The default action for many is to think “I want to buy this book” and they automatically either buy a physical copy because they love physical books, or they buy an e-book. The default is almost always Kindle and Amazon because of its market dominance.
I was shopping for The Night Train to Lison and I found it for 6 CHF on the Google Play book store, around 8 CHF on the Apple Books store, 19 CHF with Payot, 20 with Buchhaus, or even more, and that’s when I find the book.
Next year all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks. Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.
URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS. Quite quickly Twitter found that sending SMS was too expensive so they abandonned the idea but the shortened URL stuck around.
There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.
Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.
Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast. It renames the files with a chaotically huge number, and then moves files into folders from 0-9 and then from A to F or some similar chaotic mess.
Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?
Since I am planning to downgrade my Google One plan from two terabytes to 200 gigabytes as Kdrive offers me a better deal I took the time to check when, and how easy it would be to downgrade the plan. It’s actually very easy and I have a few months to back things up before downgrading.
In the process I was reminded that Google One originally had one terabyte of storage. They automatically upgraded all those with a one terabyte plan to two terabytes back in 2018 or so. We were getting twice what we paid for.
Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.
I am currently studying the Google IT Support Course. I am familiar with many of the topics and I have used many of the tools discussed. What the course offers, and the reason for which it has so much value, is that fills my knowledge gaps.
One example of this is the TCP/IP model. Until I studied the networking module I never thought about the five layers. I never thought about the complexity of getting packets from one machine on one network to another machine three or more hops across on another network.
Grasshopper is a Google app to teach adults and children about Javascript. It provides people with short, easy to understand modules to get a grasshopper to do things.
The curriculum is divided into seven modules. These are:
So far I have only played with part of the fundamentals course. You don’t need to write much code. You can select which function and variable you want to use, rather than typing lines and lines of code.
Google Arts & Culture is an app that allows people to look at Arts and culture from around the world easily and intuitively. This app allows you to learn more about arts and culture based on your current location as well as by topic, art medium and more. With this app, you can look at 360 images of monuments and locations. You can also zoom into artworks. When we were teenagers we studied the history of art. We looked at artworks in books and in documentaries. We then went to Florence and saw some of these artworks in person. We saw Michelangelo’s Statue of David and more. As children in Europe, we went to Pompei, to the Vatican museums and many other locations. When you walk in the Sistine chapel you see this art in context and you see how large it is. This app, by Google allows you to do the same thing. It allows you to study art from your phone as you commute or as you queue or do other things. In effect it helps to educate and inform us about Art and culture. We are no longer restricted to small pictures in arts books.