So, Google finally got around to adding official extension support for Chrome. It’s about time. Since Chrome is currently the fastest browser around (actually, I think a beta of Opera is actually slightly faster at the moment, but whatever), extensions or add-ons or whatever you like to call them were the only things that were holding Chrome back. Firefox still had that area dominated.

Well, I booted into Windows 7 the other day, as I rarely do, and when I opened up Chrome, I saw this little message at the bottom telling me that Chrome now has extensions. I looked down in amazement and clicked the link. Sure enough, Chrome now has honest-to-goodness extensions.

Now, you can go to https://chrome.google.com/extensions and start loading up your browser with extensions. Here are a few notable extensions you’d probably be interested in:

1. AdBlock – You know all those pesky advertisements you see all over the internet, even on my site? Download this plug-in, and *poof* they’re gone.
2. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer – This is undoubtedly setting Google up for their Chrome OS release. Since you can’t actually store things on the netbook’s hard drive, you’ll have to open document links online somehow. Well, ta-da.
3. Google Mail Checker – What this does is displays a little button at the top right-hand side of your browser, next to the address bar, that has the number of emails in your Gmail account, and if you click the button, it automatically takes you to your Gmail. Personally, I use other programs to alert me when I get emails, so I wouldn’t use this extension, but a lot of people will undoubtedly find this very useful.
4. RSS Subscription Extension – You know that handy-dandy feature in Firefox where if you click on an RSS feed link, it will take you to a landing page where you can select how to subscribe to the feed? Do you ever get frustrated when you click that same link in Chrome and get a bunch of jargon spat at you? Well, me too, so I downloaded this extension!
5. Chromed Bird – This is a Twitter client built right into your browser! I hardly ever tweet, so I’d never use it, but I know a lot of people would love this extensions.

One thing I really love about Chromes extensions is actually installing them. In Firefox, it takes several moments to install a new add-on. In Chrome, you click the Install link, the extension is downloaded almost instantly, you click the next install button and bam! You’re done. It’s very quick.

So, yesterday I finally found the time to do that Samsung Rogue review I said I’d do back in October.

Not only that, this is my first ever YouTube video. I got a Flip MinoHD for Christmas, and this is the first time I’ve gotten a chance to use it. Still getting used to using a camcorder, so the video was a bit shaky, but whatever.

Also, make sure you turn up your speakers or watch this in a quiet environment. I didn’t realize I spoke that softly. Sorry.

As I said in my post, PS3 Woes, I’ve been having some issues with my PS3 player. I thought it was fixed after moving it so the shelf wasn’t bearing down on it, seeing as I didn’t have any more problems for a couple weeks afterward. I started having the same problems again, however.

What it does is it starts just randomly cutting out audio and video. If I’m watching a movie, the movie continues while the audio and video are gone, so when it comes back, I’ve missed a bit. The cutting out becomes increasingly frequent until it eventually just totally cuts out and doesn’t come back.

I had thought that this problem was exclusive to my PS3. Then I started having the same problem with my Sony Blu-ray player. I was having the same problem with both discs and internet-streamed video, so I knew it wasn’t a problem with the optical drive or the internet connection. I looked into the problem a bit and came across this forum post. The forum post is about the PS3 slim, specifically, but the issues that were described matched mine perfectly. Apparently it’s an over-heating issue.

At the time, I had my Blu-ray player with my satellite box on top of it. I felt the bottom of the Blu-ray player, and it seemed warm but fine. I felt the top of the Blu-ray player and it felt a bit hot. Then I felt the metal bottom of the satellite box that had been sitting on top of the Blu-ray player, and it actually burned the top of my hand it was so hot. The satellite box had been off for the past few hours, so there’s no way the heat was from it; the heat from the top of the Blu-ray player seemed to have heated up the metal on the bottom of the satellite box and made kind of an oven for itself.

Now I have the blu-ray player on top of the satellite box, and all seems well. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with the PS3, since given my current furniture setup, standing it vertical isn’t an option. Ah well, I’ll figure something out when it has annoyed me enough.

A few days ago, as most everyone has heard by now, Stove Jobs announced the new iPad. If you’d like to check out the actual announcement, here is the link to go check that out on YouTube. The actual presentation was really boring, I thought; he just pretty much repeated the same things over and over, but I guess there really isn’t as much to say about it as he needed to fill his time slot.

The device itself is exactly like an over-sized iPhone. It even has almost exactly the same interface, but it is slightly different. The new iPad interface is actually already available, here, for people to put on their jailbroken iPhones.

There are a few main differences between the iPad and the iTouch:

The Mic. It obviously won’t make calls like an iPhone does – could you imagine holding a 9.5×7.5 tablet up to your ear to make a call? It does, however, have a built-in mic and can run Skype and iChat. So, you can set it down on a desk and have a conference call type of thing going.

3G. It will be available in two versions – wifi only and wifi+3G. The wifi+3G model will be available a full month later and will cost $130 more than each equivalent wifi model (the prices can be found here). I think it’s really interesting that you can get the 3G on here at all. Now, are they going to start offering iTouches with 3G as well? It’s a long-shot; most likely it’s just an iPad thing, but it opens up an interesting possibility.

The Size. Obviously, the iPad is significantly larger than the iTouch. While this significantly limits the iPad’s portability and therefore its usefulness, it does work to it’s advantage in some ways.

First off, the keyboard is, according to Jobs, “almost life-size.” That should make for a better typing experience and make the device more comparable to a Tablet PC than to an iPhone.

Second, the device is about the size of a standard ebook reader, and Apple intends to take advantage of that as much as possible, making an ebook application available and selling ebooks on the iTunes store.

Third, now the screen is big enough that they can release iWork for the iPad. Without iWork, I don’t know how anyone could possibly justify buying the iPad. This one tiny little detail, though, transforms the iPad from being a gimmicky toy that serves no real purpose to being a gimmicky toy that you can actually do real work on but probably never will because there’s no point as long as you have a real computer.

Maybe I’m totally missing the usefulness of the iPad altogether, but I have an iTouch, and I don’t feel like I’m really missing out on anything by not getting an iPad. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want one just because it’s new and looks nice and shiny, but I don’t really see any point to spending $499-829 on one.

Hello, readers! I’m back from yet another long blogging hiatus. Believe me, I hate that I’ve been blogging so sporadically for the past 6 months or so, but now, with first semester and most of my hard classes out of the way, I should finally have time to pay attention to the blog.

While I was gone, an WoW-buddy of mine, Raven, made his own blog. It’s called The Scroll, and it’s about video games. Check it out.

To go along with that, I have now made a Blogroll page for my blog, where I can hopefully get some networking going with other bloggers. If you have your own blog and you would like to exchange links, go ahead and send me an email using the form at the bottom of the Blogroll page. Make sure first, though, that the blog is actually related to computers, technology or video games. I’m not linking to totally irrelevant blogs.