The purpose of the Chromium OS project (vs Google Chrome OS) is for developers to build out the OS functions, try new ideas and provide pre-release versions for testing and debugging. The project has the benevolent guidance of Google to push things along since this is the core main development work for the Google Chrome OS. The Chromium project provides source code at the Chromium website, while Google works on its own release as a private project slated late 2010.

Features and Functions: Chromium OS (along with Chrome OS) features primarily the Chromium/Chrome browser as the only application the OS will run. The OS is designed to run on SSD devices (solid-state drives) instead of spinning platter hard drives. The OS is designed to provide the minimal resources to simply run the browser. The OS attempts to provide a safer more secure system by booting up a static image of code that rarely needs to be updated, and does not allow any downloaded applications from the Internet to infect the OS. This results in a more stable OS and virtually virus free.

The Chromium OS is based on a Linux kernel to start with. Then the Chromium developers removed and/or replaced bloated code and functions with streamlined versions. The focus of the OS is to provide a fast minimalist system that only provides the basic needs for running the Chromium browser.

Chromium OS source code is available for download so you would have to compile and build the OS for your hardware. Since Google is primarily aiming this OS at netbooks, there is currently a limited list of supported I/O devices. You may not have much success running this on just any platform. However several people are providing ready to download Chromium OS builds for your to try.

The purpose of the Chromium project (vs. Google Chrome) is for developers to build out the browser functions, try new ideas and provide pre-release versions for testing and debugging. The project has the benevolent guidance of Google to push things along since this is the core main development work for the Google’s Chrome. The Chromium project releases nightly builds of the software, called Development Releases, while Google releases its own Developer and Beta versions.

Chromium (along with Chrome) features the latest HTML5 rendering engine based on WebKit, a new and fast scripting language called the V8 Javascript engine and a new simplified User-Interface. The browser also features a simple browser extension mechanism that allows web developers to extend the functions of the browser with simple HTML and javascript, without resorting to more complicated programming languages.

Chromium sports an improved address bar, dubbed the “omnibar”. This entry box allows the entry of website URLS, search terms and references to any history items. A feature popular with Opera users in a “speed dial” page. This start page will show the last most popular pages you’ve visited and provide for a graphical easy click interface. There is also a privacy mode, to hide locations the browser visits and prevents the storage of page elements to the browser cache. Anti-phising technology is incorporated in the browser to help prevent nefarious web sites from infecting your computer with viruses.

The browser attempts to provide a safer more secure browser by keeping individual web pages and scripts separated as distinct protected tasks so no one page can take down the browser or infect the OS. This results in a more stable software program.

Chromium is available for Windows, Mac and Linux in various forms of development. See dev.chromium.org for more information.

Today, DHSs Napolitanos response to the crotchbomber: “Were looking to make sure that this sort of incident cannot recur.” But the TSAs response to Abdulmutalibs attempt makes one thing clear: We must stop pretending the TSA is making us safer.

Security expert Bruce Schneier nails the core incompetency: “For years Ive been saying Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”

So what has the TSA done in response to the attempted attack? Theyve told airlines to make passengers stay in their seats during the last hour of flight. Theyve made it verboten for passengers to hold anything in their laps, again only during the last hour of flight. Perhaps most hilariously telling, theyve forbidden pilots from announcing when a plane is flying over certain cities and landmarks.

via President Obama, Its Time To Fire the TSA – Travel – Gizmodo.

One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Lets take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today were talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesnt slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you wont have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

via You Dont Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows; Heres Why – Crapware – Lifehacker.

I finally figured out how to change that. Google keeps a “nickname” for your account and sure enough, that was set to default to my username and that is what was being used for the Reader functions.

To change your nickname to a real useful name, go to your profile management page or click this:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount?hl=en

Under your list of email addresses, click the edit link or go directly there with this link:

https://www.google.com/accounts/EditUserInfo?hl=en

Change your NickName and click save. Now this name will be used for your Google Shared Items page and emails sent from GReader.

via http://www.refseek.com/directory/educational_videos.html

Sharing is Growing

First, and foremost – and most exciting for us – we found that sharing is growing. On a “per page view” level, we’ve seen a 200 percent increase in the shares per page view across our 125,000+ sites in 2009. This means for every page view consumed, the rate of sharing has doubled, meaning our publishers are getting better at optimizing their sharing and consumers now expect it to be there.

Sharing is Valuable

On an aggregate level, sharing is now accounting for as much as one-third of the amount of traffic driven by search, which is most often the top source of traffic for sites. So say a site gets 100,000 unique visitors per month from search, they’re also getting 33,000 from sharing. Now, 33 percent is at the high range of our network, but we’re seeing sites across several verticals (mainstream news, tech, entertainment) achieving these levels.

via The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement | ShareThis.

So pardon the bumpy ride as I shift gears. I’m thinking of just posting all shared stuff to Google Shared Items, which go to my FriendFeed account and then get posted out to Twitter. Then my Linked-in page picks up the Twitter posts. A long thread, but a single one.

I then will keep my Google Reader Shared Item listed on my Blog on the Daily Links page via the “Recommended Reading” plug-in I just found.

I will still post the most interesting things on my Blog for permanent display, whereas the Google Reader Shared Items list will be a lengthy list of the latest daily items I’m interested in.

One of the values I try to live is “growth.” As part of that quest, taking control of my continued education and intellectual improvement is crucial.  We live in an age of such democratization of access to resources that can be used to learn– we just have to take advantage of them.  Lots of online self-education lists focus on giving the largest amount of links possible, regardless of how useful they actually are.  Instead of copying that format, I decided to focus more on the quality of the websites.  The following sites are a great base for your own growth as an intellectual individual.

via thesimplerlife.net » Blog Archive » 14 websites to make you a more intelligent person.

There are no comment threads added to tweets, nor a way to see both sides of a group discussion on the same page.

Just this evening a prominent tech industry person tweeted that a colleague of his was going to take questions on Twitter. All you had was his Twitter name.

To ask a question of them, I @reply to that Twitter name. Then I have to click on that users twitter page, to wait for any reply to my question. I hit refresh every 30 seconds and watch other answers go by. Not only will I not see other people’s questions to the answers I see, I have to continue hitting refresh to check for an answer to my question. Also my Twitter status is full of questions to someone my followers don’t even know.

I only see one side of a conversation and my followers only see the other side of my conversation. Using Twitter for discussion is just stupid. There are way better tools to have a public discussion with. Twitter has a very limited purpose. And this isn’t it.

It is sure sad that many people are abandoning long form blog posting and other tools very well suited for discussions, in favor of Twitter, the worst tool on the net for two way conversations. As designed, Twitter is for broadcasting. One way, spam included.

Now FriendFeed does solve all these faults and more. But Twitter has all the marketing press and FriendFeed has been sucked into Facebook. Sigh!

Browser makers, Apple, Mozilla, and now Google are making their browsers more efficient and speedier, therefore limited power netbooks can run these applications just fine.

So for most of the users on the net, web browsing, Facebook and email are all they do and quite within the capabilities of a netbook.

The netbook is not meant to replace all computers; as soon as you want to do any serious computer stuff, like multimedia production, you need to have a more traditional computer.

We have met the junction between rising hardware computing power and lower resource needing software. If you can shift your tasks to the cloud, where the power is immense, you can use any little netbook to act as the keyboard and display. It’s going back to Client/Server technology of the 80’s.

Currently the Mac Beta of Google Chrome doesn’t run extensions. It is promised very soon from Google, this week maybe. However the Open-Source project “Chromium” has a current build that does accept all the extensions from the Google extension gallery among a few other features still not in the Beta release. Here is how to do it:

Grab the latest Chromium for MAC ZIP file (as of right now) and unzip it. Then drag to your applications. It will be called Chromium, not Google Chrome. It will even have a different set of bookmarks, history, settings, etc.

Then once running, you can go to the extensions gallery and select and install them. My favorites so far are…

XMarks – Allows me to sync my bookmarks with my other computers, including Safari, Firefox and Chrome on Windows. This replaced the FoxMarks program in the early FF days and became a real lifesaver when Google quit supporting the Google Bookmarks sync extension for FireFox. Of course Google Chrome will now support syncing to Google bookmarks, but most Firefox users have moved to using XMarks and so this extension will allow them to stay there. If you are going to live in Chromium all the time, then Google Bookmarks will be fine.

Email This Page – Add a missing feature to the browser to Send/EMail the link of a web page to someone. Once installed, use the options to select GMail or leave alone to default to your system email program. I could not undetstand why Google Chrome never had this simple feature as part of the standard feature set. Now anyone with a little creativity can build a Link Emailer extension. This one is simple and works.

Evernote Clipper – Allows me to continue to clip stuff from websites into my Evernote notebooks. Evernote is the very best in online / offline note storage. Your clips are saved BOTH on the Evernote servers and your local system using a local client version of the software. This extension works with the online website to post up a note from any web page you are looking at. It uploads without spawning the local software.

AutoZoom – This extension is even better than the Chrome/FireFox zoom feature. Not only does to cause Chromium to remember the zoom setting for every page you visit (which Chrome won’t do), it allows you to set a default zoom size for all new pages you visit. This is my favorite extension so far, as I have a large screen and always had to manually zoom each new site I visited to be more readable. Now Chromium saves the day and my eyes!

AdThwart - The popular ad blocking extension of Firefox is AdBlock Plus. This extension while not the same is close enough. It uses the same subscription database as AdBlock. I still see some ads come through (as I did with AdBlock) and I see partial ad displays showing up and then they get removed by the extension. So I’m not sure if it really stops the downloading of the ads, but I haven’t really tested this thoroughly. I’m sure it will get better with time. Update: The AdBLock developers are posting their extension as they develop it also. So you might try that one too as they bring it up to speed. Another beautiful thing about Chrome/Chromium is the easy way to turn on/off extensions without restarting the browser!

The extension gallery is very new, only days old. I’m looking for more good extensions, but it is hard to find them as it seems that since the extension developing process is so easy, that the stupidest things are showing up, not really extensions, but bookmarks/webpages made into extensions. Not very useful. I’m thinking the Extension Gallery will start looking more like the iPhone App Store than Firefox Add-Ons.

Well-known European entrepreneur Tariq Krim just finished presenting the public beta release of Jolicloud, a new type of operating system for netbooks that we’ve covered a couple of times before, at Le Web.

As of today, you can install Jolicloud Express on most Windows netbooks out there easily by simply downloading the installation file and run it from the machine when I installed the alpha release.

It will keep the Windows partition and data safe, so you can always switch back to Windows if you want.

via Jolicloud Launches Beta Version Of Its Netbook OS At Le Web.

UPDATE: Alpha Testers can just do a simple update to get the beta version, no need to reinstall. — Keith

Our readers are a savvy bunch who aren't likely to be taken in by an online scam—but we've all got those friends and relatives we worry about. Here's our definitive guide to helping them stay safe online.

via The Complete Guide to Avoiding Online Scams (for Your Less Savvy Friends and Relatives) – Scams – Lifehacker.

Your eyes see, your ears hear, your nose smells. Doctors solve medical problems, lawyers solve legal problems. Your shirt keeps you warm; your watch tells you the time. Everything created solves a problem.

I believe you were created to solve a problem and your success is dependent on your ability to discover that problem and solve it. Finding this problem is discovering your purpose, solving this problem is accomplishing your purpose.

Today I want to discuss 7 questions that will help you discover your purpose.

via How to Discover Your Life’s Purpose – 7 Questions to Ask.

Hey, you, your gadgets are disgusting. And wiping them with your greasy shirt sleeve isnt making things any better. Heres how to clean your gadgets, the right way.

via How To Clean Your Filthy Gadgets – How to clean your gadgets – Gizmodo.

Beginning today, Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they’ve opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Searchers will have the ability to opt-out completely, and there are various protections designed to safeguard privacy. However, being opt-out rather than opt-in will likely raise some concerns. The company has an announcement here. Below, a deeper look.

via Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results.