Opera has released the first beta for Opera 10.5, boasting that it’s “the fastest browser on Earth.” We took a copy for a spin and found that it is indeed snappy, besting Safari 4 and Firefox 3.6 in our informal testing.
At the moment the Opera 10.5 beta is available for Windows only; the Mac and Linux versions of Opera 10.5 remain alpha releases, though Opera assures Webmonkey that beta releases for both are in the works.
Part of the reason of the delay on other platforms may be Opera 10.5’s focus on tightly integrating with Windows 7. As we mentioned in our review of the first alpha, Opera 10.5 beta takes advantage of all the Aero Glass effects in Windows 7 and integrates nicely with Aero Peek, Jump Lists and other Win 7-specific features.
Opera 10.5’s new “Opera menu” saves screen real estate.
Opera 10.5 also looks significantly different, having eliminated the menu bar in favor a new “Opera menu,” which looks and behaves much like the single button menus found in Microsoft Office. The Opera menu is unobtrusive, hanging down like an inverted tab on the far left of your window, and saves considerable screen real estate, making it very nice for netbooks. If it’s not to your liking you can turn the old menu back on by clicking “show menu bar.”
Aside from the revamped look of Opera 10.5 the big news in the beta release is speed. Opera is calling the beta “the faster browser on Earth,” a bold claim, but one that, at least partially, lives up the hype.
In our informal testing Opera recorded the fastest start up times of any browser in Windows 7, besting even Chrome by just a hair. When it comes to page rendering times the new Carakan rendering engine and the new Vega graphics engine in Opera 10.5 clearly speed things up, but as for the fastest browser on Earth, well, it’s hard to say.
Certainly Opera 10.5 is significantly faster than the current, official version of Opera, and can hold its own with any other browser out there. Opera 10.5 consistently beat Safari’s page rendering times, but against Firefox and Chrome the results were a bit more of a mixed bag — sometimes Opera came out on top, other times not.
However, at this point all four browsers are so close in terms of speed that the real differentiating factor is the feature set. And it’s here that Opera really shines with nice Windows 7 features as well as plenty of extras, including everything from a BitTorrent client to Opera’s Unite web server tools (not part of the beta release, but no doubt set to arrive before Opera 10.5 is finished).
Opera 10.5 beta also has some small, but very useful new features like the new URL bar search field. Part of Opera’s new URL search features are lifted from Firefox’s Awesomebar — allowing you to search your history and bookmarks as you type — but Opera goes a little beyond Firefox by allowing your to search actual content on the pages you’ve visited, and integrates your search engine plugins (which leaves us wondering why there’s still a separate search box).
Opera 10.5 also sees the browser continuing its pioneering support for web standards with more HTML5 support (including the video tag using the Ogg Theora codec) and CSS 3 (transitions and transforms are now supported).
Last but not least, Opera catches up to other browsers by adding a private browsing mode.
Although this release is still a beta, we found it to be plenty stable in our testing and the speed boost definitely makes it worth a download if you’re an Opera fan (and using Windows). Mac and Linux users will have to wait, but we’ll be sure to let you know when those versions are available.
It shouldn’t be any great surprise that Opera CTO Hakon Lie — famous for denouncing Microsoft and championing the free, open web — believes HTML5 needs a royalty free video codec.
“The <video> element in HTML5, which Opera proposed and demonstrated in early 2007, points to the future — but only when combined with a free and open video format,” Lie tells Webmonkey in an e-mail.
In other words, a tag for video in HTML5 is not enough; in order for HTML5 to have any real benefit over Flash, the web needs a free and open video format all browsers can play. Currently, Opera and Firefox support Ogg Theora, which is believed to be free of patents and thus, open and royalty-free. The quality of Ogg video is rapidly approaching that of competing technologies. Unfortunately, Apple and Google have opted to support H.264, which has licensing fees attached. Even though the group that holds the licensing rights to the format, MPEG LA, recently extended its royalty deadline to 2016, it’s a move many believe is designed to make H.264 more appealing and undercut any further interest in Ogg Theora.
Yet Lie feels that perhaps the most important part of the web’s success is that no single company can control it.
“No vendor or licensing cartel should be able to charge for using web standards,” Lie says.
Imagine for a moment if the JPEG image format has the same royalty structure as H.264. Sites like Flickr, Picasa or even Facebook would probably not exist given the potential costs that such sites would incur.
Unfortunately, since Apple and Google have thus far decided to marginalize Ogg Theora, the debate over the future of HTML5 video is at something of a deadlock. Current viable solutions include options like Video For Everybody which works in all browsers but requires content producers to create two videos — one in H.264 and one in Ogg Theora. That scenario brings the web full circle to same dilemma that led to developers embracing Flash for web video — one video, one player, one solution.
So is there a way out? There are several, actually.
It’s possible that, with Opera and Mozilla supporting Theora, something as simple as YouTube offering Theora-encoded video could force MPEG LA to make even more concessions and further alter the royalty structure of H.264.
It’s also possible that in the next six years — the time until H.264’s royalty fees kick in — that something entirely new will come along. However, it’s worth pointing out that the MPEG LA consortium governs almost 2000 video encoding patents. The odds of anyone creating an entirely new way of encoding video that doesn’t somehow infringe on at least one of those patents is pretty slim.
Proponents of free open web video (including Webmonkey) have suggested in the past that, should Google’s pending acquisition of video technology maker On2 go through, Google might have an opportunity to change things. On2 makes a codec called VP8, and if Google were to release VP8 as a free, open source codec, it could significantly alter the video landscape. After all, Google owns YouTube and puts out the Chrome browser, so adoption would get a huge kick-start. Unfortunately, it’s equally possible that VP8 could violate some of the MPEG-LA patents, nullifying its benefit.
For the time being at least, Ogg Theora remains the best choice for free, open video on the web.
Tuesday saw the debut of Google Buzz, a new service for sharing status updates, links and media with your friends. It’s currently being rolled out to the public slowly — you can sign up at buzz.google.com — but we’ve had access to Buzz since shortly after it launched, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it.
Buzz integrates directly with your Gmail inbox, so updates and comments appear along side your e-mails. It bears a strong resemblance to other sharing platforms like FriendFeed or Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed — imagine all of those magically inserted into your Gmail inbox and you get the picture.
It has all the makings of a powerful, real-time social platform that’s ready to compete with, or compliment, those established players.
But for now, Buzz is a bit of a mystery. Only a handful of people are actually using it, so the sharing features don’t really feel that social. It’s as if you’re broadcasting into an empty void. In that regard, my first day with Buzz reminds me of my first few days with Google Wave, or my first few days with FriendFeed. That feeling of being in a big empty room will change once Buzz opens up and more of my friends join, just as it did for those other services.
There’s another more serious limitation: What happens in Buzz stays in Buzz. You can’t use it to post to your favorite social networks. You can add feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and any other social site (except for Facebook, notably), and all that stuff gets aggregated into a single feed on Buzz where your friends can leave comments. But when you post a status update or share any sort of link or media on Buzz, you don’t have the option to CC Twitter or FriendFeed.
Google noted during Tuesday’s launch event that it does plan on adding the ability to post out to Twitter and other services soon. And, since all public posts in Buzz are available as an XML feed, you could hack together a way to post to Twitter if you know what you’re doing. But for now, for most every user, Google Buzz remains a one-way street.
Once those two things change — the volume problem and the cross-posting problem — Buzz will be a serious player on the social web. Right now, it’s worth playing with and getting used to, because once it gains momentum, it’s going to become part of our daily lives. It’s that easy to use, and that powerful.
Here’s how it works
Once you’re given access, you’ll see Buzz appear in your Gmail sidebar just below your Inbox. Click it and you’ll see something familiar: a white box inviting you to post a status update.
When you first arrive in Buzz, it’s automatically set up to follow the few dozen people in your Google Contacts list that you correspond with the most. It’s a rather genius bit of engineering — Buzz taps into your Gmail network so you don’t need to go through that process of importing contacts or “finding friends,” one of the most painful experiences on the social web.
Each post to Buzz can be public (for the whole web to see) or private (you select which friends see it). The default is public, but you can also address posts directly to a friend using a variation on Twitter’s @ reply syntax, like this: @joe@gmail.com.
Send one of those updates and it shows up in your stream and in his stream, and anyone following either one of you will see it. But the note will also show up in his Gmail inbox, so you can make sure he sees it.
You can type text of course, but if you put in a link, Buzz will go gather photos or videos that live behind that link and give you the option of adding them to your update. Photos show up in a nice little gallery of thumbnails. Videos get embedded and can be played inline.
Above that white box, you can see the number of services Buzz is aggregating for you. Click on that number and you can add or subtract services to control what shows up in your feed.
Also above that white box is the number of people you’re following. Click on that number and you can add or subtract followers. This will control whose updates show up in your feed.
All of your activities, comments and all those of your friends will show up here. Everything appears in real-time and the updates are very fast. If you or one of your friends posts something boring that doesn’t have any comments or media associated with it, Buzz will eventually collapse it. So long, clutter.
People can like, comment and e-mail anything that shows up in their feed, whether it was posted by you or them or whoever.
If you want to see your public feed of everything you’re sharing, check out your Google Profile (you know you have one, right?).
There’s a new Buzz tab that displays all your public posts. Google Profiles and Buzz are intricately tied together.
Posts can be geotagged, and the location-aware features really comes to life when you post from a mobile with GPS inside. There’s a mobile webapp optimized for Android and iPhone browsers — surf to m.google.com/app/buzz
Buzz will figure out where you are using the mobile browser’s geolocation abilities through HTML5. The interface for picking your location is elegant.
Buzz will then show you recent posts around your current location. It can also plot nearby Buzz posts on a layer in Google Maps.
Clearly, Buzz mimics the functionality of Facebook’s News Feed — minus all the Farmville, Mafia Wars and Superpoke notifications. It draws upon a common vernacular for sharing and commenting that Facebook helped establish.
So, is it a replacement for Facebook, or a compliment to Facebook? In a way, Google’s rapidly-expanding social stack — Buzz, Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Profiles, Picasa and YouTube — could be seen as a clone of Facebook that operates on the open web. If anything, it’s a version of Facebook for people who never got into Facebook, or chose not to participate because of its closed nature.
No matter how it ends up impacting Facebook, Buzz will go down in history as a transformative step in Google’s timeline. It brings a whole new utility to what is already our most critical social tool — the e-mail inbox.
Last Wednesday I married the love of my life. This is the short story of some of the things I did before I met her, a guide on flirting using Twitter, Facebook, texting, and sexting face-to-face, in the real world.
Since I came to New York, my romantic life has been a rollercoaster. A very fast one, with 9G turns. If there is a city in the world to flirt and date anywhere and anytime, it’s NYC. You don’t need the web to meet people. Every cafe, every bar, every party seems like a huge playground for singles to engage in conversations and start love affairs. However, the web can help while you are meeting people and after, all in real time, and face to face.
If you have enough confidence and you are fearless—remember: you have nothing to lose, since you will always have the “no”—any city in the world should be open for the same games. Here are some tips to use technology while meeting people in the real world.
The basic rules
Technology hasn’t changed real world flirting. Much. At the end of the day, it all depends on you, how charming you can be, and how much the other person likes you (tip: not everyone has to like you). However, web-based social services like Facebook and Twitter open a door that didn’t exist before. They are an opportunity to take the flirting to a new level when you first meet someone in the flesh, all without getting too personal. For some reason, exchanging Twitter or Facebook usernames doesn’t seem to be perceived as threatening or serious as exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. After all, Twitter is open and Facebook’s friend requests can be denied—or accepted and then canceled.
The web-based flirting can happen right at the moment you meet the other person or later. I remember my first party in the city, hosted by Gawker.tv’s Richard Blakeley, a couple of weeks after my arrival. A girl with the most hypnotic cleavage I’ve ever seen approached me and started to talk. Within a few minutes things started to get fun. A few minutes later, we moved into more suggestive terrain. While this was happening, I saw her Blackberry in her hand. She had her Facebook page open. Without her noticing, I looked her name up in my iPhone’s Facebook app as we were talking, and sent her a friend request on the spot. We kept talking and minutes later, when she checked her Facebook again, she found the request, smiled maliciously, and clicked yes saying “I guess we are now friends.”
That night was fun.
But it’s not always that easy. The key in that example is that it happened naturally, and the move matched the rhythm of the conversation. Taking the step to add someone to Facebook in real time is a risky one, so you have to measure yourself and be ready to gamble. That is the basic rule: Never force things, and learn to read the signs that the other person is giving you. If the conversation is playful, wait until you think is appropriate to incorporate something like Facebook into it.
Tweeting your pants off
Asking for a Twitter name during the conversation is a lot easier than making that Facebook move. After all, Twitter is open to everyone, and direct messaging is a perfect way to flirt—at least for me: I find its 140-character limitation challenging and exciting, and I love when people can be concise and clever in just one single phrase.
Once again, the medium is not important except as a way to reach your counterpart, allowing you to snip casually, responding to the other person’s comments. Doing it publicly is a very fine art, which can easily end in disaster, especially if the other person already has a lover. If you have enough wit and you are sensitive to the other person’s needs and circumstances, chances are that he or she will be interested in you, and something may happen down the line, as the play factor increases in your exchanges. Sometimes, this game also happens in real time.
One night I met a very pretty—and delightfully nerdy—girl at Delmano, one of my favorite bars here in Williamsburg. She knew Gizmodo and recognized me, so the conversation quickly got into technology. She confessed that she followed me on Twitter, so I asked what her nickname was to add her later. Minutes later, in fact: When she excused herself to the bathroom I sent her the first direct message. After that, we spent the whole night having two conversations, one actually speaking out loud, and the other taunting each with secret tweets. That night was fun too.
For sure, that’s also an exception, but it’s an example on how Twitter can be a nice way to flirt in real time, as long as you keep it natural and in context, just like you would in a real world conversation.
The next level
Once you have established a Twitter or Facebook beachhead it’s time to move it to the next level. You may decide to keep it in the online world, flirting until you feel comfortable to ask for a date. The alternative is to be a little bit more daring, and use Twitter or Facebook to interact with someone you met before, like you may be doing now using text messages. The difference is that Twitter and Facebook are a lot more useful than text messages, because they give you context. For example, you can learn what the other person is doing without asking for it or without the other person explicitly telling you about it.
I used to do that when I was going through my worse digital exhibitionist phase. A couple of times I tweeted or changed my Facebook status saying where I was, and the girl I was flirting with—the nerdy pretty one—sent me messages saying that she was around, wondering if we could hook up for a drink in the most casual way. Likewise, I did the same thing with other people. Of course, this doesn’t always work. You or the other person may have other plans in mind. Again, the key here is not to force things, and be as playful and natural as you can.
If you pass the initial filters, and your flirting turns into something a bit more serious, you may get an instant messaging nickname or a telephone number. Instant messaging is not very useful for real time flirting situations. Unlike Twitter or texting which allow you to be cute and playful in a parallel line to the actual conversation, instant messaging runs at a faster pace and requires more attention.
It’s only good in two situations. One may be when you are instant messaging with someone else (cue in lots of trips to the bathroom, stress, and a lot of guilt). Two—which is the only one I’ve practiced—having a sexual conversations in public, in a crowded place in which you can talk into the ear of your lover. This may also happen with Twitter or text messages, but instant messaging—using your favorite program for your smartphone—is my favorite way to do it. But then again, I am really fast typist.
The time it happened it was by chance. She and I started to talk dirty, casually while having dinner in a crowded restaurant, the typical romantic place illuminated only by candlelight and which shall remain nameless because I want to go there again. As our conversation started to get naughtier, we noticed that some people were listening to us, but instead of shutting up, I took out my iPhone and sent her an even racier message using BeejiveIM. Her iPhone vibrated thanks to Beejive’s push, she took it out, smiled, and replied back. We kept on talking about other things, with increasing difficulty as the IM conversation got completely explicit and we had a harder time concentrating on actually making sense in our audible conversation. At one point I asked her for something which made her open her eyes wide, giving me that “are you out of your fucking mind?” look of pure disbelief. I grinned and sent her another message. Surprised, she stood up, turned around, and left.
The next time my iPhone buzzed—about a minute later—it didn’t have any text. I clicked on the incoming file and a photo of her bare breasts appeared. A few seconds later, another one of her black lace knickers downloaded completely, as she was returning to the table from the bathroom. It ended being another fun night.
That, sexting, could be considered the top level of all these games, but it’s not usual to find someone who may want to do it outside a relationship, much less in a real time, face-to-face situations. When it happens, like it did as part of a larger context and conversation, it can be really fun,
Keep your mind open
Of course, things don’t always happen in this way. The above is not the norm, but it’s not the exception. The fact is that, if the opportunity arises, Twitter, Facebook, IM, or texting could be used as part of the flirting and sexual game not only in the privacy of your home, looking at your computer screen, but anywhere in the “real” world. And I have to say that it’s a lot more fun that way.
The irony of all this is that, even while I met my amazing wife through the internet, we never used Facebook or Twitter to flirt. We exchanged a couple of emails, she invited me out for coffee, and the most technology-related thing I did after that was to send her a text message, written as I was running to take the subway:
“It was lovely to meet you. I’m sorry I had to run out so earlier, but I really enjoyed talking to you. Would you like to have a proper date next week?”
She asked me to marry her two months later. And we will live happily ever after.
In this week’s romantical app roundup: Google, Buzzed! Phone trees, sheared! The Olympics, demystified! Doom II, taken down a notch! Your person, flailed around! Your visage, cartoonified! Sesame Street, Picasso’d! And more…
Google Buzz: To be a geek is to enthusiastically try every weird little project that Google decides to undertake, as soon as possible, risking bugs, frustration, and even bodily harm. And since you will Buzz, if even for a few confused seconds, you may as well do it on your iPhone—it’s a far sight more attractive and organized than the desktop app, and at least for me, makes the whole concept more approachable.
Technically, this is a web app; feature for feature, it’s comparable to a native app, but the slowness of a web interface is immediately apparent. Free.
Fonolo: Fonolo’s deep directory of company support lines and shortcuts it invaluable, leading you to—or near to—the specific human being you want to talk to at whatever company you’re calling. It’s always been accessible via the web, but the new iPhone app, though a bit buggy, will parachute-crash you into most phone trees faster than you can climb. Free.
Navigon: Navigon is easily one of the best of the pricier breed of iPhone nav apps, and it’s just gotten, and significantly richer. Just, generally not at the same time:
Not only has Navigon added a bunch of new features to its iPhone app, the price is $20 cheaper-although if you want Traffic Live and 3D maps, it still adds up to $100. Nonetheless, it sounds worth it.
The update has a few nifty angles-there’s the connection to your Facebook or Twitter accounts for updating friends on your current position, destination and time you’re due to arrive; the aforementioned Panorama View 3D views (which use NASA height and terrain data) and personalized route delivery, called MyRoutes… it’ll cost $100 if you want the full service for your iPhone or iPod Touch, with the actual price of the MobileNavigator app being lowered by $20 to $69.99. The Traffic Live has also been discounted slightly, from $24.99 to $19.99 (only available until the 15th of February), and the Panorama View 3D will cost $9.99. Those who bought the app before will get the update for free, according to Navigon.
NBC Olympics: An all-in-one, total listing/brochure/coverage app for the Olympics, that’s wonderfully, gloriously free:
NBC’s free Olympics app also has a social component, ideal for trash-talking Norwegian lugers.
There are also updated medal counts, video (US-only), and sport-by-sport forecasts. The focus is predominantly on American competitors, so apologies in advance to international readers. Otherwise, though, if you’re an Olympics junkie or nationalist smack-talker, it’s definitely worth a download.
The level of polish and depth here is what you expect from the kind of paid apps you usually see associated with a specific sports league, and it’s tough to overstate the usefulness of have a simple, searchable reference for all the variations of sliding across ice that comprise the Winter Olympics.
Doom II: Mark’s down on this app, and I can understand if the concept of a Doom RPG doesn’t get your blood boiling. That said, hear me out: The lowered pace of the game, as opposed to a traditional FPS, actually makes the experience less frantic, and less frustrating. Basically, if you enjoyed the Wolfenstein RPG at all, you’ll probably like this one too.
Sky Siege: A 3D augmented reality game that fits the mold of most of the first generation of iPhone AR games, as far as gameplay goes: hold your phone up, move to aim, tap to shoot. The blimps, helicopters and planes are all around you, so you will look like an idiot playing this, but what the hell, you’ll be a smiling idiot.
With surprisingly good graphics and animations, Sky Siege is more convincing than the other FPS simulators you may have seen, which makes gameplay both more frenetic and immersive. My only gripe is that $3 feels a little pricey for what amounts to a protracted party trick. 3GS only.
Elmo’s Monster Maker: Build a Sesame Street puppet monster (nearly) from scratch, and play with him. The real value here is in the graphics and animations, which are extremely smooth, and which make the Frankensteinian moment of life magical enough to cause me, a full-grown human being, to make gleeful gurgling sounds at my iPhone.
If your child doesn’t enjoy dancing Elmo, your child is broken. $4.
Meebo: This one’s not here yet, but just in case you were planning on running out and dropping five or ten dollars on a messaging app, hold on—Meebo is coming, and it looks wonderful. Vital features like multi-protocol support and push notifications are there, though that’s nothing revolutionary. Where Meebo wins, according to Techcrunch, is with speed: it’s blazingly fast, simple to navigate and completely, utterly free.
GorillaCam: This app again! Joby’s been content to give away GorillaCam for free in exchange for branding, which we cautiously accepted as an excuse for a few shortcomings. For the most part, GorillaCam 1.1 fills the gaps, adding digital zoom, touch to focus (for the 3GS), antishake (which actually works fairly well) and selectable image sizes. Paid apps like Snapture and Camerabag are going to have to step it up, or price it down.
ToonPaint: When you first use ToonPaint, it feels like you’re using an adjustable photo filter, and not much more. Then, you start painting. I’ll let the video explain this one.
As someone who can’t draw an even circle, let alone a convincing portrait, I can vouch for this one. Brutally unartistic people: Remember how you felt when you used to trace cartoons as a kid? This is like that, again, on your iPhone. $2.
This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!
As long as humans have had genitals, we’ve found artificial ways to stimulate them. But it took the repressed Victorian era to create the vibrator, a device aimed at curing a disease that doesn’t exist.
It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, a time where those without honeybears to take out to dinner are probably feeling a little lonely. And you know what happens when people get lonely: they go to town on themselves. According to Pamela Doan of Babeland, one of the biggest sex toy shops around, sales were up 22% overall last February, with Valentine’s Day itself being the highest single retail sales day they ever had. In fact, they were so high that they accounted for 19% of Babeland’s sales for the entire year. That’s a lot of vibrators.
I talked about the earliest vibrators with Dr. Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm, the definitive history of vibrators and the repressed era that spawned them. I had no problem talking to Dr. Maines about vibrators, but back in the 19th century, talking about masturbation was very taboo. So the first vibrators weren’t marketed as such. Instead, they were sold as medical devices used to treat “hysteria,” hysteria being something that ladies came down with when they hadn’t gotten their rocks off in a while.
According to the 2nd century anatomist Galen, hysteria was caused by the retention of “female semen,” which could get into the blood and corrupt it. So clearly, it had to be periodically let loose.
So doctors took to “curing” hysteric single women who didn’t have a husband to cure them of their ailments the normal way. They would stimulate the vagina until “parosysm” (read: orgasm) was achieved. But their hands got tired so quickly, what with all the vigorous rubbing required. And so the vibrator came into existence.
Vibrators have been around longer than electricity has—the first model came out in 1734 and used a crank like some sort of hedonistic egg beater—but it took electricity to really bring them to the mainstream.
According to Dr. Maines, all vibrators are just inefficient motors. “All motors vibrate. If you make a motor that’s especially sloppy, it’ll vibrate more. That’s the principle behind the vibrator: a very sloppy motor that’s designed to vibrate.” An efficient motor, such as the one that runs your fridge, would make for a seriously crappy vibrator. But the Manipulator, which was essentially an inefficient steam engine with a dildo attached to it, did the job swimmingly.
One of the first mechanical vibrators was the steam-powered Manipulator (pictured up top), invented by Dr. George Taylor in 1869. This monster machine hid its engine in another room with the apparatus sticking through the wall. Terrifying!
Today, vibrators have come a long way. First of all, they don’t require an entire room to run properly. Secondly, they can be purchased for their intended use instead of pretending like they’re curing whatever disease it is that makes women horny. Add onto that the advancements made in plastics and moulding makes them feel less like cold appliances. It’s the golden age of vibrators, everyone!
To make you truly thankful for the era we live in, here’s a selection of some of the weirdest and most uncomfortable-looking vibrators to ever see the light of day, with descriptions courtesy of Dr. Maines. The Manipulator is scary, sure. But then there’s the Electro-Spatteur, which spiced up its vibrations with electric shocks. You can’t make this stuff up.
Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer, Google News
A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.
Today, we are giving users even more options for following stories. Users can mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it, like they can with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. When you star a story in Google News, it’s one way to let us know that you’re interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the “Starred” section of Google News.
We hope you enjoy the new feature and welcome your feedback.
Opera 10.5 beta on the desktop.
Opera 10.5’s new “Opera menu” saves screen real estate.
With all the fervor over HTML5 video, the 
Tuesday saw the debut of Google Buzz, a new service for sharing status updates, links and media with your friends. It’s currently being rolled out to the public slowly — you can sign up at 
Last Wednesday I married the love of my life. This is the short story of some of the things I did before I met her, a guide on flirting using Twitter, Facebook, texting, and sexting face-to-face, in the real world.
As long as humans have had genitals, we’ve found artificial ways to stimulate them. But it took the repressed Victorian era to create the vibrator, a device aimed at curing a disease that doesn’t exist.
