I was trying to confirm an address detail using Google street view. Normally, when you move around along a road, the pictures are consistent as they generally come from the same mapping run. This is the 1st time I’ve come across this – two adjacent pictures coming from two different runs, on different days. Note the difference in the weather and how the cars are parked
Tag: geek
when you work with a bunch of geeks
On compliance
Targeted market segment
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Well there goes someone’s productivity for today
Google announced in 2019 that it would be adding augmented reality objects to Search. Google’s AR objects in search are incredibly easy to access. The objects are added to search in the belief that the easiest way to learn about something is to see it. By seeing things in augmented reality (AR), users can see the scale of an object and also details they might not notice from just a simple picture.
To keep this easy to access, Google puts its 3D animals and other AR objects right at the top of search. For example, searching for “tiger” will show a Google Search Knowledge Panel. These panels are often shown for movies, famous celebrities, and other subjects. In the case of a 3D animal through Google, you’ll see an overview of what the animal is, a few images or it, and a section which says “Meet a life-sized tiger up close” and a “View in 3D” button. That button launches the AR experience. You’ll need a supported smartphone to view these objects.
So, what AR animals can you view on Google Search? Technically, there’s no official list from Google for 3D animals, but there’s a number of known examples, many of which we’ve gone hands-on with so you can see how it all works in action.
These include:
Alligator
Angler fish
Brown bear
Cat
Cheetah
Dog
Labrador Retriever
Pug
Rottweiler
Duck
Eagle
Emperor penguin
Giant panda
Goat
Hedgehog
Horse
Lion
Macaw
Octopus
Racoon
Shark
Shetland pony
Snake
Tiger
Turtle
Wolf
Well, that was exciting!
Something changed in the wordpress plugin that I use to create my cookbook ebook from the recipes on my blog. This change exacerbated a known issue, and in the process, completely borked my wordpress installation to the point where the only workable option (besides manually deleting 4910 duplicated, broken media library entries) was to restore from a backup.
The good news is that I keep a rolling month of daily backups. The bad news is that I’d never tested the restore procedure (I know, I know).
Happiness is a working restored backup.
Phone comparison
Must be my accent
Every time – every single time – that I spell my email to someone over the phone in french, they add an ‘A’ at the start of it. Conversation invariably goes like this:
me: mon addresse email est R-G-L-C….
other person: ok, A-R-G-L-C….
me: non, non, il n’y a pas de A
So I got fed up and registered the email address with the typo in it, and now it will automatically forward the wrong email to my correct one, and send an auto-response message:
Brushing off the old coding skills
I’ve been getting warning messages in wordpress for the last couple of weeks about the fact that my hosting account was running an old (!) version of PHP. However, while the upgrade process would be as easy as piss with BlueHost, I needed to make sure that nothing would break in wordpress after the upgrade. Turns out, my blog theme and one plugin would bork after an upgrade – and both are orphaned code projects. It was fairly simple to change the deprecated function calls that would have broken, but it was a fun little exercise and now all is good with the blogosphere.