Last year Google introduced the Android Market for Android apps and later Google Music for streaming music. Recently Google added a couple of more products to their catalog and combined them with the Android Market and Google Music. You can stream not only music but also your favorite movies and books from the cloud with Google Play.

Introduction screen for Google Play

With Google Play, you can watch a movie, read a book, or listen to music on multiple platforms. You can access your movies, books and music from any browser with an internet connection. To view movies, books, and listen to music on an Android-based device, you'll need the Play Movies, Play Books, and Music apps from Google.

The main screen for Google Play

Remember that you have to have a Gmail account to gain full access to Google Play. Here's a quote from their site:

Play Anywhere

All your entertainment in one place
Google Play is your one-stop shop for all your favorite entertainment. With over 450,000 apps, millions of songs and books, and thousands of movies, Google Play has something for everyone. Before you decide what you want, sample a song or book for free, view app ratings, reviews, and screenshots, or watch a movie trailer. Google Play is a more connected, powerful experience.

The power of the cloud
How cool would it be if your entertainment was just available anywhere? Now it is. Buy a book on your Android phone and read it on the web at play.google.com. Buy a new album on your Android tablet and listen to it on your desktop at work. Rent a movie online and watch it anywhere on your phone. That’s the beauty of the cloud. You can read, listen and watch all your favorite content anywhere you want. No software required and no wires or syncing needed, and the best part - Google Play cloud is free to use.

Share what you love
Discover, shop, enjoy, and share music, movies, books, and apps anytime, anywhere. When you discover an amazing song, a nail-biting thriller or memorable movie, the first thing you want to do is share it with your friends. On Google Play sharing your favorite entertainment just got easier. You can easily share posts about your favorite books, music, movies, games or apps to your circles on Google+, email, or text message in a single click.

For more information on Google Play, follow the links below.

Google Play

Google Play Features

If you have been following our blog, I have written about creating websites for free with the Microsoft Web Platform. And with creating a website, you need to think about search engine optimization (SEO). One of my favorite free tools for this is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit from Microsoft.

Violation summary inside of the SEO Toolkit

With the SEO Toolkit, you can analyze your website for search engine friendly content. It can check links site-wide, with or without 'noindex' and 'nofollow' tags. It can check page titles, page descriptions, metatags, images, etc. And it breaks down the site analysis report into four (4) categories: violations, content, performance, and links. It's a full-blown website crawler!

Content summary inside of the SEO Toolkit

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is an add-in for Internet Information Services (IIS). The IIS is a website server, and the SEO Toolkit is a website crawler (it only crawls websites hosted on the IIS). If you have installed the Microsoft Web Platform, you have IIS installed. It is also a feature built into Windows but not added by default. Here's a quote from the IIS site:

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which lets you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files.

For more information on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit, follow the links below.

Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Getting Started with the SEO Toolkit

Note: In October 2020, Google shut down the Google Play Music service and recommended users transfer their accounts to YouTube Music. All of the links in this article have been changed to YouTube Music.

Google recently introduced a new music service into its catalog of products called Google Music. With Google Music, you can store all of your music to your account on Google's servers and stream it back to your favorite device. Google Music gives you space for 20,000 songs, which roughly comes out to around 100 gigabytes of storage for free!

My library on the Google Music website

You can access your music from any browser with an internet connection, or you can use the Google Music Android app. There are two ways of getting songs into Google Music. You can download free music or purchase music from the Android Market. Or you can use the Music Manager program from Google to download / upload music to / from your computer. A few of the cool features are Auto Playlists (any song you have Thumbs up'd), Instant Mixes (a quick mix of 25 songs), and Playlists. And with free / purchased music, you can share a listen with your circles on Google+.

The Google Music Manager interface

Music Manager is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. There is one restriction on types of music files; only MP3 format is allowed to be uploaded. And you will need to have the latest version of Flash for the Google Music website. Here's a quote from the website:

Google Music stores all of your music online so that you can save space on your computers and mobile devices and easily access your collection from anywhere you want to listen.

Use Google Music to browse and search your library, easily create playlists, rate your favorite songs, edit song information, and more. Since your music collection is online, you don’t need to worry about syncing these changes across your devices.

Storage

• Android Market purchases - Free and purchased music is automatically saved to your Google Music library and does not count towards your storage limit.
• Your personal collection - You can add up to 20,000 songs to Google Music from your PC, Mac, or Linux computer, free of charge. All you need to do is download a simple desktop application called Music Manager to the computer where you keep your music. Music Manager can upload your iTunes and Windows Media Player library, playlists, playcounts, ratings, and more.

For more information on Google Music, follow the links below:

YouTube Music

Have you ever wanted to try another operating system but did not want to have to erase your drive to do it? Maybe you have an app that will not work on the latest version of Windows? If so, then Oracle VirtualBox may be just what you are looking for.

Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11 running inside of VirtualBoxes

VirtualBox is a virtualization program that allows you to run an operating system (OS) in a Virtual Machine (VM) environment. VMs emulate the most common hardware found in modern computers, including Trusted Platform Module (TPM) ver. 1.2 and 2 (Windows 11 requires TPM v2).

One of my favorite things is to try out different operating systems, like other versions of Linux, including Android-x86 and Wubuntu. I have used VMs for many years now to do just that and have found VirtualBox to be the one I use the most often.

Another thing I use VMs for is running legacy software on older operating systems. I have several programs that will only run on Windows XP, so I have a dedicated Windows XP VM just for these programs.

And you can configure a VM so it appears as a separate computer on your network. You can even map shared network folders and print to network printers. You can even have multiple monitors too.

Windows 11 with dual monitors running inside of a VirtualBox

Creating a new VM is relatively simple, give it a name, select the operating system being installed, and the location of the installation media. You will need to know what amount of memory and disk space the operating system you are installing requires.

When it comes to creating a VM for another OS, it is the same as if you were installing the OS on physical hardware. If the OS you are installing requires a product key, like Windows, you will need it. Usually, when it comes to Windows, you can only use retail product keys, not Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) product keys.

VirtualBox currently runs on Windows 8.1 through Windows 11, Windows Server 2012 through 2022, macOS 10.15 through 12, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS and 22.04, Debian GNU/Linux 10 (Buster) and 11 (Bullseye), Oracle Linux 7, 8 and 9, CentOS/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8 and 9, Fedora 35 and 36, Gentoo Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and 15, openSUSE Leap 15.3 and Oracle Solaris 11.4.

With its flexibility in configuration, multiple monitor support, and support for 64-bit virtual machines (only on 64-bit host operating systems), it's my choice for VM. And did I mention that it's free? For more information on Oracle VirtualBox, follow the link below:

Oracle VirtualBox

With all of the talk nowadays about moving from personal computers to smartphones and tablets, I wondered if I could have the best of both worlds. I wanted to know is if I could run a version of the Android OS on my netbook. Having set up both multi-boot computers and virtual machines, I thought that it might be possible. And with the Android-x86 Project, it is.

Android-x86 opening screen running inside of an Oracle VirtualBox

The Android-x86 Project is an Apache open-source project working on porting the Android operating system to the x86 hardware architecture. It's the same hardware architecture that is in almost all netbooks/laptops and personal computers. They have a couple of different builds for different systems (32-bit, 64-bit, and UEFI), mainly netbooks, laptops, and tablets.

Android-x86 main screen running inside of an Oracle VirtualBox

Android-x86 can be run from a cd, installed into a virtual machine like Oracle's VirtualBox, a USB drive, or your computer's hard drive as the primary operating system. You can even set it up to multi-boot with Windows. Here's a quote from the Android-x86 website:

This is a project to port Android open-source project to x86 platform, formerly known as "patch hosting for android x86 support". The original plan is to host different patches for android x86 support from the open-source community. A few months after we created the project, we found out that we could do much more than just hosting patches. So we decide to create our code base to provide support on different x86 platforms, and set up a git server to host it.

For more information on the Android-x86 Project, follow the links below:

Android-x86 Project - Run Android on Your PC