Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/19
A solution for:
The problem with Google Now’s predictions though is that sometimes they can be inaccurate from the start or take a little longer to adapt to change. Moved your home? Switched jobs? Went for a month or two to a vacation house? Google Now might stubbornly want to keep your old addresses.
Source: PSA: Manually Assign Any Coordinates As Your Home Or Work Address In Google Maps And Google Now
–jeroen
Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, GoogleNow, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/26
Cool:
Did you know that you could share a link to let people chat with you in Hangouts?
We use these links for certain invites, but they work if you hand build them and share them too.
https://hangouts.google.com/chat/person/ 111111111111Where the number is your profile id
With vanity urls it’s harder to find that, but the easiest way is to use the public api call here https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people/get#try-it.
Put “me” into the userId field and it will output your numerical id in the response.
Enter `id` in the `fields` to limit the JSON
By constructing such an invitation URL you can get people to directly start a Google Hangouts chat with you.
The above steps will give you a lot of JSON output which includes an id field somewhere in the middle. With one more trick you can get just the id field.
You can limit the output by putting
idin the fields to request as the image on the right shows.
Sometimes clicking on G+ posts, you even get the id for free, I’m just not sure under what circumstances G+ builds a G+ URL with username or with id.
–jeroen
Source: We have made a number of changes internally to Hangouts…
via:
Posted in Google, GoogleHangouts, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/19
Google Privacy settings van be changed from A privacy reminder from Google.
Posted in Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/08
I’m not yet sure what the exact cause is, but at irregular intervals when clicking on Google Plus links, they show as “403. That’s an error.”.
They appear both when I have multiple WAN connections or a single WAN connection, which leads me to suspect that G+ doesn’t cope well when
In a future post, I will explain how I created the workaround, but here it is:
Basically it translates links
The latter was the original link I clicked in the first place. The former what G+ comes up with.
After a while, G+ comes back to its senses and allows the latter links again, so the page allows you to parse the former then put them in a list like this:
One decoded URL per list-item.
Posted in Development, G+: GooglePlus, gist, GitHub, Google, Power User, rawgit, SocialMedia, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/04
Just so you know:
Yann Penduff said: …
I’ve read reports that it seems to take 2 or + weeks for the 1TB promotion to take effect.
Source: Local Guide – Level 4 (1TB on Google Drive) – Google Product Forums
In practice it’s usually not that bad as most of the times it’s a matter of days not weeks though it can take up to 5 weeks.
It’s nice to be a Google Local Guide as you learn a lot of new things and people that way for instance through the Local Guide events.
If you’re interested, read Level 0-4 in 40 days, what I’ve learned from Google Local Guides – Pocketables
I only discovered about this a while ago as it was early last year for Google Replacing City Experts with Local Guides Program | Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
What really helps contributing is to view your Google Maps Timeline
–jeroen
Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, Local Guides, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/01
I checked our home using the recently improved Google satellite imagery: from Google Earth you can get better detail than from Google Maps.
You can even count our solar panels and see one is misaligned after a storm (a few days after this image was taken I managed to re-align that panel).
13 PV panels and one hot water panel lowered our energy bills for more than EUR 1000/year.
–jeroen
Posted in About, Google, GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, Personal, Power User, Solar Power | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/06/27
I figured that both gmail and photos take up the largest parts of my Google storage, so I did some cleaning.
You can figure out which part of your Google storage is used by email using https://www.google.com/settings/storage
Still people send huge BMP screenshots to me (probably Microsoft will never learn that pasting clipboard screenshots can be done just as well using PNG format?), so I started searching for mails with large attachments that GMail introduced a while ago:
older_than:1y size:10m
This will include mails of 10 megabyte and larger (so size is a minimum size, not an exact size) that are older than one year.
Then I deleted irrelevant mails notifying the people they should have converted their BMP files to PNG as they take up lots of space on their end as well.
Then storage didn’t decrease, as the messages were still in the trash:
in:trash
Luckily from there, you can empty the trash from there.
–jeroen
Posted in GMail, Google, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/06/24
Add your Hidden Summer Hotspot in Amsterdam and share with other Local Guides. Where to find that small theatre, that cosy restaurant or that hidden museum in remote streets? Created live during the Amsterdam Hotspot Party by Local Guides in the city.
Source: Local Guides Hidden Hotspots Amsterdam
Short: http://g.co/hiddenAmsterdam
–jeroen
Posted in Google, GoogleMaps, LifeHacker, Local Guides, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/06/21
I’m using these Chrome Extensions for most of the http / https call mockups, and after that put them in SoapUI (which despite the name also does REST and has come a long way sinceSource: SoupUI – as sometimes that is the only thing that works):
You can get both Postman versions through GetPostman.com as well.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, ASP.NET, C#, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Chrome, Communications Development, Development, Google, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Power User, REST, Software Development, TCP | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/05/20
First corkboard production server by Google in 1998
Remember the image on the right? It was the first “corkboard” production server Google used in 1998 (it’s a museum piece now).
From there they were using commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux for a “long” time which around 2005 even got their own 12V battery as UPS inside the machine and running 1160 machines in a 1AAA shipping container.
Later whey started using a mix of CPU and GPU increasing the performance per watt and recently went from 12V to 48V and even contributed 48V DC Data Center Rack to Open Compute.
In the mean time, Tensor Flow and AI got even more important for Google and during the Google I/O 2016 keynote, they revealed yet another step: TPU chips especially made for TensorFlow providing even better performance per watt for machine learning than GPU. The TPUs are not FPGAs (popular for instance when mining BitCoins), but ASICs that perform orders of magnitude better.
So in about 18 years, Google moved from cleverly assembled commodity hardware to highly specialised custom chips.
Exciting times are ahead of us. I’m really looking forward to the next steps.
–jeroen
Sources:
Posted in Cloud, Google, History, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 