My eagerly-awaited Chromecast arrived a couple of weeks ago. Despite the reports that Google had run out of Netflix codes my 3-month streaming code arrived a few days before by email — a great deal given that it is also valid for current Netflix customers too.

The requirements for using a Chromecast are:

Google have switched system font for Android’s latest release (known as Ice Cream Sandwich) from the Droid Family to a new typeface known as Roboto.

Typographica opened today with a critique of the Roboto font which boils down to this:

Tomorrow morning at 5am where I can enjoy an advanced fee scam! I’ve had these in email format before but never in my calendar…

Oddly there are no emails about this in my inbox and I sure didn’t tell it to add one to my calendar. As there is no ‘Report Spam’ link for calendar entries I had to return to calendar view, delete it from there and hope nothing else shows up.

Google just added support for AIM to Google Chat so you can just enter your login details and chat right away from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account as if they were Google Chat users.

Better yet you can actually enter your ICQ number in the user-name box, fill in your password and integrate your ICQ account although this is seemingly undocumented and likely just a result of the ICQ and AIM integration from some time back.

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine.

One thing not too many people have yet been raving over is the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender Fonts known as the Droid family.

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender known as the Droid family.

Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.

Deeper takes you further that System Preferences and provides access to a number of extra options such as Finders graphical effects, layout, spacing and menus, as well as some extra options for Dashboard, Dock, Expose, Login and more.

As an extra cool treat you can also select a screen-saver to be your desktop background just to show off how smooth, slick and system-deep the transparency, scaling and hardware acceleration go in OS X.

I’ve been a user of Google Apps for your domain for some time — primarily to let me use the great Gmail interface for my own mail domains (thanks to the domain alias feature they introduced last month).

Logging into my mailbox this morning I was surprised to find that my account is now considered a Standard Edition but that a Premier Edition is available too.

These Firefox extensions just keep getting more innovative and useful. Here’s the latest additions to my ever-growing Firefox arsenal.

If, like me, you find yourself wondering what the URL was of that site you visited/bookmarked on your other machine/os/virtual machine then this extension is for you. You can choose to sync bookmarks, history, cookies and passwords (if you really want — they are encrypted) across your copies of Firefox. Great for us MacBook owners using Boot Camp and Firefox :) .

As a frequent user of many of Google’s various services I continually find myself finding new tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. Here are a few to share;

Gmail are constantly introducing new features however the localised user-interfaces are often lagging behind and failing to expose the options. Set your language to “English (US)” to get access to the latest options.

I’ve never realized but Google use your browser in such a way it tells them which link you followed out from the search results. Searching for “damieng” for example will show my home page as the first result. The browser window will show https://damieng.comhttps://damieng.com but click on it with JavaScript enabled and instead you’ll go somewhere like;

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//damieng.com/&ei=yMf5QoHUJczcQr-YvfANhttp://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//damieng.com/&ei=yMf5QoHUJczcQr-YvfAN