BREAKING: Tech giants unveil smart toaster

A smart toaster: the iToaster, Windows Toaster 8, and Google Toast image picture toast
Apple, Microsoft, and Google are unveiling plans for smart toasters. Get ready – this is huge.

SOMEWHERE IN CALIFORNIA — In a stunning series of revelations that turned the tech world on its head, a trio of tech giants announced plans for a smart toaster. Apple, Microsoft, and Google held launch parties this weekend for a series of new devices. This brave reporter attended all three.

Let’s take a look.

Follow the 2012 elections with the Google Politics election tracker

tl;dr -check out Google’s awesome political election tracker

I’m a political junkie, so I’m following this year’s Republican primary process with the fervor with which I, also a baseball fanatic, follow baseball – which is to say, very much. And the main things in election season to watch out for are the elections themselves – in this year’s case, each state’s primary in which the Republican candidates compete.

These elections are awesome, but to fully enjoy them I need stats. I need results. I need data. I need cool graphs. I need a great political tracker. So look what I found:

Google Politics Colorado Primary Result
Google Politics election tracker showing the results of the Colorado caucus (google.com/elections)

Chrome OS: all web, all the time

As you might have noticed, the guys at Google have released (well, not released, they’ve just publicly shown it for the first time; Chromebooks are coming out on June 15) Chromebooks, which are netbooks that run the Chrome OS.

Chrome OS (official site)

More about the actual computers later; the interesting part about the computer is its operating system. Chrome OS is a completely web-based operating system; it’s nothing but Chrome, Google’s web browser. That’s right, the only application on the computer is Chrome.

Bing: the little engine that… couldn’t?

If you’ve bought an electronic device in the last year, you’ll notice that Microsoft is hawking its search engine Bing more than I hawk my products. (On a totally unrelated note, download Cabra, my free and open-source flashcard program.)

That’s all well and good, since you’re allowed to advertise, but Microsoft really goes to the extreme:

  1. Microsoft signed a deal with Blackberry so that Bing would be the only search engine available on Blackberrys.
  2. My sister bought a new computer and was offered a free song download if she searched with Bing.

DuckDuckGo – the best thing since Google

I was looking on my analytics page (tracking visitors to the site) and noticed someone came to hathix through DuckDuckGo. Being bored, I looked up DuckDuckGo and I was impressed automatically. It’s a great search engine. Here’s why.

Zero-click info

DuckDuckGo’s got this great feature that lets you see some quick background info on a subject when you search it. If I want to know who Nelson Mandela is without having to read a lengthy article about apartheid, South Africa, and that sort of stuff, I can just DDG it and look what I get: