Hoping to create sustainable communities, but promoting reuse and recycling of items amongst the the people who live within an area, this proximity based service seems to be the right answer. All while reducing the overall carbon footprint of the people living in that area.

Rentalic, faced the public for the first time in a soft launch at Maker Faire 2009, in San Mateo CA. The responce was out of this world. People loved the idea and could not wait for the site to go live. The Rentalic website says that it will be going live soon, so here’s to keeping our fingers crossed. In the meanwhile you can pre-register at the site now to make sure you will be one of the first to beta test and use the site.

Update: November 11, 2009
Rentalic is now open for invitation only beta testing. I have some invites if you need some. Just leave me a comment and i’ll email you an invite. They also got a cool video explaining how it all works!

i have a routine, i walk towards my car, press the unlock, listen to the reassuring click sound that tells me the car has been unlocked and i open the door and get in. same when i get down from the car. i click the car and wait to hear it click back to know the door is locked and we are all good.

today morning i had my hands full of stuff and was a bit preoccupied when i ran out of the apartment, closed the front door and locked it. dammit, it did not lock; so i tried it again. still unlocked. i was starting to get annoyed at the door. why was it not locking itself. after staring daggers at the poor door for a few seconds it struck me that this was my apartment front door not my car door. thats why it was not clicking back at me when i clicked on the lock button. DUH!

i proceeded to sheepishly put the door key into the lock, turn the key locking the door, looked both to my left and right to make sure non of my neighbors had witnessed this very embarrassing moment of me clicking my front door and headed to my car which responded much better and as expected to my unlock clicks than my front door had.

this got me thinking. why don’t they have the same mechanism for buildings that they have for automobiles. its a very useful technology that can be used in many different area’s. why was its implementation stopped at just automobiles?

am i the only one this has happened to? i would love to hear if anyone of you have experiences something similar.

now that i’ve hung around a little more with ‘ol chromie (aka Google Chrome), there are sides of me that are not at all happy and sides of me that are.

in no particular order lets see what my pet peeves are first.

• i really liked having a search bar on the right top corner of my browser (google, yahoo, etc..) that really made it very convinient to drag highlighted text straight from a page i’m in, and drop it into the search bar and then open a new tab and click enter to search for it. some might think it an edge case, but i do that ALL THE TIME.
• chromie over here even though is really fast and does all this cool sand boxing and what not still takes up a hell of a lot of memory. firefox would go up to about 70-90mb if i had about 8 tabs open and was running it for about 6 hours without closing the browser, but chrome jumps up to about 70mb with just three tabs open (my blog, facebook, and gmail). not quite sure i like that.
• shame on you google for downloading file links that i click on without prompting me for what i want to do with it. so here i was browsing through a site and i clicked on a link for a product thinking it would take me to its product detail page, but in reality it was a link to a page that then redirected me to the actual download of the trial version for that product and even though i did not want to download it, chrome automatically started downloading the file.  for a moment i was confused and though it was somthing to do with the page so i opened up the fox and tried it on that, and sure enough the fox prompted me asking me what i wanted to do with the file. you should know better google!
• i’m still bothered by the fact that the little comment links at the end of facebook’s news feeds don’t work in chrome. i really liked that feature

so now that i’ve gotten that off my chest what do i like about chrome so far:

• i like their treatment of text boxes. alot of web 2.0 companies spend alot of time coding fancy js to make text boxes re-sizable etc.. chrome makes all textarea boxes in any site re-sizable
• did i mention its pretty fast? well it is.
• i havent crashed it yet. this is good.. really it is. i am well known for overloading my browser with so many tabs that it is always crashing on me
• i like the way they took away all the menu options and replaced it with one that has everything you really need. everything else is just legacy stuff that made the whole interface clunky

well thats about all i have for now. lets see what else i fin in the coming days…

so now that i’ve been checking it out for about 5-6 hours… what do i think about it. i kida like it. at first glance its fast (loaded my gmail inbox in under a minute. some said this was an unfair test so i tested it with hotmail and yahoo mail as well. pretty damm good)

the install was super fast. the download it self being only some 450kb or something like that.

very easy import of all my bookmarks and other info from firefox.

when i installed chrome firefox was already running so it prompted me to close the fox before it could import my settings. i wonder if it would have asked me if i did not have it running. ben over at his blog mentioned that it did not ask him but since then updated his post since i mentioned that it did prompt me.. but i wonder.. i will have to re-install and test it out.

i kind of like having the tabs above the address bar. and it it just me or does the tabs look more tab like on chrome?

chrome-tabs

testing it across a few of my fav sites i didnt have any major problem. i did however run into some majoy issues in facebook. with their new redesign them like many other web 2.0 interfaces rely heavily on javascript and sadly alot of their js seemed broken to me in chrome. none of the little comment links in the feeds worked for me.   -  anyone else with this issue?

all of this aside. i still want to install and play around with chrome and the download link IS NOT WORKING. why is this happening to me. the link i have is http://gears.google.com/chrome/eula.html?hl=en (after a feverant google search for the download link)

anyone else having the same problem?

UPDATED: thanks linda for this link  www.google.com/chrome

Have a look at the video

Link to original article

You obviously cannot blow your way to a full tank. That was a complete dramatization of course, but I must say I am excited. Big guns TATA is funding him and he is hoping to get the first few cars out of the production gate by the end of this year. Woo hoo..

I hope the big oil companies don’t try to stop this innovation out of existence.  Enjoy the video after the jump.

Link to the video