Google Now On Chromebook

“Google Now” got a powerful goal: The right information at the right time.
From knowing the weather before you go for a run, to planning the best route to avoid traffic, or even checking your favorite team’s score while they are playing, get the information you want, when you need it. You can look at it as a new phase in Search. You are getting the answers before you had the chance to ask the questions. If you use Android or iPhone – Good chances that you saw it in action. However, if you got a Chromebook, here is how you can manage it and sync between your phone and your laptop. Yesterday, Google has announced that they’re expanding Now with support for 70 new apps, including Spotify, Feedly, Runkeeper, OpenTable etc’.

How Google Now is working in Chrome?

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Install A VPN Server On Google Compute Engine

In this tutorial, we will go over the simple steps to install an IPSec/L2TP VPN server on google compute engine.
Why?
There are many cases that we need to use a secure channel between a local machine (it might be the firewall of our office or just your development laptop) and our cloud infrastructure. The answer (in most cases) is to have a VPN server in our cloud that will be the entry point. Here we are going to look at a client-server solution. If you are looking at a solution that will give you server to server configuration please go to this post: greenido.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/how-to-set-a-vpn-on-google-compute-engine/

First, I’m going to assume you have an account with Google cloud and you already know how to launch an instance on Google Compute Engine. If not, this post could help you do it in less then 5 min.

Chrome And HTML5 Updates

There are some very interesting technologies that are now available in Chrome. In this post I will try to cover some of them.

We know that Google started the Chrome project on the three ideas of speed, simplicity, and security. It’s still focusing on these important aspects while keep moving forward (fast) on implementation of many other HTML5 features. You can find Chrome on mobile, desktop, Chromebook and Chromecast. Let’s see what are the new, improved features we got these days as developers in Chrome platform:

Focus areas Chrome is moving forward

Mobile and Open Web Platform

We’re investing a lot of time to make sure mobile web experiences improve and that they are easier to develop!

1. Build amazing mobile web apps
2. WebGL, Web Audio, WebRTC, Web Speech and many more APIs that give you ‘native’ capabilities inside your browser.
3. Vibration
4. Device Motion
5. WebRTC code lab (link) to check the new world of media (video/audio) in Chrome without plugins.

Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

Chromebook For Developers And Hackers

If you are a Linux hacker and/or a developer with a new Chromebook, Chromebox, Pixel or an old laptop with ChromeOS… You might want to have the ability to have a dual-boot option that will let you enjoy the power of your ChromeOS but on the same time be able to boot your laptop with Linux and enjoy C, C++, Java and the fun technologies. It might be hard on other platforms to ‘hack’ them, but since the chromium project is open-source, I guess, they wanted to be hackable by design (e.g. you have a keyboard shortcuts in Pixel that let you enter this mode). Here are the few steps you need to follow in order to enjoy hacking ChromeOS.

ChromeOS Hacking On Google Developers Live Israel

ChromeOS – A new gift to your old laptop

Today, I had the pleasure to sit for 15min with Nissim Betito (the one and only!) how is a known hacker in the linux community around TLV. We spoke about Chromebook and what are the powerful tools that you can leverage today when you wish to write code. Later, we showed how to install ubuntu on Chromebook and get everything you miss as a developer that must have gcc (or other complier) under their hands. In the near future we will show how to install chromeOS image on raspberry pi…

How To Prevent Your Chromebook From Going To Sleep

There are some cases where you wish your chromeOS, Chromebook (or Chromebox) will not to enter into sleep mode. A quick example is when you wish to use it in a conference to present a cool web experiment and you don’t want it to vanish after few minutes. Here are two quick ways to achieve it. Both are a bit of a hack… but it’s not a complicated process.

The hacker way

1. Login with the admin user.
2. Open a terminal by hiting CTRL+ALT+T
3. Type the following
   1. shell (to drop into a standard bash shell)
   2. sudo stop powerm – to disable sleep when lid is closed. You could go with the longer version of: sudo initctl stop powerm but there is no reason to type more…
   3. sudo stop powerd – to disable all other power management features.
4. Now logout from the menu – But do not restart! Why? because these settings won’t survive it.

The easy way

Install this Chrome extension – Caffeine after your clone/fork it from Github. It is an experimental extension for Google ChromeBooks that overrides the default power settings.
It is using this API:

chrome.experimental.power.requestKeepAwake()

which is still under experiment so you will need to enable it before the installation.

How to install:

1. Go to about:flags on your Chromebook, enable “Experimental Extension APIs” and then restart your Chromebook.
2. Go to extensions, toggle on Developer Mode, and click load unpacked extension.
3. Choose the folder containing this source.
4. Toggle / unToggle the menu icon to keep Chrome awake. Is it easy or what?

Happy new year!

[Update Sep 2014] – You can now have Keep Aware extension from the Chrome Web Store. This is the easiest way and it got two option: full system awake (sun is up) or display will go to sleep but network and the rest will continue to work (moon is up).

GDL-IL On ChromeOS And Chromebook

Today I sat with Nissim Benito (our very own Chrome/Hardware expert) to talk about the new features we have in ChromeOS. We covered the hardware specs that you have on Chromebox and Chromebook. These devices give you a lot of option to connect 6 USBs, 2 DVI etc’. We showed how you can use modern web apps that are out there today to be more productive and safe. In case you want to test ChromeOS before you buy it, you can go to best buy or Install ChromiumOS On Your (Old) Laptop another option is to test ChromeOS In VirtualBox. I’m sorry for the quality of the audio… I hope to solve it until the next episode.

Chrome For Enterprise

During my work with big organizations I got many questions about deploying Chrome for enterprise. What are the management capabilities? Which policy I can control? Is there an option to use MSI? The good news is that most of the answers are… Yes! Chrome/Chromuim supports few ways to control your browser’s activity. It can be done by using group policy, MCX files and external configuration files. In the end of the day, the administrator of your organization can manage and control all the Chrome installations. One of the main question CIO/CTO has is about the option to control the auto-updates. Well, You can control it. For more details you can read the first bullet in the list below. The other items in that list will help you understand more on the capabilities and see how you can deploy it on any network (windows, linux and mac).

 

• Turning off Auto-Updates – Detailed explanation on how you can manage the updates.
• Full list of supported Policies
• Windows Quick Start – This tutorial will show you how to get Chromium / Google Chrome deployed and configured on a Windows network.
• Mac Quick Start –  Get started with managing Chromium / Google Chrome on a Mac network.
• Linux Quick Start – Managed instance of Google Chrome or Chromium up and running on Linux.

(*) More information on all the benefits of Chrome for enterprise and businesses can be found here. And as we know, in the business world the EULA is important as well.

Chrome Frame

Another great option for enterprises that need to work with IE is to install Chrome-Frame. Chrome Frame is an Internet Explorer plug-in that renders specific web pages in Chrome. That’s right… You will be able to use the latest HTML5 features (e.g. see amazing 3D WebGL charts) inside your IE6-8. It’s very powerful way to empower your people with modern browser today.