1/30 Hangouts

3/9/13 20:37
darkemeralds: Baby picture of DarkEm with title 'Interstellar Losers Club' and caption 'Proud Member' (Geekery)
Gosh, it's the third of September, which makes me three entries behind in my putative Post and Read Every Day In September plan, which I told no one about and only vaguely hinted at to [personal profile] ravurian. I guess it will be make thirty posts in September, a slightly different commitment.

So, thing the first: Google+ Hangouts. Really cool. My sisters and I have been using Hangouts for a few weeks now. We all live in the same town, but getting together in person is a big production number. We're working on manifesting improvements in our lives (me: remodeling), and we like to meet to share our progress. Hangouts work perfectly.

What I like:
  • The interface is reasonably intuitive
  • It's free
  • It easily accommodates several people and switches focus seamlessly to whoever's talking
  • The sound quality is good, and the system eliminates cross-talk and echoes amazingly well
  • You can start a Hangout on your phone, then switch to your tablet or computer, also seamlessly

What I don't like:
  • It's a wee bit glitchy and isn't 100% reliable on all devices and operating systems (yet).
  • It's a bit of a shock seeing myself as if on live TV. But I'm getting used to that. I'm figuring out makeup, lighting and angle.

It would be really cool if the geniuses of technology could figure out one thing: how to make it so that when I'm looking at you on the screen, I look like I'm looking at you. As it is, I have to gaze interestedly into the tiny pinhole front-facing camera on my device in order to look like I'm listening to you--and then I miss the nuances of your expression. Someone get on that, please.
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Dissolution

20/7/11 13:12
darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
Is anyone else trying to re-figure out how to have an online life? Is anyone else feeling that Google+ is cool but how many more social networks do I need? Does anyone else wonder if there's still a place for a journaling site like Dreamwidth and LiveJournal in their life?

I'm finding G+ very homey--more succinct than here, not quite as flighty as Twitter. Less conversational than here, but more interactive than Tumblr. It feels like a comfortable stream of connection.

Of course, it's new. Not many people are on it yet. Everyone's behaving like early guests at a nice party, so it's also much less contentious than here tends to be sometimes. (I have invites, by the way, if anyone wants one.)

Journaling/blogging has been a mostly wonderful experience for me for the past six years or so, but I feel it slipping away as a concept. I hate to let it go, but fighting the flow seems futile. Does anyone else feel that way?
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Google docs weirdness

23/5/10 19:27
darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
Is anyone else having this strange Google Docs behavior where Pg Up and Pg Dn zoom you most of the way through any document, no matter how long it is?

It is EXTREMELY annoying for re-reading and editing.

I've hunted around the help files and issues logs, and I can see that they know about it, but it doesn't seem to be high on anybody's radar, which makes me think it's a peculiarity of my O/S and browser combination or something.

I'm on Ubuntu and using Chrome for Linux. You'd think GoogleDocs would work perfectly in all versions of Chrome, wouldn't you?
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Google Bike Routes

9/3/10 13:15
darkemeralds: Old French poster of bicycle with naked flame-haired woman. (Bike)
I'm hearing rumors in the bike blogosphere today suggesting that Google is about to announce a new GoogleMaps feature: Bike Routes!

Someone from Google has been scheduled last-minute as a speaker at the plenary opening session of League of American Bicyclists annual summit tomorrow.

I've got decent local bike-route mapping already, but if Google takes it on, rumor suggests that it will include things like elevation gain (kind of a crucial cycling consideration), and it will be rolled out nationwide in the US--with UK and Europe rollout coming soon.

It would give a fantastic boost to bike-riding if it's true. Google has had pedestrian route-mapping for quite a while now, and they added public-transit route mapping more recently. Every time anyone goes to map a route, they see those options. It's gotta have a subliminal effect even for people who don't USE those options. "Oh! there are sidewalks and buses!" Now maybe they'll think, "Bike route...hm."*

Google may be the Evil Overlords of the Internet, but this kind of on-the-ground (literally) tool for real people wanting to live sustainably strikes me as a genuine good.

*idea for Google: make "route with fewest bikes" an option for motorists!
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Time for some geekery

11/12/09 16:58
darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
Seems like it's about time for a report from the geek side. I'm on vacation for a couple of days and have been enjoying the balmy just-above-freezing sunshine from the comfort of my sofa, while playing on the internet in between very productive writing sessions.

If you're on a Windows computer and you don't yet use Chrome as your main browser...well, why not? Chrome is made of win, and the only things that don't support it well are boring work-related web apps like the trouble-ticket system that haunts my days at the office.

Lately, Google has introduced Chrome extensions, and I've found two or three of them that I love.

( Cooliris, Feedly, and Gmail Notifier )

Chrome Extensions: my new favorite toy.
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Google is watching

9/9/08 12:50
darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
I've just started using gmail as my regular email address.

Call me naive, but I'm dismayed to discover that it reads your email and advertises to you according to what you communicate about. I mentioned Rebecca Fine, Wallace Wattles, and "The Science of Getting Rich" in passing in an email to [livejournal.com profile] roseambr and here's what the sidebar looked like when I next looked:

( Experimental evidence )

That's just creepy.
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Five Monday Things Make a Monday Post

8/9/08 14:47
darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
*waves at friends from the World's Tallest Basement*

Yay! It's Monday. [/sarcasm]




  1. The secret to losing weight is to eat a whole lot less than you've been eating. The secret to doing that, apparently, is to take it in phases--first give up all crap food* but eat as much as you want of good food** for about six months; then for another six months cut good food consumption back to the caloric levels recommended for your height, build and age by "recognized authorities"; and finally decide that you're gonna have to get used to being hungrier than that because the authorities are wrong--which for me is involving some hypnosis.
  2. Google Chrome does not yet apparently support Windows XP Professional in the NT Server environment. Alas! Because I really like it at home, and I'd like to like it at work.
  3. Dean Winchester really is a very attractive character.
  4. It is a bit of a slog, getting through Battlestar Galactica season 2.0 because of all the dire containing no Leoben.
  5. Working thirteen hour days--news flash--continues to suck***.


*Crap food contains: HCFS or any other kind of corn that isn't actual yellow kernels you can see, MSG in any form (and oh! there are so many forms!), hydrogenated or altered fats, growth hormones, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, artificial flavors, stuff with more than five ingredients--particularly if you're not sure how some of them are pronounced or can't picture them in your head; flesh of animals fed their own kind.

**Good food: Pretty much everything else.

***Although I overslept and came in quite late, so really? More like an 11.5 hour day. Slacker!

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darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
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