Here’s a handy site: TinEye. It’s a reverse image search.
If you’ve got an image on your machine and don’t know where it came from, or you find it online and wonder where the original lives or who uploaded it first, this can help.
I learned about this from Terence Eden, who has a great example on his blog showing how it can be useful…
This is either fascinating, useful, or scary, depending on your point of view.
I’m usually logged in to my Google accounts on all of my devices, because I really appreciate the synchronisation of my history, finishing YouTube videos on one device that I started on another, and so forth.
Subconsciously, we all understand that Google therefore knows a lot about us. But if you go to:
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
you can see it all laid out before you.
For me, amongst other things, it shows things I’ve searched for, YouTube videos I’ve watched, posts on StackExchange, areas I’ve explored on Google maps, and so on. I generally use Safari, but if I were a more regular Chrome user, there would be a great deal more of my online activity listed here. (If you try this, then switch to ‘Item view’ for a blow-by-blow account.)
This timeline is also searchable, which is very useful for the more forgetful amongst us.
Now, if you subscribe to the ‘Big Companies are Bad’ philosophy, especially in light of recent Facebook news, this would be terrifying, though if you’re of that frame of mind you’d probably not log in to accounts on these services anyway, in which case your record will be less detailed, but you’ll use a lot of benefits too. And Google does offer you plenty of control over what they store, how much ads are personalised, etc. And you can delete your record of past activities.
Wherever you come on the paranoia scale, it is worthwhile and educational, I think, to visit such pages from time to time to develop a clearer understanding of what’s being recorded behind the scenes.
Ah, so here’s why my shiny new lawnmower isn’t getting as much use as it might…
Our spaniel is sitting looking out of the patio door, and positively quivering with excitement…
Hope your browser can display this…
On Wednesdays, there’s an interesting group of catering vans that collect at the far end of the West Cambridge campus, and I like to go there for lunch.
But it’s a bit of a distance, and the weather today was bad, so it was important to find the most appropriate method of transportation…
There are some tunes that are so catchy, they stick with you for ages.
I think I heard ‘Everything stops for tea’ about three or four decades ago, and probably only once. But the wonder of modern search engines is that they allow you to go back and renew your acquaintance with the things that formed those neural pathways all that time ago…
In case you’re Googling for it, or in case I forget how to do it…
If you search online, you can can find various articles about how to take an MP3 or AAC audio file and make a .M4R-format file which an iOS device can then use as a ringtone. I’ve had a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan as mine for years, and have probably infuriated and/or amused those around me in equal measure when my phone starts announcing that I am the Captain of the Pinafore…
I lost this, though, in a recent wipe and re-install of my phone, after which I discovered that iTunes no longer makes it at all obvious how to put these custom ringtones onto your device. It’s easy if you buy them on the iTunes store, of course, but otherwise no amount of dragging and dropping would get my old favourites into iTunes or onto my phone.
But it turns out that there is still a way, and it’s documented some way down on this Apple page. As a quick summary:
This works fine for me in iTunes 12.7 – no dragging and dropping needed. You should then see your ringtones, and be able to choose them in Settings > Sounds on the iPhone.
Tilly inspects the recent repairs to her castle walls…
John’s column in the Observer this morning is a good one. Extract:
This doesn’t mean that YouTube’s owner (Google) is hell-bent on furthering extremism of all stripes. It isn’t. All it’s interested in is maximising advertising revenues. And underpinning the implicit logic of its recommender algorithms is evidence that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with – or perhaps to incendiary content in general.
So YouTube (like Facebook) is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it’s embarrassed by the way in which it is being exploited by unsavoury actors (and also possibly worried about the longer-term threat of regulation); on the other hand, its bottom line is improved by increasing “user engagement” – ie, keeping people glued to YouTube.
I’m in a lovely but slightly moist campsite in Norfolk. The climatic conditions are, I must admit, mitigated for us by the simply splendid heating system built into the campervan we’ve rented for a few days. We’re not really ‘roughing it’!
Anyway, inside the facilities block, where I’ve just been doing the washing up, there’s a large motto printed on the wall.
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass.
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.
Yes. Amen to that!
Here’s a photo of snow melting in my front garden this afternoon. It occurs to me that, even without other clues such as the British number plate on my car, you could at least work out from this whether I was in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. Can you see how?
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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