Christmas Card to Friends from Stephen Fitzgerald on Vimeo.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a Happy Holidays, no matter what your situations are and what the year may have dealt you. Stay safe, believe and may all your wishes be granted.
Just type, “let it snow” in the Google search bar…
Once the screen is frosted, draw on it with your mouse!
via geekologie
The wait seems to be finally over and anyone can now sign up to Google+. I am sure everyone with a Gmail account will give it a try (in fact, you may soon have no choice but to join). As to whether, they will actually use it is another matter. I signed up and to tell you the truth, I’m stuck. Friends, what friends? I mean, seriously (because Google wants us to be serious with our identity, etc.), how many “friends” do you really have? Acquaintances, maybe. Colleagues, sure. Coworkers, business contacts, people you know, but real, actual, friends?
To make it easy to start out with circles, Google has already created the following circles: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following.
With the Internet being what it is, privacy takes on an added and urgent dimension. Anything and everything you type (whether public or private) is available to Google for its use and for said friends to copy and paste for the whole world to read and see. In other words, there ain’t no privacy on the Net and anyone who takes his or her circles too seriously will be disappointed. So, as you venture forth into Google+, be careful who you invite and what private info you share. Don’t put anything online that you are not ready and willing for the whole world to read.
I think I am going to avoid the mistakes I made with Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter: too many people I don’t really know tagged as friends. I’m going to let my circles build up organically, one person at a time. I think.
Interesting article over at AllThingD by Liz Gannes about Google+ and its Real-Name debate. In all the excitement about Google+, she asks if we are not missing something very important about the real-name debate. Why is Google insisting so hard that we use our real name, going so far as to delete accounts that it believes contravene this stipulation? Why is it so important that Google knows who we are? Google+ insists we do not use a nickname and have multiple accounts, but use our real name (though they now permit nicknames, but not multiple accounts). In other words, they want each person to be identified with only one real identity.
Chances are you use Google to search the Web, Gmail to communicate, YouTube for entertainment, etc. Now, imagine each of these search for an item, a person, a celebrity, a street, a company, a term, a movie, every conversation you have on Gmail, every YouTube you watch, every book you buy, every music you download… they are all tagged with your real name (or that one identity that unequivocally points to you). There’s simply no hiding in Google’s brave new world.
Do I, do you, really want Google to know what YouTube video you watched yesterday, what songs you listened to, what sites you visited, which celebrity sets your heart aflutter? Do we really want Google to know that much about us? Forget Facebook. Compared to Google+, FB looks like a kid trying to bully us in the schoolyard.
Ms. Gannes makes some compelling arguments about the whole privacy issue which makes me think: how much privacy are we willing to surrender… and for what? Turkish delight? Will we, like poor Edmund of Narnia fame, be left staring very hard at an empty box afterward? Food for thought.
Read the article at: AllThingD.
From vgodtw
An MIT student working at Google is bringing us a friendlier PC-Smartphone coexistence. Say, you’re rushing to a meeting but need to find where it is located on Google Maps. You bring it up on your PC, find it and rush out. You did not print it and now you’re forced to retype it on your smartphone again.
Not with Deep Shot, the new system designed by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, a graduate student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Google’s Yang Li.
All you now have to do is take a snapshot of your PC’s screen with your smartphone and Deep Shot will recognize the app used on the PC and what exactly you’re looking at. It then uses existing computer vision algorithms to identify the application opened on screen, extracts and transmits the corresponding Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to your smartphone which then opens up the corresponding app and displays the exact screen. Sweet!
Of course, you need to install some code on both PC and smartphone for this handshaking to work seamlessly. And the process is reversible, too, pushing the info on your smartphone back to your computer, say a paper you took some notes of on your smartphone — and which you now want to work on using your computer large screen and much more comfortable keyboard.
source physorg
From Google
How many times have you wanted to use an image to start your search with? Perhaps, you wanted to know the name of someone on the picture, where a product can be bought, where a picture was taken or even who took the picture. Using the well-known adage that a picture is worth 1000 words, now you can do just that courtesy of Google Image Search. Just provide a link or upload your photo and Google will try to find “visually similar images.” By finding the same or similar images, you increase your chance of finding your answer. Thanks, Google!
source photographybay
A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking the Sun’s rays from reaching the Moon. In fact, some rays do reach the Moon, accounting for the ruddy orange glow. It starts at 2:20 p.m. ET and Google is broadcasting it live (June 15, 2011) from 2pm to 6pm. It should last for about 100 minutes. You can view this eclipse on the ground if you’re in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia or Australia.
source wired
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