Shaun McDonald's Blog » Google

Who said Barcelona was going to be cold?

smsm1986 — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:13:00 +0000

In fact it is rather roasting compared to Edinburgh.

The direct flight with ClickAir was pretty smooth, except for a short time when coming in to land at Barcelona, due to going through a cloud.

Seems that the rumours were true about the iPhone coming to the UK, as reported by Macworld UK. However at £35 per month, I’ll give it a miss until I have some decent income. My current Pay As You Go Sony Ericsson still has plenty of life left in it. It currently takes me about 4 to 8 months to go through £35.

One thing that I found a pain, was the fact that Google suddenly decides to change the language to Spanish (or maybe even Catalan). I found a way around it! All I did was add ?hl=en_GB to the end of the Google URL. UK English not your language, just change en_GB to your own language code.

It has been great to see many of the contributors again from last year. Barcelona seems to be a city to easily get lost in. They too seem to have the tickets that allow you transfer for a period of time after the ticket is first validated. Why isn’t that possible in Scotland?

Picasa Web Albums now supports GeoTagging

smsm1986 — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:58:00 +0000

Picasa Web Albums has now caught up with Flickr and started to properly support GeoTagging of Photos.

I have however found a bug in the iPhoto uploader plugin. Basically if you have used a GPS track to Geo tag your photos, if you compress the photos on upload, then you will lose those Geo Tags.

As a point of note, you need to enable the GPS tag reading as described in the Google Help.

I have posted to the Google Web Albums Google Group to see if any one there has come across the problem too.

My first GeoTagged Google Web Album

Google Maps has new “Avoid Highways” option

smsm1986 — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:26:00 +0000

Google Maps now has a great route planning feature called “avoid highways”. This produces routes that don’t go on to motorways and some trunk routes, such as the Edinburgh City Bypass, where cyclists are not allowed.

It still isn’t perfect for cyclists as it doesn’t allow for some
roads that cyclists are not allowed on. However it is a step in the right direction for route planning for more experienced cyclists who are happy to cycle on main roads rather than the quieter National Cycle Routes.

It also still routes cyclists on some roads that cyclists are banned from using, such as the West Approach Road in Edinburgh.
See example map that shows this problem.

Another problem is where the route planner takes you a much longer way than you would expect. For example Edinburgh to Dundee avoiding highways takes you via the Kincardine Bridge, this is fine if there is high winds and the Forth Road Bridge is closed to high sided vehicles and pedestrians/cyclists. However that is significantly longer than going via the Forth Road Bridge.

Someone has a sense of humour at Google Maps

smsm1986 — Sat, 19 May 2007 07:51:00 +0000

I thought I would checkout how I would get from Edinburgh to the WWDC in San Francisco. Head over to Google Maps, and search from Edinburgh to San Francisco. Take a look at item 41, which is 3,462 miles long.

(Is anyone up for the swim?)

Blogger now auto saves when writing blog posts

smsm1986 — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:58:00 +0000

Google have now added a long needed feature to Blogger Blog post creation. This is auto saving of Blog Posts, which is done pretty much the same way as Google Mail.

This is much better than the old way of saving drafts of blog posts, which meant that on saving the draft you had to go back to the list of blog posts each time you saved. This was painful productivity hindrance.

Blogger Beta

smsm1986 — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:58:00 +0000

For those who read this blog, you will notice that it has changed a little. That’s because I now have the new Blogger Beta, which is much better. I’ll slowly be going through some of my older posts to add some labels to them, so it will be easier to find info.

The all new Google News Archive Search

smsm1986 — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 08:56:00 +0000

The new Google Archive Search is a great tool, with even more potential.

The timeline feature is really neat, though could be more customisable. For example being able to show more articles on one page.

Here’s and example search for all articles related to Mac OpenOffice in timeline form.

Google Labs

smsm1986 — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:26:00 +0000

It would appear from the Google Labs that Google SMS (UK) has graduated from the labs. It used to work. But doesn’t any more!

All you get now is a message which says
“Google SMS is currently not available in the UK. The service is still in beta, and we’re working hard to make it better.

For more information about our mobile services, please see mobile.google.co.uk.”

Then you get redirected to the Google Mobile page. Google mobile is not as good, for many things.

web quotes in Safari UK

smsm1986 — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 16:25:00 +0000

It’s nice to see some more features filtering through to the localised
versions of Google Mail! Today I noticed web quotes at the top of the
mail browser.

Google Spreadsheet doesn’t support OpenDocument

smsm1986 — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:30:00 +0000

It would appear that Google spreadsheet beta doesn’t support the
OpenDocument format for spreadsheets. It kinda surprises me with some
of the things that have been going on in the corporate world.

See more about Google spreadsheet at

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html