barryhunter's shared items in Google Reader

Make Cookies in 90 Seconds with Your Waffle Iron [MacGyver Tip]

2009-11-06T18:30:00Z

Baking cookies in your oven is fine and all, but if you want to turn out some tasty cookies in a very short time, consider turning to your trusty waffle iron. Turns out you're only 90 seconds away from crispy, chewy, cookie-goodness.

Photo by Fine Living & Martha Stewart

Although your oven will still have its place for making large batches of cookies, using your waffle iron can bake up a cookie in just 90 seconds. It's the perfect solution for previously prepared dough when you just need a quick sugar fix instead of an entire pan hanging around the house to tempt you.

It's a simple process of heating your waffle iron (no matter what shape or size it might be) on high and coating it with a non-stick spray. Using a small cookie scoop or tablespoon, spoon batter into each section of your waffle iron. This will ensure even baking and that all your cookies will finish at the same time. All that's left is to remove them from the heat and chow down!

We ran across the idea on food weblog The Kitchn, and after a little more searching found two tested and approved recipes to try your hand at—one from Martha Stewart and the other from recipe weblog Fine Cooking. If you'd like to see the process in action, you can head over to Martha Stewart for a short video (with a slow load time) to see them made before you go all MacGyver meets Cookie Monster on your own. If you've tried this method before, let's hear how it worked out for you in the comments.

A Fast Way to Bake Cookies: Use a Waffle Iron [The Kitchn]

Don't panic over the secret copyright treaty

2009-11-05T14:54:41Z

OPINION: Secret gatherings of the world's governments are usually the stuff of fevered imaginings, but just one such gathering is this week generating its own fair share of paranoia.

Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Show Just How Much It Knows About you

2009-11-05T10:00:36Z

The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile.

But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.

So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.

If you want more detailed data, it sends you to the particular data repository for that product. And for security purposes it does not create a second database of all the data, it just brings it up in your browser without restoring it server-side.

The Dashboard is only for Google products which require you to sign in with your Google account. It does not include cookie-based data Google collects through DoubleClick ads or other ads. For that, you need to go to the Ad Preference Manager, which has its own issues.

You can see the list of all the products the Dashboard keeps track of below.

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google Geo applications – deteriorating interfaces?

2009-10-22T21:04:20Z

While Google wasn’t the first website to implement slippy maps – maps that are based on tiles, download progressively and allow fairly smooth user interaction – it does deserve the credit for popularising them. The first version of Google Maps was a giant leap in terms of public web mapping applications, as described in our paper about Web Mapping 2.0.

In terms of usability, the slippy map increased the affordability of the map with direct manipulation functionality for panning, clear zoom operating through predefined scales, the use of as much screen assets for the map as possible, and the iconic and simple search box at the top. Though the search wasn’t perfect (see the post about the British Museum test), overall it offered a huge improvement in usability. It is not surprising that it became the most popular web mapping site and the principles of the slippy map are the de facto standard for web mapping interaction.

However, in recent months I couldn’t avoid noticing that the quality of the interface has deteriorated. In an effort to cram more and more functionality (such as the visualisation of the terrain, pictures, or StreetView), ease of use has been scarificed. For example, StreetView uses the icon of a person on top of the zoom scale, which the user is supposed to drag and drop on the map. It is the only such object on the interface, and appears on the zoom scale regardless of whether it is relevant or available. When you see the whole of the UK for example, you are surely not interested in StreetView, and if you are zooming to a place that wasn’t surveyed, the icon greys out after a while. There is some blue tinge to indicate where there is some coverage, but the whole interaction with it is very confusing. It’s not difficult to learn, though.

Even more annoying is that when you zoom to street level on the map, it switches automatically to StreetView, which I found distracting and disorientating.

There are similar issues with Google Earth – compare versions 4 and 5 in terms of ease of use for novice users, and my guess is that most of them will find 4 easier to use. The navigation both above the surface and at surface level is anything but intuitive in version 5. While in version 4 it was clear how to tilt the map, this is not the case in 5.

So maybe I should qualify what I wrote previously. There seems to be a range here, so it is not universally correct to say that the new generation of geographical applications are very usable just because they belong to the class of ‘neogeography’. Maybe, as ‘neogeography’ providers are getting more experienced, they are falling into the trap of adding functionality for the sake of it, and are slowly, but surely, destroying the advantages of their easy-to-use interfaces… I hope not!

How to Make Data Visualization Useful for Color Blind Users

2009-09-24T01:55:47Z

We Are Color Blind [wearecolorblind.com] is an online repository consisting of design patterns and constructive critiques of existing examples for anyone who designs, develops or is in another way involved with creating content for the web.

Interestingly, most of the available content deals with data visualization, ranging from simple design patterns (e.g. Line Graphs, Pie Charts and Status Icons) to the analysis of the color readability of existing visualization examples (e.g. Ben Fry's Visualizing the Major Health Issues, the streamlines used in the Wakoopa reports, or the World Map of Social Networks).

Any visualization designer should feel highly encouraged to at least be aware of the Quick Tips list.

Via Swiss Miss.

Web 2 Preview: DigitalGlobe: The World Is The Index

2009-09-11T18:05:15Z

I had an extraordinary day yesterday, in terms of who I got to talk with. Not only did I meet with several of FM's partners - two Fortune 500 marketers, a major platform partner, and a major blogger - I also got to watch the launch of Ad Stamp and the complete schedule for the Web 2 Summit. But a highlight of the day had to be my chance to steal 30 or so minutes with the founder of DigitalGlobe, Dr. Walter Scott.

Now why was I talking to Dr. Scott? Well, he's presenting at the Web 2 Summit this year, and I get to work with him on how Digital Globe fits into our theme of WebSquared.

In Dr. Scott's case, this task pretty much a layup.

Now, Web 2 is known for in depth interviews with titans of business like GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, or former HP CEO and pending Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina - all of them are coming this year. And it's known for having the stalwarts of the Internet industry represented as well - leaders from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Newscorp, and Microsoft will also be there.

But Web 2 is also known, I hope, for the High Order Bit - the short, mind blowing presentation of a new idea or new data that makes you step back and just say Wow.

To me, that's what happened when I really grokked DigitalGlobe, a company with a billion dollar market cap that successfully went public in the midst of the worst recession since 1931.

What the company does is pretty simple, actually. It sends super expensive satellites into space, and takes high resolution, geographic-data tagged pictures of every square foot of the earth. It then makes these images available to anyone willing to pay* (and sometimes to those who can't but really need the data, as it did with the recent LA fires).

Those images are, of course, digital. And they comprise, to echo my writing about search, nothing less than a database of surface reality, albeit from the point of view of outer space. This reality is objective, factual, and indifferent to politics. It can inform a mind bending number of new use cases. If you think about this database from the point of view of an Internet entrepreneur, well, It could become, to wax into a bit of hyperbole, fuel for a whole new ecosystem of value.

Allow me the use of a metaphor, one with which you are all quite familiar.

So think of search. What is search? Well, search is a database of everything that is worth knowing about on the web. It's made by a crawler that pings web real estate and creates an index/database of what it finds. It's served up as an application through a user interface that takes your queries and matches them to the best results in that database.

Simple, but that simplicity largely fueled Web 2 as we know it.

Now consider a new dataset for search, the dataset owned by DigitalGlobe. The "crawlers" are DigitalGlobe's satellites. The "real estate" being pinged is every square foot of the earth. As with the web, some parts of the world are worth pinging more often than other parts. ("We don't hit Greenland very often," Dr. Scott told me. But during the Olympics, the company took a picture of Beijing *once every 8 seconds.* Imagine if this technology was around during Tiananmen). The data that satellite crawler captures is stored in a vast index/database. And that index is served up as a product through a UI, though in DigitalGlobe's case, the UI is not yet scaled to a mass consumer use like Google.

Wait, check that, it is, in a way. DigitalGlobe provides the imagery you see in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. And while that information is really cool, and provides the foundation for a huge number of interesting applications (and controversy), things get really interesting when you bring two key pillars of search into the equation: Freshness and comprehensiveness.

Freshness is what is sounds like - how often does the crawler check back to the source and see what might have changed? And Comprehensiveness is equally self-describing - but in the case of satellite imagery, it's not so much how *much* of the earth you have in your database (that would be the whole darn thing), but rather, how high the resolution of that data can be.

The data fueling Google and Microsoft's web applications is good, but it's not very fresh, and it's resolution is limited. But that doesn't mean DigitalGlobe doesn't have far fresher data and way better resolution. It does. It just doesn't sell it to Google. (And as I think about the company, I can't help but think Google or Microsoft must be sharpening their pencils, sketching out scenarios for how they might acquire DigitalGlobe. But I get ahead of myself).

Imagine a time when DigitalGlobe's crawlers scale across every square inch of the (interesting bits of the) earth at second-by-second freshness - the way Google's crawlers do for the Web. And imagine a time when the data from this crawl becomes available to all of us, in near real time. Is it possible? Of course it is. You need more satellites, more CPUs, more storage, and some pretty amazing UI and use cases.

Far as I can tell, we have those components already made, just like Google's infrastructure was not so much about its component parts as it was about how they were put to work in the service of a culture changing service.

Is your mind blown yet? Mine is, but then again, that happens a bit more frequently than your average bear, I'll admit.

Back here on earth, I asked Dr. Scott two questions that bear repeating. First, who are DigitalGlobe's largest customers (and how did they use the data)? Far and away, he said, the company's largest customer is the US Government. Why? Well, they buy high resolution data of, say, a particular Afghan village, datestamp yesterday. Then they give that data to soldiers on the ground, who go into that village and ask folks questions like "What were those heavy loads being moved around in the town square by these five men at around noon yesterday?"

Why, might you ask, why doesn't the US use its super secret spy satellites to give ground troops this data? Well, because the information on those spy satellites is classified. It's super secret. But DigitalGlobe's information is commercial, and unclassified. In essence, the US Government uses DigitalGlobe for the same reason it uses FedEx to move military supplies around the world: it's just faster, better, cheaper, and easier.

OK, so there's the answer for why the US Government is such a big customer (and it's not just military, of course. There's NASA, there's NIH, there's Agriculture, you get the picture, no pun intended). What was my second question?

Well, my second question was informed by the concept of search and my rhapsody around the implications of the world as a database. Might DigitalGlobe consider offering a fresh, high-resolution database of its imagery to developers world wide - replete with business rules for commercialization? Imagine the use cases - for the images are not simply images, they are laden with latent meta-data - interpretive data on everything from how crops are growing to how traffic is moving to how governments are treating their citizens.....might DigitalGlobe consider doing such a thing?

"That would be cool," was Dr. Scott's only answer (he is an officer of a public company, after all.)

It sure would be. That would be so WebSquared.

###

*From the company's own product descriptions:

DigitalGlobe’s CitySphereTM product features 60 cm or better orthorectified color imagery for 300 pre-selected cities worldwide. These GIS ready cities are available as off the shelf products and ready for immediate delivery.

With over 37 million km2 of 3 inch to 2 foot resolution color imagery of select American and international markets, DigitalGlobe’s Orthorectified Aerial Imagery is part of our complete offering of the most current high resolution aerial and satellite imagery and the largest library of earth imagery available anywhere. In addition to the largest library of aerial imagery anywhere, we maintain a complete, highly accurate USA basemap at 1 meter resolution or better, with major cities at 6 in to 2 ft resolution.

Turn a Radish into a Power-Up Mushroom in Seconds [Food Hacks]

2009-09-06T15:30:00Z

Why not amuse and charm your party guests by garnishing a few dishes with these easy-to-make Mario-style Power-Up Mushrooms made of radishes? You might not get any extra lives, but there's some serious geek cred in this food hack.

This project is fairly simple. What you'll do is:

Make a shallow cut around the circumference of the radish
Make four cuts from the stem end to the line made by the first cut to create a square base
Trim the base until it is cylindrical
Make some very shallow, circular slices into the "head" portion of the mushroom to create the white spots
Grab some dark food coloring and add eyes to your creation (Or use seaweed as the original creator does!)

Confused? Check out Anna the Red's Bento Factory, a wonderful meal-themed blog for more detailed pictures and instructions, but before you go, tell us: Do you have any geeky or video game themed food hacks? Or perhaps some clever creations to amuse and entertain visitors? Share your tricks and include pictures if you can. Thanks, Jesus!

How to Make a Radish Mushroom [Anna the Red's Bento Factory via GameOvr via BuzzFeed]

Bing Lets You Find Other Domains On an IP

2009-08-17T19:19:37Z

As WebSonic notes in the forum, Microsoft’s search engine Bing has an interesting operator which can tell you different domains hosted on a given IP. First, get the IP of a domain, e.g. by entering example.com into a tool like host2ip. Copy the IP into Bing and precede it with “ip:”, as in ip:123.123.123.123. The search will now show other domains than example.com hosted on the server.

[Thanks WebSonic via Labnol.]

Update: Lokkju comments, “MSN/Live.com has supported this for years – it is just a carry over from live.com search.” [Thanks Lokkju!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Bing Lets You Find Other Domains On an IP | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...

Photo-crashing squirrel

2009-08-13T22:15:26Z

Too cute not to post: Melissa Brandts' photo, featured in NatGeo.

My husband and I were exploring Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park-Canada when we stopped for a timed picture of the two of us. We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intriqued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot! A once in a lifetime moment! We were laughing about this little guy for days!!

Squirrel Portrait, Banff (Via Andrew Hearst)

Do More From Your Browser Address Bar

2009-08-12T17:35:55Z

You are already familiar with quite a few browser address bar shortcuts. For instance, type some text in the address bar of your browser (e.g. apple) , press Ctrl + Enter and the browser will automatically send you to the corresponding .com website (in this case, www.apple.com).

The search and address bar of Google Chrome

Or type in some complex search query (e.g., site:firefox.com internet explorer) in the address bar, hit go and the browser will show results from your default search engine*. The address bar of Google Chrome is even smarter as it can offer live suggestions while you are typing the search query.

Other than these built-in shortcuts, you may also want to know about a couple of URL hacks (a better term would be “address bar commands“) that let you do stuff from the address bar itself - they are pretty easy to remember and don’t require you to install any bookmarklets or add-ons (so you can use them on any computer and even some mobile phones).

1. Capture a screenshot - Go to your browser’s address bar, type aviary.com before the http:// part of the URL and hit Enter. Aviary will immediately capture a full screenshot image of the web page that’s currently open in your browser - here’s an example.

2. Download videos - If you are like to download a YouTube video, just add deturl.com to the URL (see example) and you’ll be able to save the video in either Flash or Quicktime format. This is a pretty useful option for mobile phones that don’t support the flash player but can play Quicktime.

3. Shrink the address - There are about a million URL shortening services out there but if you want to quickly shrink the URL from the address bar itself, try this - just type bit.ly before the URL and it give you the short form on the next screen.

4. Email a web page - If you want to email a link of the current web page to a contact or to your own self, here’s a trick. Just type the mailto command in the address bar and this will compose a new message in your default email program - you can have the URL of the page in either the body of the message or in the subject line itself.

mailto:a@b.com?body=http://google.com/ (a@b.com is the email of your contact)

5. Share or bookmark a web page - If you find the above email command a bit scary, here’s something more simple. Go the address bar of your browser and type smub.it/ just before the URL as in this example. You can then share that page on any social site or even send the link to your friends via email. A perfect option for mobile phones.

6. Who owns that website - If you want to know the email address and other contact details of the owner of a site, the whois record of that site can sometimes help. To view the whois details of the current site, type whois.domaintools.com/ in the address bar (just before the http:// part) and there you have all the information - see example.

7. Send yourself notes - Futz.me is a free service that lets you email text notes, hyperlinks and even images from the right the address bar of your browser.

Go to the address bar, type futzme.com/xyz followed by a space (xyz is your unique username) and anything that’s after the space will be sent to your email address. If you use Futz.me with a URL that points to an image, the image will be sent you via an email attachment or even through MMS (if you are in the US). Thanks Veronica.

8. Mobile friendly web - If you are reading web pages on a mobile phone, you can easily convert the current page into a mobile friendly version by adding http://mopwn.com/ in front of the URL in your address bar as in this example. Internally, the mopwn service will simply forward your request to Google Transcoder but it’s still very handy.

9. When the default is not Google - When you type a search phrase in the address bar of your browser, the query gets executed using the default search engine which is Google in both Firefox and Google Chrome (factory settings).

Now if you are using IE with Bing or have manually changed the default to something else, here’s how you can still query Google from the address bar without changing any of the current settings. Go to the address bar and type gog.is followed by the search terms. For instance, gog.is/digital,inspiration will show Google pages for “Digital Inspiration”.

*if your address bar queries are getting redirected to OpenDNS, here’s a quick fix.

Planes For Google Earth Flight Simulator

2009-08-11T16:39:39Z

Google Earth Community Member 'Amir B' has posted some excellent plane add-ons for the Google Earth Flight Simulator! His clever concept allows you to place animating planes into the 3D view while flying the flight simulator. Turning propellors, smoke from jets, awesome realism. It's really cool! It definitely makes it fun again to fly around in Google Earth. Below I mention tips on how to load and use the planes. But first, here's a video demonstration of what several of his planes look like in action:

Amir's post includes a Zip file with 5 different planes. He gives instructions in his post on how to download, install, and use the planes. Or, you can download and try just one of the planes right here: BF 109 . Once you load a plane you should see it appear in the middle of your screen in Google Earth:

Animation - Turn on the animation by selecting the "Play" button on the time slider. Adjust the animation speed by clicking on the wrench icon in the upper right of the time slider pane and then adjusting the slider.
Enter Flight Simulator - In GE, select "Tools->Enter Flight Simulator" and choose either the F-16 or the SR22 (slower) plane for simulation mode. Then select "Start Flight".
Flight Simulator Tips - Read the GEB flight simulator tips post if you're new to flying in Google Earth. Here is a link to the keyboard shortcuts.

Amir has done a great job implementing this cool add-on to Google Earth's Flight Simulator! Footnote: Amir is also the leader of a an Iranian Alternative Rock band called Mirage Town.

How to spell-check any web site using Firefox

2009-08-10T19:00:00Z

Filed under: Internet, Browsers

Firefox includes a built-in spellchecker that lets you know when you're misspelling words in an email or other text entry box. But what if you want to spellcheck an email that's already been sent or a web site that's already been published? All you need to do is enter a little Javascript code in your URL bar or click this bookmarklet, (which you can drag and drop to your bookmarks toolbar).

Once you've clicked the bookmarklet or copied and pasted the code, Firefox will turn on the spellchecker for the page you're currently on. All the words that are either misspelled or absent from the Firefox dictionary will be highlighted in red. And you can right-click on a word to see suggested spellings or even to "correct" it. Of course, any changes you make won't actually be saved to the web page, and the next time you load the page they'll be gone.

This trick can come in handy for web publishers looking to proofread their pages, or for nitpickers who enjoy pointing out the mistakes we make when we blog in a hurry.

[Thanks Randall!]

How to spell-check any web site using Firefox originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How Do You Pronounce That Placename? (Forvo)

2009-08-07T11:05:32Z

Forvo.com is an amusing site allowing users to upload recordings of how they say names (try Appalachian) around the world and compare it with others (and see everyone on a map). We all have accents, yo!

Google Translate Equilibrium

2009-08-07T11:20:00Z

A fun way to use machine translation services is to start with a text, translate it in a different language and then translate the result in the original language. Translation Party extends this idea by repeating the translation until the text is no longer modified. The service uses Google Translate's API and it translates English texts into Japanese and then back in English.

{ via Waxy Links }

Want to see GMail subjects instead of tons of labels? Hide 'em in labs

2009-08-05T15:00:00Z

Filed under: E-mail, Google

Thanks to GMail on my iPod Touch I've gotten used to a label-free view of my inbox. The actual subjects of the message I receive are much more important to me than seeing how my filters auto-sort things. Let's face it, by now most of you probably know whose messages get labeled as what.

Don't need the multitude of multicoloralism cluttering your inbox? Head over to the labs page and turn on remove labels from subjects.

If you work on a cramped screen at all (hello, netbook users!) you'll likely welcome the change. Instead of subjects getting shoved rudely aside by multiple labels, you'll actually be able to glimpse what new messages are about before opening them.

Labels are great for sorting things, but I'm glad I can now enable a more minimal look for my inbox.

[via Official GMail blog]

Want to see GMail subjects instead of tons of labels? Hide 'em in labs originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New Real Estate Scam

2009-07-29T10:31:44Z

Clever:

Nigerian scammers find homes listed for sale on these public search sites, copy the pictures and listings verbatim, and then post the information onto Craigslist under available housing rentals, without the consent or knowledge of Craigslist, who has been notified.
After the posting is listed, unsuspecting individuals contact the poster, who is Nigerian, for more information on the "rental." The Nigerian scammer will state that they had to leave the country very quickly to do missionary or contract work in Africa and were unable to rent their house before leaving, therefore they have to take care of this remotely. The "homeowner" sends the prospective renter an application and tells them to send them first and last month's rent to the Nigerian scammer via Western Union. The prospective renter is further told If they "qualify," they will send them the keys for their house. Once the money is wired to the scammer, they show up at the house, see the home is actually for sale, are unable to access the property, and their money is gone.

Treehugger's Impressive Subway Maps

2009-07-29T11:32:04Z

Treehugger has a gallery of what they consider to be the world’s most impressive subway maps. (These are the official maps, rather than some third-party iteration.) Via Teresa.

Previously: Review: Transit Maps of the World.

Buy Transit Maps of the World at Amazon.com

Who is copyright for?

2009-07-22T12:33:06Z

Here's Google's senior copyright counsel, William "Patry on Copyright" Patry, with a pithy little zinger about the idea that copyright law is made for creators:

While one hears, constantly, corporate chieftains claiming that they're out there fighting for the creators, we all know that is b.s.: the creators are merely an expense item on a balance sheet, to be reduced as much as possible. We also hear politicians make similar paeans to creators, yet when was the last piece of legislation that was passed that benefited creators at the expense of corporations? When was the last time you heard a government official suggest such a thing?

Barbara Ringer (via Blogzilla)

MapQuest Opens Its Directions Data

2009-07-21T17:46:01Z

You can now bring the power of MapQuest routing to your application, whether it runs on a server or in the browser. The granddaddy of mapping announced a Beta release of a brand new web service for driving directions.

How it works: Through a simple REST-based interface, you pass a from address and a to address. MapQuest will return either XML or JSON with a callback. That means you can parse XML using a server-side language, or plop it right in your JavaScript and inject the content with the DOM.

This means you could, theoretically, have MapQuest directions on top of a Google Map. Nothing in the terms seems to suggest otherwise.

Of course, Google has a directions API of its own, but it only provides results within JavaScript as its own set of objects. By using standard data formats, MapQuest has unshackled driving directions. No longer are they restricted to the browser, which makes it easier for coders to cache or store results.

To use the new feature, you’ll need to have a free developer key, which you’ll pass with every API call. Once you’ve signed up the Beta docs provide a working example directions link.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

MapQuest API Profile, 5 mashups

New Geography Quiz

2009-07-20T23:37:43Z

Test your geographic skills with my latest five-question multiple-choice geography quiz, which I plan to return to this site as a nearly weekly feature once again.