There are some great little tweaks available in Google Labs for GMail, one of which is pictured above - 'Green Robot!'!

Like many of the labs additions (accessed by clicking the little green conical flask at the top of the GMail page), the beauty of Green Robot is in it's simplicity. It changes the appearance of your Google Talk contact list to illustrate which of your contacts are using Google Talk from their Android mobile device - handy!

If you haven't checked out the contents of the laboratory yet it's well worth a visit - I have a total of 12 labs features enabled on my account at this time which really smooth my GMail experience.

My labs features at the time of writing are Offline Mail, Message Translation, Sender Time Zone, Mark as Read Button, Inbox Preview - to let you view your inbox contents as the main site loads, Multiple Inboxes - to allow me to view a specific subset of my messages in a seperate 'pane', Undo Send, Green Robot (of course), Search Autocomplete, Inserting Images, Google Docs Gadget and the ability to Add Any Gadget by URL.

Which labs features are you using?

"Wordoids", which are words that are made-up, but sound right. They follow the rules of phonetics, and if done properly, roll off the tongue. The need to have an online presence has increased the need for unique product and company names and has led to these wordoids. Yet, even with a made-up name, it's important for the name to convey something about what the product or business actually is. Now you can do it very quickly using a website called, appropriately enough, Wordoid.

For example, I gave Wordoid the shortened acronym we use for Download Squad when talking on our internal mailing list, which is DLS. The first option Wordoid presented is dlsident, and it informs me that the related domain dlsident.com is available. While it doesn't look like much, if you spell out the first three letters as we do when using the acronym, this name actually rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It's like a subversive version of the name. Other options it came up with are dlsider, dlsidad, dlsidends, and dlsidanila. Certainly, they're not all winners, but I bet they're better than you expected.

You can tell Wordoid where to place your seed word - at the beginning, end, or anywhere including in the middle of the text string it returns. This gives you a ton of flexibility to guide your wordoid's creation to include useful information, but still come up with something unique, easy to say, and with an available domain name.

While most touch mobile devices like the iPhone render web pages surprisingly well, sometimes they are slow to load and difficult to read. Blogs, in particular, with their wide text areas tend to become difficult to read on small screens.

If you run a WordPress blog, there's an option available to you called WPTouch. WPTouch is a theme package plugin that allows your blog to render a completely separate and mobile-optimized theme based on the browser user agent provided by the device's browser. The WPTouch theme is much lighter than a typical blog theme, and it provides the option to strip out javascript-heavy elements, making the page load that much faster.

Of course, not all readers will want to view a mobile-optimized version of your site, particularly when their mobile device can handle the page's full functionality. In that case, there is always a link in the footer of the page that allows the user to switch to the full version of the site.

WPTouch is a free WordPress plugin that you can download directly from the Add Now plugin administration screen on recent WordPress installations by searching for WPTouch.

Most statistics packages focus on which pages or content are drawing people to your site. While that's certainly important, sometimes you want to know what's happening right now in terms of traffic on your site.

If you're running a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can install a plugin called WP-UserOnline to find out exactly that. WP-UserOnline gives you a summary of who is currently viewing your blog broken down by Members, Guests, and Bots. It then gives the details for each one below, including the member name, name of the bot, the page the user is on, and the referring page (if available).

It's certainly not as full-featured as a full stats package like Google Analytics, but there's no better way to know what traffic is viewing your WordPress blog at the moment.

It's been a number of months (if not longer) since Yahoo showed any love to its Upcoming events service. Since acquiring the service in October 2005, the service has seen just one re-design - and few additional features since. However, in a largely-uncovered announcement earlier in the week, Upcoming now offers a new Jumpstart feature that scans your Pandora, last.fm and iTunes libraries and then follows your favourite artists on the service - alerting you to forthcoming gigs listed on Upcoming.

Whilst other services, including last.fm, allow you to easily view your favourite artists, it's an interesting addition to the Upcoming service - and hopefully means that Yahoo are now looking at ways to build on a largely unloved product.

Google has given users the ability to caption their YouTube videos for a while now. But that can be a cumbersome, time-intensive process and most of the millions of videos hosted on YouTube are uncaptioned. That could change soon, as Google is beginning to roll out a new automatic captioning system that will analyze speech in videos and create machine-generated captions.

This means that users who are hard of hearing will have an easier time using YouTube. And because Google can translate text into 51 different languages, it means that you'll have a much easier time understanding those German and Japanese videos you're so fond of watching.

The technology for the machine-based captions is the same as the tech that allows Google Voice to automatically transcribe your voicemail messages and send them to you as emails. That is to say, it's not perfect, and we can expect to see a fair number of mistakes in YouTube captions for the foreseeable future. But this is an excellent start at making web video significantly more accessible.

Automatic captions are only available on a handful of YouTube channels right now, including Google, YouTube, PBS, National Geographic, MIT, and UCLA. A wider release is scheduled soon, with auto-caps expected on English videos by the end of the week.

While YouTube, MTV, Vevo, MySpace, and other online video sites compete for the title of "Hulu for music videos," it looks like Hulu is hoping to get in on the action itself. Hulu has made a name for itself as a destination site for professionally produced TV shows and movies. Sure, it's only available in the US, and it doesn't have nearly as many TV episodes or movies as you can find from your friendly neighborhod BitTorrent tracker. But Hulu is 100% legal, the ads aren't that annoying, and the video quality is pretty good.

Today Hulu is announcing a deal with music label EMI. No, you won't find music videos from all of EMI's artists. Just one: Norah Jones. There's a new Norah Jones channel on Hulu with a few dozen videos including music videos and concert clips.

While this could certainly be the start of something big, right now it's pretty small. As much as I'd like to see Hulu become a one-stop shop for all-things web video, it seems like Vevo is much further along in working out partnerships to actually supply a fair amount of content. Now if only the site would go live.

Update: The folks at Vevo just annoucned that the service is set to launch on December 8th.

[via NY Times]

The Next Floor is an interesting blend of side-scrolling action game and tower defence game. In The Next Floor your goal is to defend against the incoming waves of bad guys. You start off on one floor of a building, and you have an elevator in an elevator shaft. You move using either the arrow keys or the A and D keys, and you point your mouse at the bad guys and click the mouse button to fire your gun.

Killing bad guys earns you money, and it's a good thing, since the waves of bad guys get increasingly fierce and you must buy weapons that you can station in your elevators to automatically fire at the bad guys. Wait, did I just say elevators with an 's'? Yep -- as the game progresses you will find additional floors of the building open up, and you have the option to buy additional elevators to defend those floors.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me is the fact that you can move the elevators around by dragging them with your mouse, and they can move even if there are elevators occupying every floor. If you drag an elevator to a floor that already has an elevator on it, the two elevators will magically swap positions. You can use the elevators to move your man around from floor to floor, but fairly quickly your elevators will have more firepower than your poor little dude's pistol, and you'll find you're not really using him.

The 15 levels of The Next Floor provide just the right amount of gameplay; any more would have become tediously repetitive, and any less wouldn't have given enough time to build up your elevators to the incredible killing machines they can become.

The now-defunct Google Page Creator made it easy to create a reasonably attractive web site without an advanced degree in HTML or CSS. But Google has killed off Page Creator and replaced it with Google Sites, a service which has often been described as a tool for creating Wiki-like pages that are hosted for free by Google and which allow you to collaborate with other people on tasks such as planning a vacation or managing your office calendar and workflow.

You can also use Google Sites to create a public web site. But it's much trickier to make a page on Google Sites look, well... good. But this week Google rolled out an update that should make the service much more attractive, literally. There's now a template gallery allowing you to select and customize a template for any new page you create.

Currently there are templates arranged in categories such as business collaboration, activities & events, schools & eduction, and Personal & family. Google is also making it easy for users to submit their own templates to the gallery, so the number of available designs to choose from should climb pretty quickly.

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

This morning Adobe is launching a beta version of Flash Player 10.1 with support for hardware decoding of H.264 Flash video. In other words, if you have a supported graphics card (PDF link), you should be able to watch high definition and high quality Flash video without killing your CPU.

This comes as particularly good news for people who have picked up small laptops and nettops based on the NVIDIA ION platform. While the graphics processor is powerful enough to decode Blu-Ray video and play many modern video games, the ION chipset uses a low power Intel Atom processor that seems to think that 1080p Flash video would look better as a slideshow than a video.

With Flash Player 10.1 beta installed, even these ION-based machines can handle 1080p Flash video from sites like YouTube, which is good because YouTube is getting ready to roll out a whole heck of a lot more 1080P video.

You can download Flash Player 10.1 beta from Adobe Labs.

NVIDIA loaned me an ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics to test the new Flash Player, and it performed as advertised, easily handling 720p and 1080p HD video playback from Hulu and YouTube. The video at the top of this post shows the ASRock nettop playing video smoothly after installing the latest version of the software. To see what video playback looked like with the older version of Flash Player 10, check out the video after the break.

[Update] The folks from A Story Before Bed contacted us and have offered a coupon code that allows users to try the site including sharing a story for free. The code is good until the end of November. Just enter MT9C-WN6Y-TF6J at the point of checkout, when you're asked to pay for the story you recorded.

Having to be away from your young children at bedtime is probably the absolute worst part of having a job that requires travel. Worse, sometimes it's not practical to call and talk to them before bed. A Story Before Bed is a site that is looking to solve this problem for traveling parents.

The idea behind A Story Before Bed is that you choose one of the stories in their library, then you record yourself reading it using a webcam. You can then send a link to your child's caregiver, who can then open the book on their computer, and watch as you read the story to them. They see the full pages of the book with your face inset, and the experience even includes animated page turns. To make sure that what you are reading relates to the page being displayed, the video of you reading is actually split up on a page-by-page basis, so you can only ever be listening to the correct voiceover for a given page.

A Story Before Bed is not a free service, but recording a story is free. The service charges $6.95US if you want to keep your recording so that you can pass it along to the young people in your life.

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they're working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn't some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google's web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google's accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user's search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.

Of course, now I have to do something about the slowness of my personal blog. But I probably should have long ago.

[Photo by chrisscott]