Google Adds Video Chat to Gmail

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:

My Heart Will Go On

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.