The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,854 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Getting hacked often involves social engineering and corporate policy flaws (involved: Apple, Amazon, GMail)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/10

With more and more stuff being linked together in the cloud, getting hacked becomes increasingly more simple.

This time, it involved Amazon, Apple and GMail, some good knowledge on how the system works, and social engineering to sound trustworthy.

The goal was to get access to a 3-letter Twitter account, the collateral was someones digital life.

Lessons to learn from how Mat Homan got hacked:

  • Make local backups often
  • Use two-factor authentication
  • Don’t have all your devices on “wipe from the cloud”
  • Don’t bind your primary accounts together on the clouds
  • Have distinct reset accounts for your primary accounts
  • Make your primary accounts use a distinct name

Applause for Mat for coming forward on this. I know lots of people that wouldn’t.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in GMail, Google, LifeHacker, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

Reference desktop client for the Google Authenticator (OS X, Windows, Linux) – via: mclamp/JAuth · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/20

It runs on OS X, Windows and Linux:

JAuth is a reference desktop client for the google authenticator. Intended

as an alternative to the iPhone Google Authenticator app and similar.

And it comes with installers in addition to source code.

Interesting.

–jeroen

via: mclamp/JAuth · GitHub.

Posted in *nix, Apple, Google, GoogleAuthenticator, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Some Chrome links: finding out which tabs make noise, muting noisy tabs, restarting chrome while retaining all pages

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/13

Finding out which Chrome tabs make noise (I opted for the MuteTab extension)

Restarting your browsers retaining the opened tabs. Chrome does this automatically upon update, but there seems to be no manual automatic way other than this:

  1. Change your options to Reopen the pages that were open last
  2. Close your browser
  3. Restart your browser
  4. Resetting your Reopen the pages that were open last back to what is was

Not nice, but it works.

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Google Map Maker – submitting your own corrections to Google

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/01

Interesting: Google Map Maker.

–jeroen

Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Fix to force Google Chrome to use google.com as default search (via: I cannot get Chrome to use www.google.com as the default search engine rather than www.google.com.hk. – Google Chrome Help)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/22

Every couple of Google Chrome versions it starts using the local Google search domain (the one that Google things that geographically matches you, probably in a language you do not understand).

I have the “Use Google.com in English” cookies set, the right Chrome language settings, the right Google language settings, etc.

This is not the “right” solution, but it works, thanks Dwight Stegall:

  1. Right click the address bar and click on Edit search engines. When the box opens click the Google option in the list. Then click the X to the right to delete it.
  2. At the bottom look for a box with “Add new search engine”. Type in Google and in the next box type in a keyword. I use “g” for Google.
  3. Where it asks for URL paste this in.
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s

You can use a similar solution for instance to force Google.co.uk as your default search domain.

–jeroen

via I cannot get Chrome to use www.google.com as the default search engine rather than www.google.com.hk. – Google Chrome Help.

Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Administrative and Personal offline installers for Chrome (via: Alternate offline Google Chrome installer Windows – Google Help)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/04

Because I tend to forget where Google keeps the information on dowloading the offline administrative and personal installers I have quoted their full help page below.

According to Google Employee Blair (Googler) (at 20100614 in topic Google Chrome Offline Installer – Google Chrome Help):

Be aware that the version of Google Chrome available from the link may not auto-update to future browser releases, meaning you could miss important security fixes and feature improvements. Make sure to check back often to download newer releases.

The standalone offline installers from the quote at the bottom of this post did all keep themselves up to date.

There is a bunch of version specific Google Chrome installers THAT WILL NOT AUTOUPDATE (they usually keep less than 2 months) with URLs formed like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | 2 Comments »

Finally Google allows searching for “C#” via: Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March – Inside Search

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/04/05

Finally, Google allows searching for C# and returns meaningful results (previously they returned the same results as searching for C).

They improved a bunch of other special characters as well.
–jeroen

via:

Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March – Inside Search.

Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Google, GoogleSearch, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Many people missed the 8-bit street view at Google Maps Quest on April 1st #1april #april1st

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/04/01

Many people mentioned the April 1st prank by Google: 8-bit maps, and a NES Google Maps cartridge (quote at 0:55: blow on the cartridge to fix bugs ROFL!)

Today Google Maps has a quest mode, rendering the maps in Nintendo NES “quality”.

Few people really used it, and missed the glorious 8-bit streetview, and the really nice landmarks that you see when you zoom in to a scale of 500 meter or better.

You can even link to the 8-bit maps and to the 8-bit street view!.

Click on the images for larger versions (:

--jeroen

    

Posted in About, Apri1st, Fun, Google, GoogleMaps, Personal, Power User, Prank | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Refined: Alternate (offline) Google Chrome installer (Windows) – Google Help « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/30

Just updated my earlier post on Google Chrome offline installers with this info:

Google Chrome has two offline installers: one single user install, and one for all users on the same Windows machine.

It ends up at one of these download pages, each with a download link for the current version (which changes for every new version):

–jeroen

via: Alternate (offline) Google Chrome installer (Windows) – Google Help « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff.

Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »

intelligent answer to “whats my ip” on Google Search

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/23

It looks like Google decreased traffic to many “Whats My IP” sites by automatically answering the whats my ip – Google Search query.

I’m not sure when they introduced this, but it is good and bad at the same time.

–jeroen

Via: whats my ip – Google Search.

Posted in Google, LifeHacker, Opinions, Power User | 2 Comments »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »