There's been several long threads recently on Google's crappy info-box. Google doesn't want you to leave the Google page, so Google slurps information up and presents you an answer on the Google homepage. Here's what it typically looks like. OK, that's kinda useful. Search for a thing and get the info without clicking through. But there are times when it goes dreadfully wrong. Sometimes it…
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User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden. *sigh* James Whatley (inactive)@WhatleydudeSurprised Loch Ness isn't trending tbqh.❤️ 7💬 0🔁 021:36 - Sat 07 August 2021James Whatley (inactive)@WhatleydudeSearching for Loch…
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I got a student discount to buy a Google Stadia games system for £60. Seemed like pretty good value. But I didn't buy it - because Google refuses to tell me how much their ecosystem costs. Upfront Cost There's nothing on the main Stadia page which says that you need to pay £9/month to get the 4K version of games. Go on, take a look at https://store.google.com/gb/product/stadia?hl=en-GB. It s…
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Google Calendar is one of the cornerstones of G-Suite. Sadly Google don't dedicate enough resources to develop into its full potential. Other than a new icon and forced Google Meet integration, it hasn't had many improvements recently. Leaving it to the community to pick up the pieces. Here's how to get an external calendar integrated with your internal calendar. Why is this useful? I'm…
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Some background reading. Skip if you're familiar with fonts. A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that. Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the Latin letter Capital W, U+20AC is the Euro…
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/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well…
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My colleague was understandably ticked off with me. A week previously, they'd asked me to get something fairly urgent done. I hadn't done it - and all hell was breaking loose. I wasn't being truculent or disobedient. I simply hadn't seen their message. And it was all Google's fault. At work, we use Google's G-Suite. It's a brilliant set of email and document tools. It also contains two…
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tl;dr Google forgot to renew a domain used in their documentation. It was mildly embarrassing for them. And possibly a minor security concern for some new G-Suite domain administrators Background Choosing a good example domain, to use in documentation, is hard. You want something which is obviously an example, so that users understand they have to substitute it for their own details. But…
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Six years ago, I developed Android apps (APKs) which I emailed to myself. When I try to download them from Gmail today, I get this rather annoying error. Anti-virus warning – 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled. Google, in its efforts to protect me from myself, have retroactively blocked certain filetypes from being downloaded. If you try to f…
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Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an animated virtual assistant. I've spoken to several people in Microsoft, and we …
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Another day, another Gmail bug which won't get fixed. The original Android phone - HTC Dream - had 192MB of RAM. The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in a decade. Laptops have also leapt forwards in speed and memory. Sadly, no one on the Gmail team has noticed. It's 2019, and Gmail app users are still seeing the dreaded "[Message Clipped] View entire message"…
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I don't like AMP. I think that Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive. So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don't want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first physical meeting after several exploratory video calls. These are my…
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