The Geekorium

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere. - Len Kendall - Don’t ‘like’ this post

The habit of “liking” things on the internet would be difficult to break. But it inspires me a little because it gels with an upcoming experiment I have planned for The Geekorium.

To “like” (or +1) something is the lowest form of interaction you can have with someone’s post, and it saves you from having to put actual thought into your response. I think I’d rather have “likes” on my posts than nothing at all, but I’d certainly appreciate some thoughtful comments more.

Len points out that the “like” button is one-size-fits-all. There’s no way to say “I appreciate you posting this, even if I disagree with the content”. There’s no difference between liking your favourite noodle bar and liking news of your friends newborn son. And with the rise of sponsored posts on Facebook, your “like” on the noodle bar page now puts ads for that noodle bar front and centre above more important things like births, deaths, and marriages of the people I actually care about.

I expect this behaviour is here to stay, but I will try and think a bit harder before liking things in future, and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same too.

Since Google announced they were closing Google Reader down in June, people have been scrambling to find something to use in it’s place. I’m not sure what the rush is, but I was caught up in it too. My replacement of choice is Tiny Tiny RSS because it’s self hosted, meaning I don’t have to rely on any third party for such an important task any more.

This article is not about how to set up TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS). That’s been covered by the official Wiki and Forums. This article is about how to make TTRSS behave somewhat more like Google Reader, so you can jump right back in to reading feeds and not have to learn something new.

First up are the settings you can change straight out of the box. Open Preferences - the link is the first item in the ‘Action’ menu at the top right of the main interface.

Set up the above options as shown. To access ‘Automatically expand articles in combined mode’ you need ‘Show additional preferences’ ticked. ‘Combined feed display’ switches the view from 3-pane view to two-pane.

While you’re in Preferences, click ‘Customize’ under ‘Customize stylesheet’ and paste in the code found in this Gist by Gregory Rickaby to get TTRSS looking a bit more like Google Reader (if that’s your bag).

Mark Waters created a Google Reader Shortcut plugin. Developer fox has already merged it into the software, but if like me you downloaded the version before the plugin was incorporated, you can create a directory called ‘googlereaderkeys’ in the plugin directory, and in that create a file called init.php. Paste the code from Mark’s plugin in that file and save it to your installation. This will enable the familiar j/k keystrokes to navigate feeds and ‘v’ to open them. Alternatively you could get used to the native keystrokes n/p for next/previous. Don’t forget to visit the plugin page and enable this new plugin.

Next up is collapsing expanded articles by clicking on the headings again. Based on fox’s patch, open up the file ‘js/viewfeed.js’ in a text editor.

Beginning at line 1320, replace:

[snippet id=“862”]

with

[snippet id=“863”]

And save it back to your installation.

Things should now look like this:

There are a few more tips around including how to import starred and shared items into TTRSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is a fantastic product that fills the void left by Google Reader. I highly recommend donating too - Andrew Dolgov has been working tirelessly, since the Google Reader announcement, to keep on top of endless support requests.

Got any other tips you’re using?

June 2013: I am no longer using this software myself. This post was written in support of an independent developer who I believe has built a terrific product and released it for free for anyone to use. You’re still free of course to use Tiny Tiny RSS, but I can no longer recommend it. While the developer works hard and is constantly updating and fixing his software, I find his customer service manner to be beyond rude. He’s never been rude to me personally so this isn’t sour grapes, but his forum and other interractions are littered with examples of unnecessary rudeness. If you want good software, and will never need assistance please go ahead and use TTRSS. Personally, I switched from Google Reader to a self-hosted solution so that I wouldn’t need to switch again. However, I’m not convinced that I will able to get help with the product in future without following the developers unwritten rules for support. I’m certain the developer will not miss me. TL;DR Developer is unnecessarily rude and I don’t want to support rude people.

So I’m hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course - the second¹ new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a “hangout” feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I’ve never tried it, so I’m sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.

This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook². It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked³. There was also Wave - but that never made sense to most people⁴. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.

What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined⁵ by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and Wordpress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook - making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now - Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface - but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your “Circles”. You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the “sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally” variety. For example, you create a “Work” circle, a “Family” circle and potentially a “Drunk shenanigans” circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I’ve rarely used it, and I can’t imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there’s the Hangout feature I’ve mentioned above. When you’re online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is “Sparks” - a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you’re interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it’s uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it’s just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it’s fully integrated into everyone’s Google account though - like my mum’s - I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it’s only a matter of time before someone takes that “social” power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information - reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it⁶. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and - because you might not have actually heard of those - Youtube for video.

Google’s plan with Google+ has already started. You can “Plus One” any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result - similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can “Plus One” after you’ve visited - the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you “Like” a video - soon to become “+1” no doubt - this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I’m imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It’s all part of Google’s plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more⁷. It’s a grand vision. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Of course at the moment, it’s all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it’s about is to give it a go. I’ve got some invites if you’d like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.

The decisions Google makes don’t normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/21469363/ The Google Master Plan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers - you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

But then on the other hand:

1. Nothing looks the same as anything else - the interfaces of some products have similar elements, but there’s no universally consistent theme to the products.
2. Google Translate (which is so nicely integrated into Google Reader) is not integrated into Buzz, so all the non-english-speaking people I follow are just so much noise to me.
3. Google Bookmarks (which I used to use a great deal) now houses the annotations you make to Google results (starring results and so on) but
4. Google Chrome doesn’t use Google Bookmarks to store your bookmarks (!?) it uses Google Docs.
5. On top of that, I am yet to be able to actually produce a two-way sync across Chrome at home and at work.

So riddle me this Google: why are some products tightly integrated - inextricably so - while others barely work in ways that would make absolute sense to the user? Normally I can see where you’re going with things - heck, I write a site just about Google Wave - but in these couple of cases, it seems you’re making decisions not based on what’s best for the user, but forging ahead with integration only when it will push a product that you deem worth your time. No one was clamoring for Buzz. They thought it would be nice if Google entered the Social Networking space, but not at the expense of your other products. But users have been asking for years for tighter integration of products that matter to them - translate, bookmarks, the defunct notebook, docs and calendar.

I realise these are all different teams of people. I realise they’re all working as hard as they can on what they’re doing. But Google the Company needs to stop occasionally and say “Maybe we need to focus on fixing and integrating what we already offer before we introduce this new shiny toy”.

Google, you have a lot of excellent products - please pay them some attention occasionally and get them talking to each other.

This might be my next phone…

In about June or July my iPhone contract expires. Looking at the new 4.0 software that won’t run on my 3G phone, and knowing that the next model will be out about then with (hopefully) the newer faster processor and better battery life, I’ll probably be looking to upgrade. The problem is despite loving my iPhone, and what is to come, I abhor that what my iPhone can run is subject to the whims of Apple, and I hate that I’m tied to iTunes in any way.

So this is my wish for all the makers of Android handsets and iPhone/iPad competitors:

Get your shit together by July. Get a decent range of Android competitors out here to Australia by then. Bring your Dell Pads and Smartphones, provide me with some choice! Everyone will get a fair viewing - I’m prepared to sacrifice the money I’ve invested in my iPhone apps if you’ll provide something compelling! The Dell Tablet sounds great - I’d like a bigger screen, but I want only one device to make calls from - so make a bluetooth headset standard kit and I might get one. Or I’ll get a Nexus One, or one of the HTC range. I’m not fussy so much on brands, but I am fussy that the experience be as fun and intuitive as the iPhone. I’m fussy that it not lock me in to software that makes me fume. I’m fussy that it not be a step backwards - that I can surf the net, that I can get some great apps, and that it remains the hub of my communication.

Please think of Australia. You have 4 months max to make this decision difficult for me. If the next iPhone gets here before you get it together, you’ll have blown it for at least another two years. The next iPhone promises to be a cracker. Make yours a cracker too!

{{< youtube v_UyVmITiYQ >}}

Finally got around to watching this. If Google’s Wave takes off (and it will), it will change everything. This is better than email, better than IM, better than a personal wiki. Within months of this going live, we will have a million new ways to communicate. That they’ve made it open source makes it more likely than any other tool to change how we communicate via the web.

I won’t write up what it is, because you either already know, or can read about it at Mashable or Techcrunch

Not really.

Google released a small update yesterday that adds information about recent activity on your Gmail account to the bottom of the Gmail interface.

The new option in the Gmail interface

It also includes a link to further information, including details of IP addresses and methods that have recently been used to access your account. If anyone has accessed your mail in any way, it will be reported here.

Argh! What is that?!

I checked mine the minute it showed up in my inbox, and was shocked to see a bunch of IP addresses listed, when I hadn’t been anywhere near my computer in the last five hours.

In the screenshot, the blurred addresses marked with asterisks are my home computer’s IP address. But there are two addresses there that are listed as having accessed my account through IMAP and “Mobile” access.

I have to admit here that I freaked out for a second. I couldn’t think where or when anyone or anything could access my account. Two addresses - 67.228.171.34 and 67.228.162.43 had snuck into my account and peeked at my stuff!

Let me just say at this point that neither of the addresses I just listed are doing anything wrong. I freaked out for a second. I’m writing this post to help out anyone else who has unidentified addresses accessing their mail.

But lets not get carried away. Before I truly started freaking, I wracked my brains for any other computers I might have set up to access my account, or for any other service I could think that could be using my mail. At this point, nothing came to mind.

Working backwards from what information I had, I ran a “whois” on the addresses.

http://whois.domaintools.com/67.228.171.34

The address belongs to “SoftLayer Technologies Inc.”, and I have no idea who they are, but further down the page I get the last bit of information I need to unravel the “mystery”. Under the “Additional Information” section is this:

network:Organization;I:Xoopit.com 67.228.171.34

And I remember¹ I signed up for Xoopit, a service that searches my mail and finds all the photos and videos therein. Perfectly legitimate (I gave it my password), and totally not malicious. The other service turned out to be Zenbe.com, another free mail service (like Gmail) that has a few other nifty features. I tried it out a few months ago and forgot about it, but it happily kept fetching my mail from my main account all the while.

So, crisis averted. But the experience highlighted a couple of things for me.

1. Don’t be a douche and don’t freak out so easily

2. If you sign up for something that has potential privacy ramifications, write it down or keep a record somewhere so you know what services are accessing what.

3. When you have access to a tool like this² - use it. It only takes a second, and it can be incredibly useful. It reminded me of two services I’d forgotten about, and in future, could save me from a real problem.

Google has been running a “treasurehunt” with unspecified prizes up for grabs for the fastest times to complete the tasks. What it amounts to is four questions spaced over a month, that you can log onto in your own time and attempt to nut out. The questions are randomly generated, but are of a different type each week. The first week was a number/maths problem, the second was a computer/file problem, the third a logic (and slightly computer network) problem. I haven’t seen the final fourth question yet.

I thought I’d jot down how I answered the questions - not my particular answers - as they will be different for other people, but the methods for answering the questions which are the same for each of the four question types.

Please note that I cannot finish the treasure hunt. I got stuck at question four. I wrote up how I did questions one to three before I’d done four and it just seemed like a waste not to post them.

Question 1

Question 1: Robot A robot is located at the top-left corner of a X × Y grid (marked ‘Start’ in the diagram below).

The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked ‘Finish’ in the diagram below).

Note: The grid below is 7x3, and is used to illustrate the problem. It is not drawn to scale.

*Image not to scale.

How many possible unique paths are there?
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

I used to have a book of puzzles and math problems that had a section about just this type of number problem. Unfortunately I could never make sense of it - it used factorials and a fancy equation that told us the answer, but the author never explained how he got the numbers that he plugged into the equation. Fortunately I have Google. With a bit of research I found out from Dr. Math that the formula is:

              n!
C(n,r) = -------------
           r!*(n-r)!

where n is the total number of moves along one path it would take, and r is the number of moves along either axis (accross or down in this example).

The grid size I was given was 66 × 46. Starting in the first square, the robot can move either down or right - and will therefore take 65 moves right and 45 moves down to get to the star-square, regardless of what order he takes them in. That’s a total of 110 moves (down or right), and I can plug those numbers into the formula to get:

               110!
C(110,65) = -------------
            65!*(110-65)!

The problem is, most calculators can’t handle those numbers. The = 110 × 109 × 108 × 107 … etc. This can generate very large numbers very quickly. Asking the Google calculator what the answer is gave me a very large number indeed, and did what most calculators do with these sorts of numbers and freaked out, giving me this answer:

110 ! / 65 = 1.60981337 Ã - 10^31^
<a href=“http://www.google.com/search?q=110!/(65)&hl=en&safe=off”>Google’s unhelpful answer

What I needed was a whole number - a large whole number to put in the answer box. So I went looking for an online calculator that can handle large numbers. I found one built using Javascript, and one that runs in a Java applet. I found the javascript calculator more intuitive and easy to use, but the final step of dividing one huge number by another kept timing out on me, so I switched to the Java one. I used a lot of copy pasting to keep the numbers clear in my head - pasting them into a text document and switching between the two calculators to check and recheck my answer. Eventually, I had a number to paste into the answer box that matched what Google almost told me earlier:

110 ! / 65 ! × 45 ! = 16098133690909086126971454271170

I submitted it and a few minutes later, was told I was correct. A week later I tried question 2.

Question 2

Question 2: Zip Here is a random zip archive for you to download:
GoogleTreasureHunt08_longstringofrandomnumbers.zip

Unzip the archive, then process the resulting files to obtain a numeric result. You’ll be taking the sum of lines from files matching a certain description, and multiplying those sums together to obtain a final result. Note that files have many different extensions, like ‘.pdf’ and ‘.js’, but all are plain text files containing a small number of lines of text.

Sum of line X for all files with path or name containing 999 and ending in .abc
Sum of line Y for all files with path or name containing 000 and ending in .xyz
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.

Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

Where the bold numbers/letters above change randomly from question to question.

I downloaded the zip file provided and extracted it (with paths) to my hard drive. I initially tried to find a way to automatically find the files specified using Windows command line tools, but they are very limited (or I just don’t know where to look). What I was looking for was any file with a ‘.xml’ extension that resided in any folder (even in subfolders) with ‘zzz’ in the name, or that had the filename ‘zzz.xml’. Same again for any file with a ‘.pdf’ extension that had ‘EFG’ in the path. then I had to extract the numbers on the fourth line of all the files I found. Fortunately I have access to unix tools - Cygwin for Windows at work, and linux and mac machines at home. With a bit of “research”, and the unix ‘man’ pages, I strung together a command that would print me a list of numbers.

find . -path *zzz**xml -print0 | xargs -0 -I xxx sed -ne '4{p;q}' xxx

The command works this way:

• find is the command to look through a file list.

• I started in the directory I had extracted the files to, which is why I used . as the search path.

• Then the ‘-path’ switch finds any path that matches the regular expression following it. The expression I used was abc*xyz, where abc is the path code we were supposed to find and xyz is the extension.

• -print0 just outputs the files it finds.

• The files then get piped |

• into the xargs command, which is used to run the sed command on each file in turn.

• The sed command is then given:

  • the -n switch to make sure sed doesn’t edit the file.

  • -e to run the sub-script 4{p;q}, where 4 is the line number to extract, p prints the contents on the line, and q tells the sub-script to quit there, rather than keep going unnecessarily. I’m not sure the -e switch is necessary, but I kept it in from the helpful fellow who suggested it on a forum discussion from 2004 that I can’t find again.

  • xxx to say “use the file you found in the xargs part of the command.

  I’m not sure that my analysis of the sed command is accurate. Please correct me if I’m missing something.

It’s a relatively simple command, but it produces a list of every 4th line in every file that matches the criteria.

There’s probably a unix-hackery way to then get the sum of those numbers, but I just copied and pasted them into an Excel spreadsheet and used the =SUM (A1:A10) to add them all up. Then repeated the process with the next set of criteria and multiplied the two number I got at the end to give me the answer. I did it a second time to produce another answer in a faster time, and waited for Question 3.

Question 3

Question 3: Network Below is a diagram of a computer network. The nodes are hosts on the network, and the lines between them are links. A packet is sent out from host X with a destination of 111.222.333.444. Which nodes does the packet pass through on its way to the destination? (include start and final node in your answer)

And here’s an image of the second question I attempted (click to zoom):

After freaking out a little at how complex it looks I started brushing up on my routing table knowledge. It quickly dawned on me however this puzzle is nothing like a real-world networking problem, and is entirely about logic and following a path.

Again, there’s probably a unix-y way of doing this, maybe a perl script or something that could look through this grid of numbers and trace a path around the diagram. I chose to do it the easy hard my way.

What I’m doing is following the logic of the routing table. At each node you can get only one step closer to the node you want, and each node has instructions for where to send the information next. In this example if I start at the top in row 1 (for node A) I would read this as:

• if I want to get to 203.21.93.108, then go to 203.21.93.108;

• if I want to go to 48.251.60.80 go to 100.5.76.120;

• if I want 8.32.24.0/24 go to 161.212.157.20;

• and if I want to go anywhere else, go to 17.29.203.130.

Of course, you don’t start at node A, you start where you need to start

• in my case node G. I write “G” in the answer box and start.

Finding the starting point: G (in this example), I looked across the columns until I found reference to the end point I was trying to reach: 203.21.93.108. On the table, the second routing table entry in row ‘G’ has “203.21.93.108 => 8.32.24.60”. This means that for the information to get from G to 203.21.93.108, it must first go through the node with the IP address of “8.32.24.60”.

“8.32.24.60” is node “F”, so I write down F in the answer box and keep going.

Node F directs me to “234.129.94.133” which is node “I”, and so on I go. It’s like a numerical choose your own adventure. Without the choice. Or the fun. On occasion, there are nodes that look like the next logical step would be to finish the puzzle, because it is right next to the finishing node, but if the rules don’t tell you to finish, you have to keep going.

Following this to completion gives a string of letters like this: GFIHDCLONAM corresponding to the path taken through the nodes. This gets me through this round and on to question 4.

Question 4

Question 4: Primes
Find the smallest number that can be expressed as
the sum of A consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of B consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of C consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of D consecutive prime numbers,
and is itself a prime number.

For example, 41 is the smallest prime number that can be expressed as
the sum of 3 consecutive primes (11 + 13 + 17 = 41) and
the sum of 6 consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 = 41).

Where A, B, C, and D are uniquely generated for each question.

Question four is here to separate the boys from the men. Unfortunately in terms of maths and programming/scripting - my voice hasn’t dropped. I cannot continue giving any help, and I’ve had to bow out of the hunt. I know I could do the question with the help of the internet, but frankly

• I was only doing it to feel smart…

Anyway - if you’d like a solution to the fourth question you can get it here: Solving Google Treasure Hunt Puzzle 4: Prime Numbers. His solution is particularly good - in that he uses a lot of command line nous to get the job done. A few commenters say they’ve used python/perl/java programs to do it all from scratch, but I love that he uses a bit of unix giggery-pokery to get a useful file that he then just extracts the answers from. He also hasn’t tried the first three questions yet - so I’m not linking to someone who’s gonna show me up with their first three answers!

Have fun.

google_logo by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.

OK, I haven’t Googled it so this game might already exist.

Two or more players - one player does a bit of research (if they need to) and declares some piece of information that the other players must find. Ideally it should be something that will only be found on one page on the net - not common info like you might find on Wikipedia, but rather some small factoid on some obscure website in the outer reaches of the internet.

Then the other players have to craft the perfect search phrase that will produce that page in the top result of a Google search - without using any of the actual words you’re searching for, or any prior knowledge of the page to your advantage. The player’s score decreases with every failed attempt to make it into the top spot.

I can’t think of anyone geeky enough to actually play this with me, so it’s purely hypothetical. And it’d probably need honing and crafting to make it playable. If you’re geeky enough you might also like Googlewhacking or you could check out this online archive of Google games.

Actually, it’s more of a love/frustration relationship. It’s so one-sided.

I’m a big fan of Google. About 3 years ago I realised that working between home and two schools, I’d have a lot of information that I’d need to share around easily. Web 2.0 had just hit its stride and instead of stowing everything I created, wrote or needed on a USB stick, I thought I’d see how much I could get online.

Google at the time was expanding rapidly, and had just added a calendar to its already successful online mail app. A little while later it acquired Writely - which luck would have it I already had an account at. All in all, Google was looking set to be able to take my data online and keep it all together in one big web-app.

Month by month, I’ve been signing up for Google services such as Analytics (my Feedburner account will be integrated soon), Notebook and Groups. As they come out with new products, I evaluate the ones I use elsewhere and ditch them if it’s worth it (sorry Bloglines). The dream of sharing my data between online services is foremost in my mind at these times.

But Google can frustrate me too.

When Google finally released a way to upload photos to Picasaweb, I immediately signed up there as well. I’d never had a Flickr account, despite it being the place to upload your images, preferring to keep my images on my own hosting. When Picasaweb became usable, I thought it might make sense to keep my images there instead, so that when Google chose to integrate it with Docs or GMail I’d be right there in the thick of it.

Well the other day I signed up for a Flickr account anyway. The first reason was because Picasaweb only accepts JPEGs, not PNGs or GIFs (I upload a lot of screenshots, and I usually take them in PNG format). The second reason is that Flickr has a nifty API that some excellent people have used to create a wonderful plug-in that lets you add images to your Wordpress posts in-line as you work - functionality that is sorely missing in Wordpress. No one has made such a beast for Picasaweb.

Which brings me to my biggest two frustrations about Google:\ 1) They offer so much potential but move so damn slowly. I can see the dream of having all my data online and usable, but its just out of reach. Google seems like they’re concentrating on everything BUT the things that I want them to.\ 2) They shroud their projects in secrecy, so I never know if I should wait or give up. I imagine that one day, Picasaweb will do what I wish it would. But it could be tomorrow, in two months time or in ten years. Till then I’ll use Flickr, but only out of necessity, not out of loyalty or because I want Yahoo to have my data¹.

I’d love for Google to share their future product enhancements occasionally. I’d also like to see them offer equivalent functionality to their rivals. And while we’re wishing for stuff - I’d like a way to import my Google Videos into Youtube.

Heh.

While zooming around my old home town of Gladstone, QLD through Google Map’s much improved interface, I came across this from above.

<a title=“Google Maps - Gladstone Reel to Reel” href=“http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=gladstone&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=-23.870386,151.264862&spn=0.00388,0.005397”>The World’s largest reel-to-reel.

It’s gotta be in the Guinness World record books somewhere. I have my crack team of researchers standing by to find it.

I recently discovered another use for Gmail’s ‘convert to html’ feature.

For those of you who weren’t aware, Word and PDF files that you receive in Gmail can be opened in-browser as html files. What this means for you and me is a simple way to open some of these common file-types without needing to download the file and fire up the correct program - simply click ‘Open as HTML’ and you’ve got your file, ready to read in seconds using Google’s conversion.

I was reading Lifehacker’s article on this very feature - Travel tip: Use Gmail as a file viewer, and was reminded of a discovery I made a few weeks back. My ma asked me to recover a seemingly corrupted file for my sister. Their PC wouldn’t open the Word document (an all too common experience) and I was unable to offer much help over the phone. I asked her to send it to me (via my Gmail account) so I might try it on my own computer. When it arrived I remembered the ‘convert to html’ feature and gave it a shot, thinking it couldn’t hurt to try. To my surprise, it worked! Gmail opened the file with no issues.

I tried to open it on my Mac, and it worked - so the story isn’t so amazing - and I’ve since tried other files that haven’t opened.

But you’ve nothing to lose if you have a file that really need to open (and if you haven’t a Mac handy) give Gmail a try - another tool in my file rescue kit!

Oh, and if you want a Gmail account, you can sign up from a text message sent to your mobile - apparently even in Australia now. Or leave a comment and I can hook you up! Check out why Gmail has developed such a huge fan-base.

Ok, originally I thought this was just a goofy co-incidence.

SPAM Recipies!

Gmail’s spam mailbox has spam recipes up the top when you have web clips enabled! I thought it might be just their advertising seeping into inappropriate areas, but now I think they’re actually having a little joke about spam!

I must have the best and latest of everything. This holds true for me as long as my budget holds up. In fact, its less ‘latest and greatest’ and more ‘what people are willing to give me’ most of the time. Not that I’m cheep, just that I’m poor.

Not that it would make much difference I suppose, who wants to pay for stuff you can probably get for free. Take software for example. I’ve found free versions of almost every app I’ve wanted to use. When I first got my computer I spent hours searching online for free software to make the tiniest of jobs simpler or quicker. Because I could.

For about a year I used Safari on my Mac. It was free, it came with Apple’s design and endorsement, and could therefore be trusted to integrate itself into the operating system without hassle. I started subscribing to rss feeds at about the same time that Apple released Tiger, and with it the new improved Safari 2.0. Safari 2.0 had lots of cool stuff I was sure I needed, but couldn’t afford the upgrade to Tiger. Then Safari started crashing. A lot. I tried to fix it but to no avail. I had already tired of Internet Explorer at my all PC workplace and switched to Firefox. I thought, why not do the same at home?

I haven’t looked back (except maybe the once I’ve started Safari by accident using Quicksilver, and I felt a wave of nostalgia for its beautiful brushed metal). Firefox gives me a clean consistant experience between work and home, and allows me to do amazing things like keep my bookmarks in sync (now even easier with Foxmarks). But it got me thinking… How many things can I keep in sync between work and home?

Then I ‘discovered’ Web 2.0… what a find! I can create documents, keep a calendar, write to-do lists, even write screenplays, all from my browser, allowing me to access these things from anywhere. I’ve gone-a-hunting for as many useful sites as I can find. My next post I’ll be listing the best ones I’ve found so far, and the ways I’m using them.