No Birthday Reminders for People You Don't Know

I made it a habit to add my Google account to "Internet Accounts" in OS X, which also enables me to see calendar events on the notification window when I am on my Mac. Problem is that I get bombarded with birthday reminders for people I do not personally know.

My first shorthand solution was to uncheck "Calendar" from Google Account in the OS X Calendar application.

That solves the problem on Mac, but I am 'still' a Chrome user and see these alerts on Chrome too.

There is a long article on Techcrunch from early 2015 complaining about this issue, but a note at the end that Google was working on a solution. No update after that, but I think Google has fixed it now, and you can stop these alerts at the source :

• Go to google.com/calendar, you should see Birthdays under Calendars
  
• Under My calendars, click on dropdown box to the right of Birthdays and select "Calendar Settings" or "Edit Notifications"
  
  
  
• Select "Contacts only" option next to "Show birthdays from"
  
  

• Hit "Save" at the bottom

Enjoy!

Fixing pepper flash issue(?) on latest chrome

Problem:
 The latest version of Chrome (v22.0.1221.0 - I am on dev-m channel) causes some playback issues with flash videos on my pc. Top part of the video is cut diagonally and keeps on flickering. Here is the link to my bug report.

Screenshot shows how it looks on my screen.

Possible Cause:
The new 'Pepper Flash', result of collaboration between Adobe and Google is supposed to be more secure. Latest release of Chrome has it set as the default flash player on my Windows 7 machines and it seems to be the cause of this issue.

Workaround:
Until a fix is available, disabling Pepper Flash seems to be an easy solution.
In my case, typing chrome://plugins showed that I had 3 Flash plug-ins:

• The new Pepper Flash plug-in
• The built-in Flash plug-in that comes with Chrome
• And the Flash plug-in installed separately for IE and other browsers. 

Clicking the details on the right side of the screen and checking the "disable" link under Pepper Flash seems to have fixed the issue for me.

Note: I still see the same diagonal line if I hover over a link item on the page that would normally overlay a menu, so I am actually not so convinced that this is a PepperFlash issue as I originally suspected. See Chromium discussions for further details (link above).

Never ending Flash Plugin Issues

I've been using Google Chrome since the first day it was available for download and has made it my primary browser at home. It's been causing me some grief when I tried to upload files in gmail for sometime (nothing gets uploaded) and I have opened a case with Google.

My bug report was then merged into another one related to "Flash". Since then, I learned that it's the Adobe Flash Plug-in that's causing the problem. There are several threads, that are still going on for about a month now and it is not clear whether the issue is yet finally fixed.

In a similar case, after I upgraded several Macs to OS X 10.6.7 and installing Firefox 4, people started to complain. Upon investigation, we found out that Flash plug-in was the culprit and disabling it would fix freezes.

Here are the link on latest flash issues:

• Chrome: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=75627
• Firefox : http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/798754