Google are taking over the world! We’re entrusting our data with a faceless corporation!

Some people worry about that, anyway, though I’m not one of them. I think Google offer a great range of free services that greatly enhance my online life - even if sometimes I feel left out as a European.

Today Google announced on their blog a great new service that should help make people much more comfortable with using Google - Google Dashboard. This can also be found through your Google account settings. What it gives you is a single page summarizing all the Google products you use, and what is kept on them.

So, I can see how many conversations I have stored in my Gmail, how many albums in Picasa, what’s in my Google Docs and so on. It covers over 20 products, including the aforementioned, Calendar, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and more. From here you can control all of that data too.

Perhaps the data that’s most eye opening is your search history - searching while signed in is associated with your account, and it’s all there! There’s even a calendar that shows your levels of search activity. It’s fascinating, in a narcissistic way, but even better you are put in control of it all. If you want to delete it, that’s easy. You can delete bits, or everything and “pause” history collection.

I think this Google Dashboard really makes you feel in control of your online life, and I would love to see sites like Facebook and MySpace follow suit. Cynics and conspiracy theorists probably won’t be convinced, but it certainly takes some of the wind out of their sails.

*Apparently there are some issues with data collection for Google Apps for Domains.

The 12th Annual Independent Games Festival is almost upon us, and has a huge selection of submissions to check out. There’s a record 306 entries, covering a huge range of genres. Lewie Procter at SavvyGames has completed part one of a ‘Pretend you are an IGF judge‘ series, which usefully brings together all the publicly available submitted games, so you can check them out yourself.

The sheer volume of games is pretty intimidating, but there’s sure to be tons of great stuff. I’ve already reviewed AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, which I love and Terry Cavanagh’s excellent Don’t Look Back is also there, alongside his upcoming and highly anticipated VVVVVV (no demo for this yet, sniff!).

While publishing giant Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 will break barriers by allowing you to be a brutal terrorist, these indie developers are proving that you don’t need to shock or ask ridiculous moral non-choices of your players to do something revolutionary with video games or story telling. There’s also a wealth of humor, weirdness and creative enthusiasm that I feel is lacking from many of the season’s big upcoming releases - which unless I’m forgetting something are all sequels. While there is certainly lots of good stuff to play, like Hollywood before it, the games industry seems stuck in a blockbuster-sequel cycle, making it seem difficult for genuinely new games to make their mark.

After waiting all day yesterday with no joy, finally this morning the Left 4 Dead 2 demo is available to download and play! The first game offered some of the best cooperative multiplayer gaming around, and on first impressions, that certainly hasn’t changed.

This demo lets you play one campaign, entitled “The Parish” either in one player mode (with three AI companions), or online with four players fighting to survive together. There’s plenty of high speed frights and thrills in both, but playing with bots just isn’t the same. Multiplayer games are much more dynamic, and there’s more emotional involvement - whether it’s anger at a selfish player, or pleasant surprise when people are working together!

It looks like Left 4 Dead 2 is cementing its supremacy over the aged, lumbering Resident Evil series - these zombies are varied, fast moving and extremely vicious. There’s really nothing like the moment when a horde of zombies is rushing towards you: it’s one of the most visceral, adrenalin pumping creations in gaming history.

To play you’ll need the Steam client, and from there you can download the demo - but be warned, it’s not for the faint hearted.

In this brave new world of the internet, the planet, we have been told, has shrunk. Yet for Google, it seems old geographical realities still hold true.

Google Voice sounds wonderful, but I’ve heard so much about this amazing service I can’t use that I’m beginning to hate it. And Onebox music search - it sure is lucky no one in Europe listens to music, or we might be a bit annoyed at Google’s new search feature we don’t have. Thanks for making these tools available everywhere, except in Asia, Australasia, Antarctica and Europe. What’s this all about? When did the US become the world?

North America only accounts for 15% of internet users, so when are the majority going to get some of this stuff? Europe’s a bigger market, and just as developed as the US. I’m surprised that a music search service should need any local restrictions - with streaming services like Spotify there are licensing issues, but search?

With Google Voice, obviously there will be differing telecoms law, but Google has presence everywhere and there seems to be no movement at all. As we follow events around the world with complete ease, the idea of waiting months for something just doesn’t fit. So come on Google, there’s a whole world out there, and we don’t like being ignored! One day, you might wake up and find we’re all using Bing.

Like the idea of “Massively Multiplayer Online Games”, but put off by all those orcs and demons? Cryptic Studios are making their new comic book inspired Champions Online free this weekend. Boasting excellent character design, you can create your own super-hero and enter a colorful world where the Earth is of course in peril. Help save us all from Doctor Destroyer!

Like their City of Heroes before, this promises a much more light-hearted take on the role-playing genre. You can sign up here and download the client in preparation for 10am Friday (30th Oct) US Pacific time (5pm GMT).

[Via: Eurogamer]

Gretel and Hansel is a surprisingly macabre and grizzly take on the classic Brothers Grimm tale. You play Gretel, who becomes alarmed after overhearing her mother planning to send the children away into the dangerous forest!

Presented in really pretty water-colors, with a perfect soundtrack, Gretel and Hansel isn’t particularly complicated (and there’s a walkthrough linked on the game page if you get stuck). It does feature achievements, and some of them feature very dark humor! It’s not a cute kids game, this one.

Check out Gretel and Hansel here.

[Via: IndieGames.com]

The web’s great, but it’s pretty distracting. Between glancing at incoming email, news feeds, Twitter updates and so on it’s a wonder there’s time for work at all. It’s hard to be disciplined enough to not check these things every few minutes, but it’s not a very efficient way of working. It’s rare to find something totally urgent, after all.

Freedom is a neat little app for Macs that allows you to set a time, e.g. an hour, and from then on your network access will be cut. Harsh, but I tried it and it certainly does the trick! The first few minutes may get a little anxious as you worry about all the emergency humorous tweets you’re missing, but once the cold turkey is over it’s surprisingly liberating. Great for anyone writing (after web research is done!), as it’s really easy to concentrate when all your desktop distractions have gone*.

You can set Freedom to cut your net from ten minutes to eight hours - can you imagine eight hours without the web - and as your productivity during that time will be greater, you’ll have made more time to update Facebook for the rest of the day! It really is a win-win application.

Impressively, there seems to be no way of stopping Freedom unless you actually reboot your system - I tried force quit, but apparently still had no web access! Mac users can download Freedom here.

*Smart phone users are doomed, I’m afraid.

Windows: Zuma’s Revenge! is a puzzle game from PopCap, where you fire balls from a lost frog’s mouth to escape and angry island god. The story doesn’t matter, though! This is horribly addictive stuff, so before you know it you’ll be hooked. It’s not a revolution, as previous games were similar, but this is the most varied and best looking Zuma game yet. Get it here!

Mac: Want to really get under the hood of your Mac? Mac Pilot (updated to version 3.4.1) will allow you to supercharge your Mac by tweaking more than 225 hidden features. The application allows you to activate or deactivate features in all of your Mac’s applications, like the Finder, Spotlight or Photo Booth. You can also view the settings for the different volumes mounted on your Mac and manage startup applications.

iPhone: LineUp is one of those ultra addictive games where you need to touch groups of three or more same-colored blocks in order to get rid of them and stop the board from overflowing. A row of new blocks is added to the pile every few seconds, and the time it takes for these to be added speeds-up as the game goes on.

The Unity plug-in has produced some impressive browser games, but maybe Lego Star Wars the Quest for R2D2 is the best so far.  It’s basically a 3D hack and slash adventure, but has great graphics, is really smooth and of course has everyone’s favorite Star Wars sound effects. Pressing F puts you in full screen mode, and then you won’t even notice it’s a browser based game. Not so long ago, a game like this would have been perfectly acceptable on a home console, and it’s incredible to see this for free running in Firefox! Play Lego Star Wars the Quest for R2D2 here. The Unity plug-in is available for Windows and Mac.

You wake up in some kind of chamber, naked next to a tiny bicycle. As you come to your senses, you see another chamber, but the occupant races off on a motorbike almost before you can see them. That’s how the lovely Icycle begins.

You guide your naked cyclist through barren, but beautifully painted and animated landscapes, in pursuit of the mystery biker. Using the cursor keys to accelerate, brake and jump your way is pretty easy to grasp, although you can’t go backwards at all. You need to learn the events of some areas to beat them - timing your jumps to avoid falling rocks, or cracking icy floors. It occasionally gets trciky. The gameplay is simple, but it looks absolutely fantastic, and you’ll certainly want to play through to the end!

Play Icycle here, which requires Flash.

Earlier this year, I wrote a short explanation of how to use the free DJing application Mixxx. In this post I wrote that you could import iTunes playlists, and commenter Stephane has pointed out Mixxx isn’t compatible with iTunes playlist formats.

Having searched around for programs that convert iTunes playlist files to the more common M3U format, I haven’t found a solution that works. The nearest thing to a solution, assuming you associate Mixxx with your iTunes library, is to open iTunes and the playlist you want, and select all the tracks, then drag them into a newly created playlist in Mixxx. The problem with this is that although you aren’t copying the files, for some reason you will lose the playlist order, and Mixxx will automatically put them in alphabetical order. I can’t get around this!

However, as Mixxx doesn’t automatically play tracks - you have to cue and start each one yourself - it’s not a big disadvantage, but it is annoying that you have to remember the order yourself, or make it up as you go along. I had thought I could drag iTunes playlists into WinAmp, and then export them to Mixxx, but even that doesn’t work.

More annoyingly, Mixxx doesn’t let you drag and reorder playlists - although this is a problem highlighted in their development Wiki, so hopefully it will be addressed soon. Until then, or until iTunes exports more friendly playlist file formats, I’m afraid importing playlists from iTunes will continue to be a pain. For now, you’ll have to make new playlists.

As always, we welcome your comments - maybe you have a solution to this problem?

Leading the resurgence of point and click adventures, Telltale Games have decided to celebrate September 19th, International Talk Like a Pirate Day (what, you hadn’t heard of it?) by giving away the first episode of their new Monkey Island series for free. It’s a one day only offer, and you have to sign up with your email address on their site. They will email you a reminder when the download is available. I really enjoyed the demo, released a couple of months ago, and this is an offer you don’t want to miss! Sign up here!

[Via: Eurogamer]

Break Stuff! It’s unclear why the Dad in DadGame likes to break stuff, but he does, and he does it well. In this browser based carnage filled platform game, take control of Dad on a hilarious, but very destructive adventure.

Featuring great cartoon graphics, animation and brilliant story cut scenes, DadGame seems fantastic even before you are let loose at the controls. Thankfully, the gameplay is also really good. It’s chaotic for sure, but as your main task is just to break stuff, using your fists, swords, throwing objects, it’s enjoyable chaos. Creating carnage increases your carnage meter, and when you reach 100%, Dad goes on fire! When on fire, Dad is invincible, and has a range of cool attacks including, of course, lasers coming out of his eye!

What’s not to like?

Having a string of passwords for online accounts and computers is part of life today, and they are supposed to be the means for keeping our stuff safe. Despite this many of us use incredibly easy passwords, like the Twitter employee whose Gmail account had the password “password“! You shouldn’t be that stupid.

Much of password hacking isn’t like the movies, but either educated guess work or using programs that fling the entire dictionary at password protected things, until they happen upon the right one.

Here are two simple things you can do to improve your passwords,

1: Don’t use just a word, and don’t use something related to you that anyone might be able to find out or easily guess. So no dates, or names of loved ones! Not doing that will keep the most basic hacks away. Complicated, seemingly random passwords maybe hard to remember, but you’ll be surprised how quickly your fingers learn the routine. Create a random password, and give yourself a week to remember it!

2: For password recovery and internet banking, when a password system asks security questions make the answers as bizarre and uniquely yours as possible: What was the name of your first school? Don’t give the right answer, as that might be discoverable: What was the name of my first school? Monkey Tennis Junior. Not true, but something I will remember. If you can create a question, be as bizarre as you can be - as long as it’s something memorable for you!

Most of us will never suffer from identity theft, but these two suggestions will keep you as safe as you reasonably can be. Of course, all systems are probably hackable by someone with the right resources and persistence, but it’s difficult enough that it’s not worth doing for normal people!

Mindracer is a mathematics racing game, for one or two players. Put your adding, subtraction, multiplication and division skills to the test! Two player mode is pretty cool, pitting you head to head, literally each at one end of the iPhone. Of course, if you hate mathematics, nothing about MindRacer is going to change your mind!

Windows: Would you like to play Guitar Hero but don’t have the game - or the console? Don’t worry: you can now play Frets on Fire, a fun guitar game with which you can follow the steps of Jimi Hendrix or Slash with the help of your PC and your keyboard. The latest version, 1.3.110, includes loads of improvements that make the whole experience even better!

Mac: DivX is the worldwide codec standard behind many of those compressed videos that are legally or otherwise downloaded from the net. Of course, there are now hundreds of players out there that play DivX but they need to be encoded in DivX to work properly through a converter such as DivX 7 which converts your files to the latest version of the DivX standard now updated to version 7.0.1.