CogBlogged Tagged ‘google’

When I first saw (or correctly, when Ninmah sent me the link) Google’s home page today, first reaction, was “nice graphic”- a guitar version of the logo. Then I moved my mouse. The graphic made a noise. OISOME! The logo makes sounds. But wait, there’s more. You can record your sounds at a URL you can share! Woah neo. Like most of you, I then made noise and tweeted it – here is my first song, recorded below as a video: But then I figured out you dont have to strum with your mouse, the keyboard plays things, so I got a little bit farther from Pure Noise — http://goo.gl/doodle/Ocja, though far from Les Paul, for whom today’s logo is made in honor of. And there is more- see from PC Magazine How to Play The Beatles on the Les Paul Google Doodle — there is a strc ture to [...]

By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline. Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines. Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there. Have you found other embedded tools in search results? Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mrphancy I’ve been a few weeks into using Google Chrome, and sorry Old Fox, the shiny metal is looking and feeling good. With Firefox, it was a long running period of spending time I’d rather be browsing waiting for Mac Beachballs to stop spinning, or that pause when a cursor goes into a form field and the fox must be tapping its feet or scratching itself before allowing me to enter anything. The tipping point for me was the direct availability in Google Chrome of most of some 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts. I’m not going hog wild with scripts and extensions, my lean set now includes: Flick CC Attribution Helper my own humble script that adds to any Flickr photo page that is cc licensed, two different cut and past attribution html codes- one for embedding in blog posts (used above) and another just for [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry: BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?” That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford’s Locus Bayou office over the past two [...]

My own Google wave spun through Photoshop As much as I recall being smitten by the original Google Wave Preview video (I watched the whole demo, its still on my iPhone), I’ve felt not more than tiny ripples of interest, and until just a few minutes ago, was curious why I was not feeling the giddy euphoria I see elsewhere. Yes, I am still on my medication (just kidding, the only meds I take are the ones my pancreas stopped making in 1970). Maybe it was the let down of all the anticipating for my golden ticket invite, after barking a lot on twitter, I ended up with about 6 invites. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Witheyes After all that, well, if I was a cliche movie figure, I’d be in bed smoking a cigarette wondering if the invite had been good for her. Over my years in the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Carplips I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly seeing those words. But I am not rolling over. Yet. It all surface, like many things, in the act of doing something else. I left a comment Sunday on someone’s blog about something rather inconsequential, and got an email later asking me if I knew my blog was riddles with spam links. Sure enough, I looked at the source code, and at the bottom, written with CSS to hide the display (but not hide from google) was a long list of every variation of PPC (pill/porn/casino) link one could imagine, maybe 120 of them. It’s [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by voss You would think in an advanced electronic era that has brought us tools to broadcast our breakfast dilemmas and make our rock and roll dreams come alive that we might perhaps… maybe… improve the collection of information via @$#%#ing paper forms. There is no excuse for wasting my time with bad forms. I am putting my paw down on these offenses: Badly Designed Paper Forms My handwriting is already bad enough for me to masquerade as an MD, but forms that do not allow appropriate space, ones that have me repeat information already entered, or request information hardly relevant is a huge waste. My time is wasted chicken scratching in tiny boxes and some poor staff person’s time is wasted trying to interpret what I wrote and re-enter it into some computer system. Fax Me That Electronic Form I find alot of forms [...]

cc licensed flickr photo modified by one shared by alexik Don’t belittle me for not knowing how the great Google Machine works, but I am feeling like someone took my piece of pie. For more than a year, at NMC we’ve been running Google Apps Enterprise Edition for Education. I am more than happy not running desktop mail applications, we have the office sharing calendars and doing collaborative work in docs. That’s great. Yet, I am baffled why in this Enterprise Application package, we are missing a key tool for collaboration- Google Groups. Along with Maps and Google Reader, it requires us to keep an “out of enterprise” account open at Google to use these orphaned services. Where it gets really goofy, and twisted, is that for many of its own services, Google runs support through Google Groups- so to get help for Enterprise Apps, I have to access this [...]

I’ve done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, but for a few NMC projects, it made sense as a way for a staff person to update data on our web pages w/o having to touch the pages. As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell [...]

I admit it. I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a “Feed Reader”. Me and 3 other holdouts. Go ahead, call me a throw back. Recently, in using Google Reader, I am seeing signs that the Great Google is subtly slipping in more social network features, that have me wondering if Google is becoming more like Facebook is becoming more like Twitter? Is the bird wagging the Goog? Blog experimentation notice- I am trying the Lightbox 2 plugin switched to z-Lightview to embed images… clicking will load in an overlay to see full size… if it works. Oddly enough, we have the most unlikely technology prognosticator, Conan O’Brien, to credit for peeking ahead to YouTwitFace and oddly enough, despite the Google -YouTube Connection; the Big G is not part of the acronym. But they are doing things in the space, all of which may [...]