A few days ago, I was at a Google-organised event in London talking about open source technologies and how they form the foundation of various projects.

I was first last week to break news of Quake 2 running inside Google Chrome, which was demoed at the event – awesome!

You may have seen my recent rant about the University of Reading’s e-mail software. I got so fed up, in fact, that I decided to do something about it.

That something was to “migrate” my University e-mail to Google Mail. With a release a few months ago, Google gave Mail the complete toolset you need to get it to act as a mail client for your Uni account – seamlessly. This wasn’t the only reason, though – with a Google account, the mail and contacts sync much better with my Nexus One.

Here’s how I migrated so you can too – in about 15 minutes.

Last night I was fortunate enough to be at the Google Technology User Group meetup at Phonica Records in London.

This was the first of these I’ve attended, and went in at the deep end – the event featured numerous speakers from Google, and I did a 5 (and a bit!) minute lightning talk on a little something I’ve been working on (more on that below).

With the continued proliferation of malware and websites of malicious intent on the Internet, consumers are offered little if no help in protecting their computers.

There is, however, help at hand.

Google, not only the most popular search engine, but also the largest single repository of information about the internet (internet metadata, if you like), now provide developers with an advanced way of warning users about malicious content on the internet.

This post is an overview of the Google Safe Browsing API; what it is, why you should use it in your application, and how it can help your users.

Yesterday afternoon while I was sitting at home, I realised I hadn’t yet gotten around to trying out the extensions feature that has been recently released in the beta branch of Google Chrome.

Google Chrome

Note: in order to enable extensions, you need to be on the dev branch, which you can install from here. If you’re on a Mac/Linux, you probably already have the dev branch, but you will have to enable the extensions pages with instructions here.