Google announced today a new tool that takes the burden of finding gifts off your back. The new tool, now called the Automated Shopper, will pick out who to give the gifts to, how much to spend on each person, and what to get them. After confirming the purchases, the new tool will ship the gifts out to the recipients.

To get started, all you have to do is set a budget for your entire holiday shopping and press go. Although, Google will not reveal the specifics of how their tool works, they have given us a rough outline.

First, the tool analyzes emails, chat conversations, search and web history, gift notes from previous years stored in Google Notebook, genealogical trees, and any other available information to determine who should receive gifts from you. Then, using the same information, Automated Shopper determines how close you are to each person on the list using a new technology called RelationshipRank ™. Your specified budget is then allocated across people according to their RelationshipRank ™.

For each person on the list, Automated Shopper queries Google’s profile database. This database contains all the information available about any person in a single area. Automated Shopper then uses this information to choose a gift that fits each person’s interests and falls within the budget for each person.

Automated Shopper then returns a list (Google says it should take between 0.00003 and .00005 seconds to get this list back after entering your budget) of the people each item will go to for you to confirm. Google says this confirmation phase is only temporary for as long as this tool remains in beta.

After confirming the gifts, the tool pays for each of the items and has them shipped to a location near Moutain View. At this facility, a line of advanced robots removes each gift from its box and wraps it, adding a personilized note created by a highly advanced AI designed to match the personality of the giver.

The wrapped packages are then sent off to the recipients, whose addresses are found in Google’s profiles of the recipients.

The only problem is, it doesn’t really exist…yet.

Warning! Please use your judgment about the person, the computer, and the prank before attempting this. Always try whatever you plan to do on your own computer or some other safe computer before doing anything.

1. Set XKill to start when the user logs in Go to System > Preferences > Sessions and add an entry with the command ‘xkill’. If you have not used xkill before, it turns your cursor into an ‘x’ (may vary by distribution) and kills the process behind the next thing you click on. Watch out with this one! Using this on unsaved work would be very bad.
2. Change/remove main menu shortcuts Go to System > Preferences > Main Menu. Then either just uncheck any boxes you want or switch the command associated with the application shortcuts around. Either way, the recipient of this prank will have no idea how to get their programs to launch. (You can also set one of them to the command ‘xkill’ described above. This is probably not a good idea, though, since it is very possible that the user would accidentally click on something they shouldn’t. In short, be careful and don’t do it.)
3. Replace desktop background with a picture of the desktop This trick will work on any OS, but it is still one of my favorites. Just take a screenshot of the computer’s desktop without any windows open. Then set that screenshot as their desktop background. Just move some or all of the desktop icons to another folder (be sure you don’t delete them) and watch as the computer’s user tries to click on his/her icons without any luck.
4. Change the terminal’s colors Know a geek who loves to use the terminal? Open terminal and go to  Edit > Profiles. Then choose to edit the default profile and mess with the colors. For maximum confusion, leave the background color, but change the text color to match it. Be careful you write down the previous settings, though, if the user has changed them.
5. Free the fish When you walk by the person’s computer, simply press Alt+F2 and type in “free the fish”. This will cause a fish you swim across the desktop over and over again. You will have to do it again after every reboot, though.
6. Bonus! Sometimes the simple tricks are the best. Unplug the keyboard or mouse.

As stated above, be careful and use your judgment. I do not recommend using any of these ideas unless you are absolutely sure no harm will be done.

Know of any great tricks? Share them and tell us how these tricks and others have worked for you.

Thanksgiving is a season to think about all the things we are grateful for, but so often we forget the bits of technology that we enjoy. Here are the pieces of technology I am grateful for:

Digital Rights Management We so rarely think about it, but DRM touches our lives every day. This proven useless piece of wonderful technology brought to us by wonderful narrow-minded people of the music and movie industries brings joy to our lives every time we try to do anything with our legally purchased content. Then, it makes us go buy new hardware, providing an incredible excuse to waste more money.

Dumb Comments Without the occasional dose of stupid, annoying comments, I would never be able to put up with the huge number of intelligent comments. Can you imagine only getting intelligent comments on your blog? No dumb ones and no spam? How would you survive?

Monopolies Ahhh… monopolies… Don’t listen to those people who say they’re bad for consumers or whatever! Monopolies are just another excuse to waste some more money (always fun!) and develop another idol (the company’s marketing department). Besides, without monopolies, we wouldn’t have this guy making a fool of himself.

Open Source Purists I just can’t stand those people who think it is OK to have a little closed code on your system. You know, the people who are too spoiled to use gNewSense. How can you stand touching any evil .doc files and MP3’s? Why can’t they just bug people into using other software! If their boss doesn’t like it, they should just get a new job.

Just in case you didn’t notice, I’m being highly sarcastic.

Psystar seems to just keep bothering Apple, most recently promising to continue fighting the lawsuit and introuducing Blu-Ray drives into their open Macs. However this turns out, it will be a very interesting fight.

Don’t forget:

In a shocking revelation today, millions of Chrome fanboys across the web have realized that Google has not yet lost interest in their one month old browser. In fact, since the original release, Google has actually released a number of updates.

When Chrome was first released, most analysts believed that the project would be abandoned soon after the fun of creating the comic book release notes subsided. One professional Google fanboy said that “Google Chrome rules! It’ll probably be abandoned in a couple weeks, but Google Chrome rules!” Now, millions around the world are discovering that, in a rare move, Google appears to have maintained interest in a new project for more than a month. The last time in recent memory that this happened occurred with GMail, although, due to its beta status, it is still unclear if Google will eventually forget about it too.

“The implications of this could be huge, but it is too soon to tell,” said one analyst. He points out that, although most projects are abandoned within the first few days or weeks, some survive three or four months before their developers move on. If Google Chrome makes it past this point, however, most see it as highly likely that Chrome will quickly take over the world. While many see this as good news, one person warned us that allowing Google to take over our lives and our government could be a bad idea. The morning after finding his or her cryptic note, we attempted to ask for further comment, however he or she had mysteriously disappeared.

Overall, it seems that no one really knows what to think of this unprecedentedly good memory on the part of Google, which, some argue, hasn’t happened since they first launched their search business out of a garage*.

* All high-tech companies start in a garage. Google is a high-tech company. Google started in a garage.

Seriously, there may actually be something to be said for Google’s see-what-sticks approach, as it may actually allow for more innovation. Who knows.

The good news is that the Large Hadron Collider does run Linux, but what if it ran Windows?

(Click to see larger image.)

Let me know what you think.

One of the many benefits of buying Linux preinstalled on a PC is that there is no crapware. One common piece of crapware is a 30-day free trial of some antivirus suit, which is not even needed on Linux. This, however, led to an interesting quote on Dell’s website. Below is a screen-shot:

Almost certainly a mistake... I hope.

This is a screenshot from the Dell site, comparing a Windows (left) and Linux (right) machine. The red highlighting was added to point out the flaw.

Not only does Dell say the Ubuntu machine comes with “No Security,” but they also say it has “No Productivity Software (pre-installed).” Ever heard of OpenOffice?

I suspect (and hope) that this is a mistake that will soon be corrected.

Warning: The following post contains comedy. Some people are allergic to it. Symptoms include posting angry comments.

It is interesting to look at the differences in the styles of different distributions. This is often best represented in looking at the art proposals for upcoming versions of various distributions. For example, a typical theme proposal for Fedora looks something like this:

“I was laying in my hammock one night gazing up at the infinite stars when suddenly an idea occurred to me. Gazing out at the vastness of the stars, it seemed to be that those stars perfectly represented Fedora, since Fedora 9 was called “Sulfur” and there has got to be some sulfur out there somewhere.”

A typical Ubuntu art submission, on the other hand, looks more like this:

“ubuntu rulz!!! see my awesum desktop: ubuntu should totally look like dis”

In contrast to both of these styles, OpenSuSe selects its artwork based an automatic algorithm that picks the wallpaper with the most green in it. Given a tie, which happens quite a lot, another script kicks in and posts the hex codes for the most used shade of green in each wallpaper. OpenSuSe contributors then vote on their favorite color (of green.)

I don’t even want to know what Gentoo’s process looks like.

Anyway, today I want to discuss some of the best Fedora art submissions judged, appropriately enough, not by the art but by the concept. I will even go so far as to rank them. First place goes to…

1. Dice - To quote directly from the excellent concept description, “dice like a symbol of the variability.” I could not possibly agree more. In fact, I believe that Fedora should change its slogan to “Fedora. It’s just a crap shoot.”
2. Eden - The Eden theme goes back to the fundamental parts of a flowering tree, each representing a part of Fedora. I believe that placing a big tree on the desktop of many young and incompetent Fedora users would help remind them that they must remember to water their keyboards at least once a week. Every time I see another Fedora user complain about system problems on some forum, I sigh and prepare to repost my standard response - “Dear Generic Fedora User. You forgot to water your keyboard, you idiot. Have a nice day.”
3. Solar - The author of this theme recognizes the simple truth that many miss: the only truly prefect system in the whole universe is the solar system. Based on this knowledge, it is easy to see how Fedora should strive to be as perfect as the solar system its self. The analogy fits perfectly! My only question is: if the sun is the kernel, what is space junk?

When in the Course of geeky events it becomes necessary for one project to fork off from another and to assume among the powers of the technosphere, the separate and equal station to which Moore’s Law and bigger hard drives entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of geek kind and WordPress require that they should declare the causes which impel them to fork the project.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all geeks are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Midnight Hacking. — That to secure these rights, Operating Systems are instituted among Computers, deriving their just powers from the motherboards, — That whenever any Form of Operating System becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Geeks to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Operating System, laying its foundation on Linux and organizing its features in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their coolness factor. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Operating Systems long established need an upgrade; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that geekkind are more disposed to fork and code, while other users must suffer with the operating systems to which they are accustomed.