Tips, tricks, and thoughts about Google, AdWords, Google Cloud Platform, and all its subsidiaries. Not affiliated with or sponsored by Google.
I love YouTube live streaming for all the interesting information it has. Recently I’ve been watching the Bloomberg Global News channel, located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8PhLsUcFE . They keep up a constant stream of business news and information about the economy.
It’s definitely a channel to bookmark if you’re interested in business, or just want some background talk while coding.
Google shut down Inbox this month, which is disappointing because I LOVED the app. It was a fast way to categorize and mark-as-read huge quantities of email.
For posterity, here is the Inbox iOS app icon and the screen that pops up when you attempt to use the app after the shutdown date:
Today Google made a blog post celebrating the 15th year anniversary of Gmail:
https://blog.google/products/gmail/hitting-send-on-the-next-15-years-of-gmail/ .
When Gmail was first introduced, it was truly revolutionary. Most other email providers offered a handful of MB of total storage. Webmail interfaces were slow, crowded with ads, and were a mess to use. When Gmail was announced, many thought it was an April Fools joke: who would offer 1 GB of storage when that was 2 magnitudes above what most providers offered?
I think what surprises me the most about Gmail is how completely it has won the email market for the past 15 years. An email service is relatively straightforward to implement: the protocols are all open, there’s open source software that can scale reliably; and yet Gmail is the undisputed king of email. Even many corporations use Gmail through G Suite.
Now that Gmail has essentially won the email market, it looks like it is slowly pivoting to become an application delivery platform in itself. Just like how the web pivoted from delivering simple HTML pages to full Single Page Applications (SPA): games, word processors, custom applications – Gmail is doing the same thing. If you look at the original blog post, Google is introducing many new actions with email: reply to a comment post, browsing hotel recommendations, and generally interact with other web sites and services. Gmail will slowly turn into a one-stop shop for all your messaging needs – it’s not too hard to imagine Gmail being able to add items to your todo list, to create posts to be sent to your blog to post, to send texts to friends, etc.
Here’s to another 15 years of Gmail transforming our lives. Thanks for everything.
If you’re an opinionated person, you probably have a lot to say about each restaurant or business you visit.
Suppose I had something to say about Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria, a pizzeria in Orlando, Florida. I would first post to the two major review sites, TripAdvisor and Yelp. For reference, here is the restaurant’s home page:
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/dining/epcot/via-napoli/ . Here is the associated TripAdvisor page and the Yelp page.
If you’re still not done sharing your opinion, the Google Local reviews page could also use your opinion! First, google the name of the restaurant and its rough address (you don’t want to get the wrong restaurant!):
Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria Orlando Florida
In the knowledge pane on the right hand side, you should see an option to post a Google review (see the green arrow I added). You can click the link to open up a new panel of reviews for the restaurant, and add your own as well (see my green arrow in the picture below):
You can also try looking around for other specialty review websites. For example, if I google for Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria reviews, I get the following:
Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria reviews
The third site on the list, AllEars.Net, is a specialty review site focusing on Disney properties. And it allows you to submit reviews (see my green arrow, screenshot below):
So there you have it – 4 separate places to post a review for just one restaurant: Google Local, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and AllEars. If you like to write and have an opinion, that’s plenty of spots to share your thoughts!
As a personal note: I’ve been to this restaurant and it’s great! 5 stars out of 5. I recommend the large pepperoni pizza!
Here’s a short code example using Tweepy to pull a list of following users (users that you follow). consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token and access_token_secret are necessary tokens for authenticating into Twitter.
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
for friend in tweepy.Cursor(api.friends).items(3):
# Extract friend (following) Twitter screen name and user id
friend_screen_name = friend.screen_name
friend_id = friend.id_str
print("Friend screen name & ID: %s - %s" % (friend_screen_name, friend_id))
In computing, an Easter Egg is a hidden trick that an application or web site can do. There are a lot of famous easter eggs buried in various programs, and Google is no exception.
If you have a reasonably modern web browser, search Google for do a barrel roll. The Google screen itself should rotate through 360 degrees in imitation of a barrel roll. Here are some example screenshots of the rotation:
do a barrel roll
If you want to see the barrel roll recorded on video, try this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJ8uy09KkA .
The do a barrel roll phrase was popularized by 4chan, but originated from Star Fox 64, where a major character repeats that phrase to encourage dodging from enemy fire. See Know Your Meme for an explanation or this YouTube video for gameplay footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkJvY96i8w .
If you need to find the GPS coordinates of a certain location, Google Maps makes it easy. First, find the location you want on Google Maps. I’ll use Epcot, Disney World as an example:
Epcot, Disney World
Zoom in on the location you want, then right click and select the “What’s here?” option:
A small gray pointer will appear on the map (I’ve marked it out with an orange arrow in the screenshot below). The GPS coordinates (lat, long) will appear in the little box at the bottom:
As you can see, the small box reads: Orlando / Florida 32836 / 28.375250, -81.549385 . The lat/long coordinates are in the bottom row: 28.375250, -81.549385.
Youtube has so many shortcuts, it’s easy to forget about them. So there’s an easy way to quickly look up all of the available keyboard shortcuts. First, go to a YouTube page (I love Disney’s YouTube channel):
https://www.youtube.com/disney
From there, hold down the [Shift] and [?] keys. The following screens should pop up:
Make sure you read through these keyboard commands, they make it easy to quickly review a YouTube video for information – especially instructional videos!
As I’ve said before, I love collecting samples of error pages, especially when companies take the extra time to personalize or make the error funny.
Perhaps this isn’t an error per se, but I love the image YouTube pops up when its search function can’t find anything relevant to the query:
Suppose you need to find a web page containing a number, but you don’t know the exact number. Enter the Number Range operator. The number range operator looks like this: #..#.
For example, if I wanted to search for content from the Google I/O conventions between Google I/O 2016 and Google I/O 2018, I could search for the following:
google io 2016..2018
As you can see from the videos top bar, I found content from Google IO 2018 (the keynote), and Google IO 2017 (Introduction to Kotlin).
The number range operator works for prices as well. Suppose I wanted to buy a laptop, but my budget is only $550 to $700. Let’s try to find a laptop using Google search:
laptop $550..$700
As you can see from Google’s bolded text, I found multiple laptops within my price range of $550 to $700.