Internet

YouTube now defaults to HTML5 YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering. Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox. ...

Non-local backup I’ve been going back and forth trying to find a good off-site backup for a long time. I do have an Apple TimeCapsule where I do backup locally, but it doesn’t backup my external drives where I have all my pictures that goes back many years and that would be a nightmare to lose. I use Arq and Amazon Glacier to backup my pictures off-site and I also use rsync to a local NAS for a local backup. But I want a way of doing backup of all my stuff, so I’ve tried both CrashPlan and Backblaze but always found them to slow for my liking. Another reason for giving up on CrashPlan was the client software that uses to much processing power and I think the client is written in Java which would explain why it’s a resource hog. Not so with Backblaze that uses only about 3% of CPU even when the settings for upload speed is set to full upload speed and it doesn’t use much memory. ...

Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning: We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months. I don’t get it. So they count heads, and see that not as many people use Google Reader as they’d like. But the only people I know that use RSS on a daily basis are the one that counts. Bloggers, journalists and tech leaders. You know, the people that write and influence the rest of the heard. How can you not make money on the data Google gets by their reading habits? You want me to have to spend all day reading assorted ramblings on Google+ or Twitter to find some nuggets? I don’t have the time for that. ...