, “I’m looking at you, Firefox!”:

  • We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.
  • Extensions should not be able to crash or hang the browser process.
  • Chromium should assign blame to extensions that are overusing resources via tools like the task manager and web inspector.
  • Poorly behaving extensions should be easy to disable.
  • Extensions need to be loaded immediately at startup, ideally before pages are loaded, yet shouldn’t affect startup time.
  • Most extensions should be able to load in place without forcing a browser restart or even a page reload when they are installed.
  • Similar to Google Chrome, it is important for security that extensions be able to silently update.

The authors mention that each extension should run in its own process, just as Chrome handles separate web pages — and that these processes should be “sandboxed” to prevent access to the local machine.  The one exception would be content scripts (like GreaseMonkey) that would have to run in the same process as the content they’re modifying (really?  you couldn’t pipe it through?).

The “silent update” facility will be driven by a central repository of extension updates.  A central service will also keep track of known harmful extensions.  The browser can check this service to disable those extensions.

The APIs have not yet been specified at all, other than to mention some hopeful categories: “toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for GreaseMonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or adblock-like functionality.”

Each extension will be accompanied by a manifest, written in JSON, which seems to be the most detailed part of the proposal so far.  No word yet on when we can expect more.  Personally, I can’t wait.

Apple to Mac users: No anti-virus software? Get it now!

Windows users all know that there’s nothing quite like an anti-virus application to bring your PC’s performance crashing down. People using a Mac or running any flavor of Linux never have to suffer from this, since virus developers have always been interested in reaching the bulk of the population, meaning the Bill Gates-loving crew. But these days are now becoming a distant memory!

In a recent note to fans, Apple has strongly recommended that all Mac owners should now install an anti-virus application on their systems. The note said, “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.” The note then recommends three applications: Intego VirusBarrier X5, Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh and McAfee VirusScan for Mac. And now that you’ve read this, here’s something for you to watch:

Gotta love the irony.

[Via Newlaunches]

Gadgets Dominate Black Friday (and Happy Cyber Monday!)

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Here’s a piece of trivia for you. Though now the term “Black Friday” (indicating the day after Thanksgiving in the US) has come to refer to the beginning of the period when retailers get back in the black (due to the heavy Christmas season shopping), that’s not the actual origin of the term. It originally referred to the heavy traffic on that day, a comparison to the chaos of Black Tuesday during the 1929 stock market crash. Since the current state of the economy has inspired a lot of references to 1929, the importance of Black Friday this year was particularly fitting. You could practically see the stock market holding its breath.

Luckily, all the worry was for nothing – retail sales were actually up 3% this year! And it looks like geeks were leading the way… or at least, gadget sales were. Nine of the ten most popular sales for Friday were gadgets… like a Sony Blu-Ray disc player, a Canon digital camera, and an Acer laptop. And on eBay, an MP3 player sold every 11 minutes (with the iPod touch leading the way).

The hit of the day, however, was the Nintendo Wii. It was also the most searched-for product on eBay, selling over 3,000 units there at an average price of $349. The Wii Fit also made the top ten sales overall. My Buy.com alerts informed me that they were selling Wii bundles for $379 (bundles, of course, meaning one good game and two or three stupid games, like giving you Super Smash Bros. along with M&M Racing to make you think you’re getting a great deal).

And the odd one out (the non-gadget) in that top ten? Ugg boots. At number 2 right below the Wii. I can’t even think of anything funny about that. I’m just disturbed.

Strangely enough, nothing from our list made the cut.

Also, happy Cyber Monday! Today is supposed to be a companion to Black Friday–the premise being that shoppers would return to work on Monday and immediately go online to buy all the things they missed on Friday. OF course, not only has the term not really taken off, but today isn’t even the biggest online shopping day of the year. Oh, well.