Google – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life Bits 2018 w/41

2018/10/12 by Nalates Urriah

SL Universe is Gone – Sort of… but gone. Actually, the SLUniverse forum redirects you to the Virtualverse site as of October 10. You’ll have to open a new account to use the new site. This is the pages showing when an SLUniverse URL is entered.

Viewer Blocked – There is an Android viewer named IM to Second Life. As of last Friday, the Lindens have denied that viewer access to Second Life™. Seems there were privacy and security issues. Serious enough ones to cause the Lindens to act.

See: Android Viewer “IM to Secondlife” Blocked from Second Life.

Second Life Halloween – Premium members get a new gift this month. See New Premium Gift and the Return of the Haunted Halloween Tour. The announcement also points you to scary places in SL.

How to Search… 12 Tricks

2017/10/02 by Nalates Urriah

I found some things I didn’t know…

If these are new to you, the tips should make it easier to find things.

Now… if they just worked on SL searches… (the site: trick does, but not as handy as I would like.)

360 Video – Google’s Take

2017/04/19 by Nalates Urriah

Google and their YouTube are moving toward 360 video. The site Voices of VR Podcast has an interview with Google reps. See the article: YouTube VR Wants to Find the Next Billion Dollar Genre That Hasn’t Been Created Yet.

This video is from the New York Times, taken in Falluja, Iraq August 2016. It is a 360 video. You can drag the view around as it plays. I think it works amazingly well.

For viewing on my 2D screen it is a bit of a pain. I can’t always tell what the point of the clip is and have to pan around to see what it might be. I suppose in VR with directional sound it would be more… useful? Enjoyable? I think as each scene fades in from black that a direction needs to be set so one is looking at the subject of the clip.

Google Forms and WordPress

2016/04/19 by Nalates Urriah

From time to time I’ve wanted to collect information from readers. I have adopted and discarded various polling plugins. But, they keep changing and being a pain. So, seeing this come through my mail I thought I better take a look.

How to Add Google Forms to Your WordPress Website

Elegant Themes has a tutorial out explaining how to add a Google Form to your blog. They do a good job. The result is pretty much point-click then post a block of text into your post. Easy.

They go on to explain how to use the resulting data collection.

For complex data collection I think this is a good solution. If you want to collect information from users check this out.

Google Computers

2016/03/28 by Nalates Urriah

Ever wonder what Google’s ‘cloud’ farm looks like? Here is a 360° video tour of one installation. Click and drag in the video to rotate the view. I know this works with Google Chrome browser. I am not sure about others.

Some of what they are talking about is outside the frame. You will have to click-drag the view to see what they are talking about.

Gmail Clean Up

2015/07/08 by Nalates Urriah

If you use Gmail as I do, you soon find out that it lacks many of the tools in advanced email applications like Outlook. What you may not know is Gmail has an amazing search feature. This search feature allows one to perform many of the tasks you may think are not possible.

I discovered the hidden features of Gmail Search when I decided to clean out some of 7,000+ emails sitting in my Nalates mailbox. Deleting the 50 or 100 emails displayed per page was looking to be rather tedious.