This week search giant Google launched the much anticipated browser Chrome and if first impressions count, this will rock your world. A small sub 500k download that was installed on our system in less than 20 seconds, it looks good, feels great and is so fast it’s like using a command line tool. It may lack the extensibility of Firefox but the basic features are enough to keep you going until it is developed further.

Chrome is all about speed and packing in loads of features but maximising window space. It has turned some common browser traits upside down literally, like placing the tab bar at the very top of the screen.

Some cool features include:

One box for everything. Web search. Web history. Address bar. Suggestions as you type. One unified box serves all your browsing needs.

New Tab Page. Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a visual sampling of your most visited sites, most used search engines, and recently bookmarked pages and closed tabs.

Application Shortcuts. Use web apps without opening your browser. Application shortcuts can directly load your favorite online apps.

Crash Control. Every tab you’re using is run independently in the browser, so if one app crashes it won’t take anything else down.

Incognito Mode. Don’t want pages you visit to show up in your web history? Choose incognito mode for private browsing.

Simpler Downloads. No intrusive download manager; you see your downloads status at the bottom of your current window.

The only drawback I can see at the moment is that the screen text looks a little rough around the edges, but hey, this is still only a beta version. From using it for just an hour you can tell the level of thought that has been put into the development. Could it overtake Internet Explorer in the future? It certainly should, maybe the masses are just in need of a little education.

When you are shopping for a bargain on the web, smart surfers always use price comparison web sites. Whether it be for car insurance, holidays, gadgets or plain old groceries, these places can always give you a good indication of what the best market price is. But which of these is the best for usability, results and reliability? One search engine, as used by Five’s Gadget Show, stands out from the crowd.

Foundem is a vertical search engine, that claims to have a deeper understanding of the categories in which you are searching. Traditional search engines seemingly broad but superficial (shallow), while vertical search engines tend to be deep but narrow (highly specialised).

Foundem’s patented WebSentient™ technology provides the World’s first and only general-purpose vertical search engine. Their patented WebSentient technology can provide accurate, timely, and highly-detailed parametric search within any single domain.

Foundem is not directly responsible for any products bought through any of the suppliers featured on their site. They don’t have a record of your transaction, so if you have any queries relating to your purchases are the concern of the supplier directly via their website.

Foundem has been tested using Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on PCs, and Mozilla Firefox on Macs. JavaScript and Cookies must be enabled for our site to work properly.

Check it out at: www.foundem.co.uk

People in the UK don’t eat enough vegetables. Quite often small children would rather eat crisps, chocolate chips or anything else instead of vegetables. 5 a day may be the goal, but getting them to eat vegetables can be no mean feat. Here we a list an abundance of resources packed with good ideas geared around getting the good stuff inside them.

This is one common struggle that most parents will face at some time or other  as most kids will turn up their nose at the site of anything green. So how do you get around this issue? Here are some cool and easy ways to get your kids to eat their veggies:

Books at Amazon.co.uk

The Art of Hiding Vegetables -Bali, Child

Sneaky Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Foods -Jessica Seinfeld

After School Meal Planner – Annabel Karmel

Lunch Boxes – Jennifer Joyce

Healthy Eating for Kids – Anita Bean

Healthy Cooking for Children – Mandy Francis

Web site resources:

Getting Kids to Eat Vegetables – Food Fun

8 Fun Ideas to Get Your Kids to Eat Their Veggies – At Squidoo

Getting Kids to Eat Vegetables and Fruits – Keep Kids Healthy

10 ways to make your kids turn green – iVillage

How to Get Kids to Eat Vegetables: 6 Easy Tips – MomScape

Encouraging Toddlers to Eat Vegetables – Kids and Nutrition

Get your Children to Eat Vegetables – Yahoo Health

How to Get Kids to Eat Their Vegetables – Helium

Kids and Nutrition – Busy Cooks

It seems that Christmas gets earlier every year, but plugging toys and gadgets during the summer holidays? You’d better believe it. Jane Douglas of MSN took a trip recently to the Christmas in July show in London and came back with a whole host of gift ideas for all of those early adopters and kids that must have everything.

Click here to see a gallery of the gadgets at MSN Tech.

For an alternative spin, see the clip below from megawhat.tv.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqutOXvgNY0[/youtube]

Setting up a basic 2-3 PC wireless home network that has shared resources can often involve a reasonable amount of monetary outlay and a lot of frustration. However if you have an Orange Livebox or (Wanadoo) then you have all of the equipment you need. There are many forum posts on the Web asking what equipment is needed to enable a network with a Livebox, but no router or print switch required; the solution is very simple.

So I wanted to make a wireless network (using Windows XP) that had a desktop PC as the main unit and 2 laptops that all shared a printer and external hard drive.

Overview

As I was doing some more research via Google I came across this article from a couple of years ago: How to Network your Livebox, It can be done that explained it in simple terms.

The Livebox is actually a router in itself, and will allow 6 PC’s to share the wireless Internet connection. On this very same network you can also share other resources like the printer, hard drive and just about anything else.

Tweaks

I followed the steps explained and just had to make a few small adjustments:

1.    I had to drag and drop the whole external hard drive volume into ‘My Shared Docs’ folder. Doing this makes it accessible to the network.

2.    One of the laptops was running Vista. So I changed the workgroup name on this machine to ‘MSHOME’ which is the default setting for XP. The default for Vista is ‘WORKGROUP’.

3.    I had Norton Internet Security running, but I just put the network into the ‘Trusted Zone’ in the setting panel.

Now I had a fully functioning wireless network with shared resources and it took 15 mins to enable and cost me nothing. Bargain.