Oh g33kiness to the power of 2: today Google celebrates the 50th birthday of Lego with one of those funky little custom logos :) It's a shame you don't see it when you're using one of the funky new themes though (I know they're not really new, but loads of new ones have been added just recently).

Google Maps Street View is the sort of web application to make g33ks shout k3wl (ok - that includes me), and even though you never knew you needed it, now it's here you do. It's a great solution, we just need to find out what the problems it solves are now. If you don't know what it does, just click the link, the video and pictures explain it all much better than words can. Only a limited number of locations are available currently, but I imagine more will be added soon.

Whilst you're still waiting for Bloons World to happen (when is it going to be here? Some people - you know who you are - are asking me this every day. Someone give me a break and tell me when the release date is, preferably tell me it's soon) why not add the Bloons gadgets to your funky themed Google homepage so that you can play tiny icle versions of Bloons and More Bloons. And if they're just far too small for you to play (they were a touch on the microscopic side for me) why not add the epically cute Maukie (the Google cat - sound essential for ultimate cuteness) to play with as you peruse your news feeds [all subbed by Merc].

I've been a bit slow on the uptake this week (I've been busy) and only just realised that Google have introduced an option of "themes" to their personalized homepage now (sign up for an account if you don't already have one). Now the web page that you visit most often (after Lazylaces of course) can have a relaxing peaceful colour scheme of your choice. Lovely. Mine's pictured above (click on it for a bigger view). Great you think, that's nice. Then you realise that the picture changes over the course of the day in accordance with the local time. That's the point at which the g33k genes get all excited. Expect time dependent style-sheets all over the internet by this time next year. I'm already thinking about it...

After a short absence (caused by some techie changes at my web host that no one there told me about) the "Submit A link" feature has returned (see right hand column). Find a good game, or whatever, on the net, fill in the details on the submit form, and it'll email the details straight to me for inclusion on the site. That's the theory at least. In practise what actually happens is I drown under a sea of emails and spam (current inbox size: 4500+ items) and people get upset because I lose their submissions, but Gmail search and I do try our best. Thanks to all the submitters, whether your links get used or not. All you Evil Spam Monkeys on the other hand I do not thank, despite some of your comical efforts.

It's been an age since I posted anything in Lazylaces' Techie Category, but I thought I should share Paint.NET with you, if you weren't aware of it already. People have been telling me about this free piece of software for a while, but it wasn't until I was stuck on a machine without any graphics manipulation software earlier today and I needed to produce a screenshot for Lazylaces that I got round to using it. And it's a beaut. Lots of features for manipulating (or even creating) pictures and saving out into a variety of formats, totally simple to use (it took less than a minute to work out everything I needed to do) and all for free. Great if you are looking for that kind of thing, or maybe next time you are playing one of those puzzle games that requires you to do stuff with image files. It's for XP/Vista only, but that should cover the majority of PC users, and all you Mac-ites are probably using something 5000 times cooler already.

A while back I mentioned that if you were ever having problems visiting this site on the regular site address:

You could always use the alternative site address:

Well that still remains true, but after a little bit of work I did yesterday the regular site address should always be working wherever you are in the world (including Denmark which curiously always had problems before this update).

It turns out that some idiot had not changed the lazylaces.com domain name registration, and it still had the old DNS server information on it, despite numerous warnings from my web host Brinkster that they were changing name servers. The miracle was that it still was working at all, even if it failed some of the time (although yesterday it wasn't at all which was what made me investigate it). And in case you were wondering - yes, I am the idiot that should have changed it. What can I say? I'm kind of busy and it just got forgotten. Doh!

Anyway, the net result of all this is that you should all find the regular site address working now (the update was made 24hrs ago now, and should have had time to filter around), and also the submission page should be working again as it knows where the email server is now.

Cheers,
G :o)

For all you Mac OS X users out there Ed has created a simple little Lazylaces widget for you to plug into your Mac OS X Dashboard. Nice [subbed and created by Ed].

Whatever your web browser of choice it's time to get updating and tabbing everybody! Yes even Internet Explorer users get tabs now (without installing bizarre toolbars and addins); welcome to the 21st Century Microserfs!

My own personal preference (although I use all of these 3 regularly) is Firefox 2. Everything you loved about "Firefox 1.5.whatever" with added Session Saver (no need for addins on this one any more) so all your open tabs are remembered when you close down and reopen the browser, a very nifty in-browser spell checker which I hope will remove my reliance on dictionary.com when I'm posting, and a raft of other stuff I haven't even looked at yet. W00t! Check out these Firefox 2 tweaks to get it all just how you want it.

Microsoft play catch up with IE7 which is finally out of Beta. It's got lots of nice features, none of which will seem to be original if you've used any other web browser, but that doesn't stop them being good and useful. And most importantly IE finally gets tabs (one of the best things in a browser imho, I just find them so useful). Download it today (or tomorrow if you want the first security patch).

Finally Opera 9.02, which is winning the war of numbers (9 must be better than 7!), has been out for a while, but I have to mention it, as way-back-when Opera was the browser that first revolutionised my own web browsing with tabs. There are so many features in this one it's just ridiculous, and it's several steps ahead of the rest still (although I maintain that the inbuilt mail client is rubbish of the highest degree - the browser's only bad point, but the idea of incorporating mail into the browser is a fine one). Try it if you want to see where FF and MSIE are heading next.

Happy tabbing browsing everyone!

Having read the feedback on the new "What's Hot" and "What's Not" lists I've just updated the way that they work so they are based solely on user ratings, ie. if a game has a rating of 0% it is definitely at the bottom of the list, if it has 100% it is at the top. However I've restricted the inclusion of games to those with 50 more votes, so new ones do not jump automatically to the top or bottom of the pile, and a reasonable amount of opinion is canvassed before they can appear on the lists. Currently 33, of the 973 games posted, have 50 or more votes. I've also added a "What's Forgot" list which shows the 10 games with the least number of votes, so hopefully even forogtten games get a vote once in a while and eventually get 50 or more votes (thanks to Andiar for this idea).