I’m pretty close to what you’d define as a Google fan boy. I did a whole assignment on them for Business Studies in high school and think they’re pretty amazing. Seeing one of their offices has a slide and firemans pole… pretty much sold me. At the same time, I’ve been pretty sceptical of some of their products. When Chrome came out at first, I didn’t really see the appeal and stuck with Firefox. Now I’ve seen how fast and clean Chrome is, it’s been hard to resist using it as my main browser. I did love Gmail the first time I tried it though. Never looked back.

When I first heard of Google+ and what it was, I had serious doubts it would get far. They’d already tried Google Buzz and to be honest… Facebook and Twitter are hard to take out of the captain’s chair. It’ll take a bit of a strong mutiny. Google need to really shake up the crew.

My artist's representation of what I see in my mind.

After using it for a few days, here are my thoughts. Overall, I’m really impressed and see a LOT of potential here. Is it love? Not yet. Maybe a small crush.

You’re able to edit posts you make
Really simple… but so useful. There’ve been so many times i’ve posted something on facebook or twitter and wanted to update it. Deleting it and redoing it is a massive pain.

Posting to one person in particular… bit weird
Posting a message to someone in particular is a bit weird… you post an update like you would to everyone but set it only to be visible to them. Hard to ensure they see it if they have lots of contacts? I worry that with a lot of contacts and messages in someone’s stream, if Google doesn’t have a special way to arrange these my messages will go unnoticed. It’s also hard to tell that they’re just for you and not the whole world.

Notifications in the top bar
These are brilliant. If someone follows me, or responds to something I’ve posted in Google+, I can respond in Gmail (or other Google sites) without needing to go to Google+ itself. I just click the notification and it brings up a popup where I can respond to a message or add someone as a friend. As an active Gmail user… this is one of my favourite features of Google+.

Nice combination of Facebook and Twitter
Google+ does seem to be a really well thought out combination of Facebook and Twitter. Following updates from celebrities, news sources and people who are in areas you are interested in has been really common on Twitter. Ever heard the saying that Twitter is the place you follow people you wish were your friends? To some respect it’s true! Google+ is set up so that you can have different circles of people you follow. As soon as you follow them, you see any public posts they make. Just like Twitter. At the same time, I can also have private discussions with friends and share photos with them like I would on Facebook.

Great emerging artist and photographer culture
Sharing artwork (e.g. sketches, photography, comics) on Google+ works really well. When you upload an image to Facebook, they appear in your friend’s feed but they appear as small thumbnails. On Twitter, you can’t see thumbnails at all and the process is a little bit more complicated, requiring third party services. On Google+, images you upload appear as a nicely scaled version in the stream. It even sets up a mini-gallery if you’ve uploaded multiple photos. Artists are already starting to try this out, I’ve even seen it used to upload a whole web comic.

Combine this improved functionality and usability with the fact that anyone can follow you and interact with your posts. Now you’ve got an open service to share your artwork and get feedback. People can follow you and see your latest stuff right in their stream. I’ve personally set up a circle for photographers and another for artists (which i’m using for cartoonists and sketchers). I see their new work in my stream, similar to having followed their blog’s RSS feed but more interactive.

Less cumbersome than Facebook to maintain
Having notifications appear in the notification bar in my Gmail account, responding to messages within the notification popup and being able to add friends into groups within a few clicks makes the service already a lot easier to use across the day than Facebook. It doesn’t really interrupt as much. I don’t get emails telling me someone wants to add me or say something and then have to visit a separate site to post or respond. It just seems a lot cleaner with its integration with Google and Gmail.

Low internet connection is a little unresponsive
While on a 3G net connection Google+ was a little unresponsive. It still worked, just took a bit longer with no real loading bar to say whether it heard me yelling “I want to add someone to a new circle dammit!” within the depths of my mind.

Reposting is getting messy
When people repost something which someone else posted on Google+ (say they really liked a photo a photographer uploaded), if you also follow the person who posted it originally then you see it twice in your feed. Kinda messy. Not to mention if people comment on individual images in a gallery, it pushes those images up higher in the stream. For photographers who’ve posted a lot of images in one gallery, it can look like the photographer is spamming Google+ with all their images… when really people are just commenting on them! Hopefully Google cleans up the feed organisation pretty soon…

Overall?
Overall, I’m liking Google+. It’s the first time in a while where a service has actually made me use Facebook less. I’ve really stopped visiting it much. When I’m bored these days, I’m actually going to Google+. I’m really looking forward to where it develops in the future!

Oh… if you want an invite, I’ve got more to give now

I have found that there is a way to shutdown without installing updates first. It’s just not in the start menu:

1. Close all programs if you haven’t already.
2. Press Alt + F4.
3. Choose the option for shutting down without installing updates and click OK.

There are apparently other ways to change what Windows does but when you just need a quick solution to get your computer off without worrying about waiting for updates, this is my favourite way to do it.

For some reason, this blog won’t let me add the following information to my previous post about paths in Google Earth so I’ve had to add a continuation here in this new post.

Using that data in Google Earth

Remember that question in my other post which asked if you wanted to update the KML Path file? As I said above, if you click “Yes, update” it updates the path you have stored in the clipboard with your path’s distance. Below explains how to use that in Google Earth

1. After the distance is shown, you can go back into Google Earth and go to Edit > Paste:
   

   This pastes in the newly updated path

2. Once you’ve pasted in the path, it’ll appear under your places in Google Earth (the same area your other paths appear in). It appears under the name “KmlFile”. You’ll likely need to expand it out by pressing the + icon next to the “KmlFile” path. As you’ll see, when you expand the view of the path the distance is now visible:
   

   The new path under "KmlFile"

Extra bonus info – using KML files

Alternatively using the Google Earth Path Measurer you can save the text you copied into a file using Notepad or another simple text editing program and save it as a .kml file. From there you click the “Calculate Distance from KML Path File” button instead of the “Calculate Distance from clipboard” button and the same process occurs using the file rather than your clipboard.

The measured path that is updated is instead stored in this .kml file rather than the clipboard and you go to File > Open to open the file rather than pasting the path in.

The explanation is here! According to Firefox’s documentation, it appears there is a “color management” feature which renders these images differently. For some reason this has been set to be the default option from Firefox 3.5. So on Firefox, my background image and the background colour were not matching up.

To change this setting back in Firefox:

1. Type in about:config into the address bar
2. Find “gfx.color_management.mode”
3. Change the value from 2 to 0.
4. Restart Firefox

Before:

With the gfx.color_management.mode still set to 2 (click to see full image)

After:

With the gfx.color_management.mode set to 0 (click to see full image)

How do I fix images so that they display correctly in Firefox 3.5+?

It looks like it might be a PNG issue in Firefox. After a bit of Googling, I came across the following steps:

1. Download TweakPNG from here: http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/
2. Run it and open your image
3. Delete the lines which start with gAMA, cHRM, iCCP and sRGB (these seem to be the chunks of colour profiles which mess up in Firefox)
4. Save and replace your image on your site.

What you’ll need

To change styles on websites using Firefox, you’ll need the following:

• Firefox (duh.)
• Stylish – The Firefox extension which makes all of this possible
• Either a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS
• A basic knowledge of finding elements on a website (do you know what a div is?). I use the Firebug extension for Firefox to find which styles are on different elements I want to change.

Once you have the above prerequisites you can move onto the steps below. If you don’t know HTML or CSS and can’t be bothered learning, you can always use other people’s ready made styles.

How to restyle a website your way!

In my example, we’re going to be changing the boring blue bar on the top of Facebook.

1. Go to the website you’d like to change in Firefox.
2. Get to the page on the site with the element you’d like to change (e.g. if you’re looking to change the blue bar in facebook, login first so that you can see the blue bar).
3. Find the icon at the bottom right of your Firefox window.
4. Click on it, go to “Write New Style”, then to “For thesiteyouwanttochange.com”. Click that.
5. A new window will open which is where you can put your CSS styles. You insert them in the space between @-moz-document domain(“facebook.com”) { and } as i’ve highlighted in the screenshot below:
   
6. So basically, you find what you want to change on the site and put those styles in there. You can click the “Preview” button to see the results. If styles aren’t appearing, try using !important after them to ensure they override the website’s styles. The styles I used for my Facebook example will be at the end of this post
7. When you’re done. Click Save.
   
8. You might need to make your own images (if you’re that dedicated to your changes), for example I had to create my own Facebook coloured images so that they’d match the new coloured background:
   
9. From this point on, as long as you have Stylish enabled on your Firefox, you’ll have your new style in use instead:
   

   Click for the full image

My sample Facebook bar change code

With my styling changes, I basically went through the elements in Facebook’s top bar and changed the background colours, border colours and link colours. I also had to change the images used in things like the Facebook logo and buttons. The code I used to change the Facebook top bar’s colour was:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {
#blueBar {background-color: #ff6600 !important;}
#pageLogo a {background: url('http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/facebookicons.png') no-repeat -21px 0 #ff6600 !important;}
#jewelCase .jewel {border: none !important;}
.jewelToggler {background-image: url('http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/facebookicons.png') !important;}
#jewelRequest:hover, #jewelRequest:focus, #jewelRequest:active, #jewelMail:hover, #jewelMail:focus, #jewelMail:active, #jewelNotif:hover, #jewelNotif:focus, #jewelNotif:active {background-color: #ff6600 !important;}
#headNavOut {background-color: #eeeeee !important; border-color: #b3b3b3 !important;}
#pageNav a {color: #aaaaaa !important;}
.uiSearchInput, #navSearch .uiTypeahead, #navSearch .uiTypeahead .wrap {border-color: #b3b3b3 !important;}
#pageNav a:hover, #pageNav a:focus, #pageNav a:active {background-color: #ccc !important;}
}

Using other people’s styles instead
You don’t need to make your own styles if you don’t want to. You can also go to http://userstyles.org/ and download styles other people have made.

Well then Mr Patrick, have you made any styles for userstyles.org yet?
Funny you should mention that. I’ve made a simplified style for Omegle (the bulky interface annoys me). You can find that here: http://userstyles.org/styles/35854.

My user page on userstyles.org is here – http://userstyles.org/users/59925, if I make any future styles, they’ll appear here

Apologies for the slightly lousy quality of my images, I was using Paint Shop Pro for the screenshots and I think the compression settings were a bit lousy…

My question is – why wouldn’t Softpedia control what advertisements appear on these pages? Wouldn’t these ads negatively affect the user experience on the site? I clicked on one at first while not really paying much attention. I didn’t start the download because I saw the filename and knew it wasn’t right but other less careful or less tech savvy users would be totally confused by this.

Nice and confusingly, the advertisement's download button is bigger than Softpedia's actual download button

Even more confusingly, there are now two download buttons which aren't related to Softpedia at all surrounding the text links the user is supposed to click on.

Surely as a download website, you’d ensure these sorts of advertisements aren’t on your site. I just felt like I had to rant about that. Rant finished

With the internet and social media now allowing the entire world to be connected instantaneously to each other, the delaying of broadcasting television shows overseas seems to have no valid purpose outside of marketing and profit. I can see no difficulties in the digital age involved in sending a new episode of a TV show to networks all around the world in an instant, digital pirates manage it straight after a show has gone to air.

From my understanding, the real reason studios delay each premiere is for marketing purposes. The idea seems to be that while the show can be broadcast globally, the crew behind the show can’t be sent globally to promote it all at once. Understandable but surely unnecessary in the digital age. Promotional campaigns through digital media outlets like Facebook and Twitter can lead to huge success for a show, just look at the amazing success of Glee. Not only does it hit twitter’s trending list quite often but songs from the show appear regularly in iTunes top 10 downloads. Compare this to the negative effects of ignoring social media or working against it – fans of Lost in Australia had to avoid social media and carefully choose what websites they visited to avoid having the ending spoilt before it aired in Australia. Forcing viewers to wait several days just because Channel Seven decided Wednesday would give them the best ratings is disrespectful to all the fans by putting ratings before its loyal viewers.

After the season 4 finale of Dexter in America (which aired before the season had even begun to air in Australia), I almost found out the major twist at the end on Facebook without meaning to. I won’t say how much was revealed but it definitely ruined part of the surprise. After all the work that goes into planning and scripting a series, surely the last thing networks want is to have the ending ruined for international viewers?

It is here which lies a huge part of the problem. Networks want to build buzz, they want people to talk about the show over social media – it builds up a show in amazing ways. However it builds up the show internationally not just locally. They want to do this while at the same time restricting when other viewers around the world can watch the show. It just doesn’t make sense and leads to people getting the shows online rather than through the methods the studio gets paid for. Will there be a need for national copyright restrictions on services like Hulu and American TV network websites if all viewers are seeing your show within about a day or so of its initial broadcast?

Why not open up these restrictive broadcasting borders, allow your shows to be marketed to the world as the internet and social media are already doing and make things easier for everyone?

Here’s a step by step guide to marking out a path and then measuring it:

Creating your path

1. Go to Add > Path
   
   

   Adding a path

2. Enter in a name for your path (you can also add a description)
   
   

   Naming a path

3. Click the “Style, Color” tab and you can also change the colour of your path along with how thick the line is (can be useful when differentiating between paths you’ve created)
   
   

   Setting the path colour and width

4. I like to click OK after this just to make sure those settings are saved.
   
   

   Clicking OK!

Marking out your path

1. To mark out your path, you need to open that path property window again. To do this, go to the list of “My Places” on the left hand side and find your path:
   
   

   Finding the path you've created

2. Right click your path and go to “Properties”:
   
   

   Getting back to the properties window

3. This will bring up the properties window which appeared when you first created your path. Move this window away from the map (so you can see it and mark out spots) but don’t close that properties window. To mark out your path:
   1. Click on areas of the map to plot out your path (the latest bit of the path will appear as a blue dot, earlier parts of your path will appear as a red dot)
   2. To remove part of your path if you make a mistake, make sure the spot you want to remove is appearing as a blue dot (if it isn’t click the red dot to make it blue – this is the currently editable spot). Right click it now it is a blue dot and it will be removed. If you right click on a red dot, it will remove the dot marked blue, so you have to make sure the dot you want to remove is selected and blue (confused the crap out of me for a few moments)!
   3. Once you are done, click OK on the properties menu to save the path.

Measuring your path (updated on 7th September 2010)

Okay, so you’ve marked out your path and have it saved. The fun step now is to measure this path! Google Earth does not seem to measure it on its own but there is a program which can measure it for you.

1. Right click on your path and choose Copy.
   
   

   Copying your path details

2. Download the “Google Earth Path Measurer” here and install it.
3. Run the program and first check whether or not the right units are selected (I don’t use miles, so I needed to change it to kilometers):
   
   

   Choosing kilometres using the radio button

4. Click “Calculate distance from clipboard” to take the path you copied earlier and use it in the program:
   
   

   Clicking calculate distance from clipboard

5. The program will ask if you would like to update the KML file. If you say yes, it will update what you have copied so that it contains the distance as well. This is useful for putting back into Google Earth (see my article about how to do that here). Just click “Yes, update” and continue:
   
   

   Updates the path you have stored with its distance

6. The program will then display your path’s distance:
   
   

   The distance is shown next to your path's name

I’ve got information on how to put these measured paths back into Google Earth in this new post – http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/2010/09/putting-a-measured-path-back-into-google-earth/

Hope that helps!

A lesson for all - computers hate you. (Click image for full size)

Technology does like to mess up on you at the worst possible time. The lesson here is: be ready to have to live without it at some point!

The Coles here actually was doing quite well with what looked like all actual registers manned by a employee. My wait time was totally non-existent despite it being peak hour. Very good job Coles!

I generally think these self serve machines are a good idea, apart from the fact it seems like everything in the store is still the same price. Why am I paying the same amount of money while having to serve myself? Surely everyone who uses the self serve checkout should get a slight discount.

I’ll use movies as an example. Imagine you’ve just bought a new movie. You think it’s a great movie and lend it to your friends. They watch it and give it back when they’re done. Having purchased the movie, you’ve generally got the right to do this. It’s your DVD and you have the right to share it with others. After watching the movie, a few of your friends buy a copy or tell their friends who buy a copy or rent it at a video store. It works out well for all parties.

Isn’t borrowing a movie from a friend the same as downloading it off the internet? I still haven’t paid for it.
Personally, I don’t see it as the same thing at all. It is like saying two brothers who get into a fight is the same as World War 2. Sharing digital media on the internet is free distribution on a global scale. When you download a movie off the internet, you aren’t borrowing it, you are receiving your own copy with no idea of where it came from originally. Lending a movie to a few friends is different to duplicating this movie for anyone who wants it around the world.

What if I delete it straight after I watch it?
Sure it’s slightly better than a collection of pirated movies but it’s not without its issues. How much money did everyone involved in that movie get from the 3000 people who all just watched a copied version of one purchased DVD? Even still, how much money did they recieve when the first person who uploaded the DVD didn’t actually purchase it but stole it from a pre release version of the movie which only producers are supposed to have?

The movie studios make enough money, what does it matter if I download a movie or two? They shouldn’t make it so expensive.
Firstly, how do you know how much money each movie studio makes? Some smaller studios in Australia need to rely on government grants just to produce a TV series. Surely all that money they made from previous series would be plenty to fund the next one right? Well apparently not just as Roy Billing, one of the actors from Underbelly points out here,

“contrary to popular belief, actors are not all earning millions. Some of us do very well, some of us just eke out a living — same as in every job. But, like the life cycle of a movie, our income has many streams, unlike an average job where you get paid one wage for the job done. Those extra income streams from the movie or TV show’s initial release to DVD sales or online distribution, make the difference between working for peanuts or getting a fair whack for what we do.

Similarly the production companies that employ us rely on those income streams to make a profit, which can then be channelled back into other productions.”

So do you decide which movies you download based upon the wealth of the movie studio and/or actors? Or do you use the wealthy studios excuse for all downloaded films? (I would like to point out I don’t agree completely with Mr Billing, he believes ISPs should be held liable for illegal downloads, I don’t believe that but that’s a topic for another blog.)

Sure – some movie/tv/music/game studios charge too much or keep too much of the profits, but why does that make getting their work for free okay? How does that help actors and artists? Punishing the whole team for the wrongdoings of their bosses? What if the actors’ payslips relied on DVD purchases? Would you go into a top range clothing store and steal just because you disagreed with the prices set by management?

I don’t see the morality in taking something for free just because I disagree with how the profits are distributed or because I think they’re earning too much. If a group of people have spent months creating a piece of work for your enjoyment, why not pay them what they ask for and support them continuing their work further?

Is piracy really stealing? I haven’t taken it from anyone really.

I do want to point out that downloading movies isn’t really stealing in the usual sense. Piracy allows you to copy their work while the original is still left in possession of the store/owner. As i’ve pointed out above though, I don’t think this makes it okay.

Imagine you spent months on something, be it building a house, designing a piece of clothing, coming up with a brilliant recipe, inventing something amazing, coming up with a unique marketing strategy for your company, designing and developing a new website… pretty much whatever you can think of which falls into your expertise. Imagine that within days of releasing this piece of work it was copied almost exactly and given out for free to everyone and anyone. How would you feel?

I’m all for free movies, music, games… whatever but only if it is authorised by the artist or creator and if they are happy with what they are recieving in return.

Update: Just came across this article which says that:

“A study into Internet piracy by a Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading.”

I don’t know anything about the validity of this study or how it was conducted but it’s just food for thought.

Note: I’ll likely update and refine this post when I find better ways to explain my thinking. Feel free to discuss your thoughts and suggest ways for me to better explain this all