The Venture Skills Blog

I know its been done to death but I thought I would bring you my take on the big thing from Google this month Google Gears for those who have been living on mars (hows the weather?) Google Gears is a small application designed to help you use Google services offline the first service to get the gears treatment is Google Reader (an RSS reader in case you missed that while on mars to!)

The Good

It works! no it really does work I’m sitting in the middle of a forest on a grey day writing this blog post (The Boss is making us do away days!) while looking through the various feeds I have in my feed reader on my windows partition, interestingly their is some differences between Mac (who install gears via a firefox extension) and windows versions with the windows version being significantly bigger. While in Offline mode Google reader performs well but you do notice the lack of search facilities more, it seems a sham that with such a powerful data set at your finger tips their is no obvious way to mine the data. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s that time of year when reflections should be made so I thought rather then simply tell you how well its all gone I would just link to some of our best stories and posts of the year (this is not the last post of the year but Christmas time isn’t really part of 2006 is it?) Read the rest of this entry »

A quiet end to the week, it must be thanksgiving or something…
For those who are well not american here is a quick recap of things that have happened this week that you maybe interested in.

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I have been using Firefox 2.0 for a little while now and thought I would do a quick update on how its going, you can see my first impressions here. The biggest difference is I seem to be using more extensions and I don’t really know why? My Firefox install were already pretty “pimped” up but I seem to have gone overboard with all the extras. A couple of things really stick out these include the dictionary function which is fantastic! though I seemed to have some how lost the check by default it was easy to get back I also changed it to check every field not just multi line fields by
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Reviews are coming in as you would expect along with the tweak guides here are just a few of the more relevant ones.

• Firefox vs Explorer - via gizmodo
• Tweaks for Firefox 2.0 from tweakguide and lifehacker
• Interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla big wig) -via read/write web

5 out 14 of my extensions failed to work theses were

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