Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capa­bil­i­ties to their gmail ser­vice. To enable the ser­vice, just visit this site and down­load and install the plu­gin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s down­loaded before you can install it — but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you acci­dently leave Fire­fox open.

Then, it’s just a mat­ter of wait­ing for one of your con­tacts to have installed it them­selves so you can try it out!

You can tell one of your con­tacts has the video plu­gin installed because they’ll have a lit­tle video cam­era icon by their name in your con­tact list like this:

I love the clas­sics. No, not Beethoven and Mozart, Super Nin­tendo and N64. The great news is, rather than drag­ging out your old con­sole sys­tem from your parent’s base­ment, you can use an emu­la­tor on your com­puter and relive all those great clas­sic gam­ing moments.

I am a Mac user, so the emu­la­tors I use are SNES9x for Super NES (dona­tion­ware) and Six­ty­Force for N64 (share­ware, but worth the $16 fee). I’m not a fan of using the key­board to play con­sole games, so I bought an XBox 360 USB con­troller and down­loaded a 3rd party dri­ver to make it work on my Mac.

One of my favourite things about gam­ing with an emu­la­tor is that they allow you to freeze your game at any point and return to it later. FAR bet­ter than leav­ing your con­sole paused for the evening because the wife HAS to watch Juno for the 15th time this week, only to have her shut it off. Love you, Honey!

Any­ways… what about the games? Con­sult almighty Google for web­sites that have ROM’s for these emu­la­tors (CoolROM.com has a bunch). ROM’s are basi­cally images of the old car­tridges for these sys­tems. The best part is that you don’t have to blow into them to make them work with your com­puter, you just keep them in a folder on your computer’s hard drive and open them with your favourite emulator.

Awe­some­ness!

Note: The screen­shots are of the win­dowed mode in these appli­ca­tions, but you can run them in full screen mode too.