Tag Archives: geeky

Google Goggles – Search with your camera phone

Google has just released a new service. It is called Google Goggles and it runs on cell phones (not many people know that Google produces a mobile phone operating system).

Basically, you take a picture with your phone and the service gives you information about what you’re looking at. In this example the service recognizes the Golden Gate Bridge and returns information on it.

Google Goggles example

It’s a very early version of the service, but it also works on books, business cards, paintings, logos, and even wine labels! Take a look at the official site to get a better idea.

I’ve read a review of the service and it seems to work reasonably well. Amazing!

It feels a lot like magic! This could also be quite scary. Imagine a day when people can find your Facebook profile by scanning you with their phone!

Birthday graphs

Today is my birthday – an event that is becoming increasingly scary! Quarter century down…

Anyway, graphs always cheer me up so here we go:

From today I am closer to 30 than 20!

From today I am closer to 30 than 20 years old

But I still have 1 year to publish a paper like Einstein’s relativity or 21 years to beat Obama to a presidential nomination!
My age relative to a few other things

We have been using incorrect URLs all this time

I learned a couple of days ago that I was typing in web addresses (URLs) incorrectly. It turns out that there should be a slash (/) at the end of the URL that you enter. When you omit this slash your browser and the server work out the problem – but it takes some time.

This is explained in detail in this article. Here is an example of what is happening:

  1. You ask the server for: http://alistairpott.com
  2. The server says that page doesn’t exist – you mean (note the slash): http://alistairpott.com/
  3. Your browsers says OK and then asks for http://alistairpott.com/
  4. The server sends back the page

It’s not quite this simple (this only applies when you are not referencing a file directly), but the principle is there. You can often see this is happening – go to a site and you will see that once the page is loaded there is a trailing slash in the URL.

Entering the correct address (with a slash) prevents the first 2 steps and can speed things up. How much of a speed up? Probably not much.