Google Maps has just added a very nice new feature – terrain view. This isn’t satellite images, but rather it is map-ish terrain views. It’s very pleasing to the eye.
To make room for this new feature, the “hybrid” button has been removed and you now are given a “Show labels” checkbox when viewing in Satellite mode.
For more information, check out the official post on the Google LatLong blog.
Google has just added a feature
that allows you to move the marker for your address to better show exactly where you home (or business) is located.
To do it, just search for your address in Google Maps, click “edit” and then “move marker” and drag the marker to the proper location
This only works in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand for now, but it’s presumed that it’ll be available in other locations eventually. It also requires a Google account, probably so they can keep mischief to a minimum.
I have Verizon Wireless for my cell phone and I’m reasonably happy with them. However, they seem to be having a very hard time figuring out what their rates are.
First was the very amusing story of George Vaccaro, who couldn’t convince Verizon that $0.02 and $0.0002 were actually different numbers.
Now we have a guy that called Verizon 56 times and asked them two simple questions regarding their rates:
1 — What is the data overage rates for the basic 10MB data package for $29.99?
2 — If you get the Core Choice 450 minutes package with unlimited data, what is the data roaming rate in Canada?
Of the 56 reps he talked to, only one
quoted the correct price for both rates and he received a total of 22 unique responses.
Check out the video below for the whole story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdKwRdWocco
For a while now, people have been trying to come up with a good way to be able to see the sky in Google Earth — not the night sky, but the clouds. Over the Google Earth Blog, some interesting workarounds have been used, but they weren’t ideal.
However, with the new weather layer, it’s automatic! Just turn on the “clouds” layer, fly down low, and you’ve got a great looking horizon!
Here is a view from downtown Detroit, with and without the clouds turned on:
It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly an improvement.
All of this weather stuff is great, but it’ll really make the weather overlays on Google Earth Hacks much less useful. 🙂
It’s about time! Google has finally added a weather layer to Google Earth. The layer consists of three sub-layers:
Complete details can be found in a nice write-up in the Google Earth Blog.
As reported in the New York Times (and detailed on Ogle Earth), the new Google mobile platform will run Google Earth!
Stefan seems to cover the big questions that result from the article:
“If it doesn’t say Wood & Fullerton above the door, you’re at the wrong Goodyear.”
That was the tagline of a commercial I heard on the radio yesterday. While I understand where they’re coming from, it seems to put a downer on the Goodyear brand as a whole.
I heard it as “all of the other Goodyear locations suck, but ours is pretty good.” Wouldn’t you want people to think the entire company is great? It sounds to me like they’re competing against themselves, which isn’t a great business plan.
This seems very much to me like churches that are competing for each other’s members. Shouldn’t they really all be on the same team?
points us to a minor update with the Planets Layer in Sky Mode.
From GEB: “These layers use the time slider to show you the positions of the moon and planets in the night sky. The only problem is that the layers only included three months worth of prediction. So, on October 22 they no longer showed future data.”
Oops. 🙂
I was trying to contact some large churches in the Atlanta area to see what they were doing to try to conserve water during the current drought. I used a list from 2005 of “Atlanta’s 25 Largest Places of Worship” (paper copy — not available online).
These are BIG churches. The smallest
budget listed was $2.2 million, with the largest being $23.5 million. There is simply no excuse for some of the bad techniques on these sites.
You’ll notice that some churches show up in multiple lists, while about 1/4 of them had no obvious problems. I’ll admit that I didn’t dig very deep into the sites, as I was just trying to find contact info.
On the list, three of them had an intro that I had to choose to skip. That’s always bad practice:
One church tried to disable my right-click. Not only is that very easy to get around (a simple menu option in Firefox), but it makes the site harder to use. I was looking for contact info, but when I found the e-mail address I wanted, I would have had to type it into gmail instead of copy/paste.
There were quite a few that lost their navigation when JavaScript was disabled. That’s simply inexcusable:
A handful had oversized images on the front of their site — large images that were scaled down using HTML, which results in slow load times and jagged images:
Of the list, only two of them used proper canonicalization (having “site.com” automatically add the www and redirect to “www.site.com”, mostly for search engine purposes). This was especially sad because a lot of them had automatic redirects on the home page to some horrible long URL (“snellvilleumc.org” becomes “http://snellvilleumc.org/templates/cussnellvilleumc/default.asp?id=31612”) and they still didn’t bother to drop in the “www”:
So 23 churches didn’t canonicalize properly. Not a huge deal. Two of them were even worse, though — they don’t load at all without the www!
For the most part, they had pretty bad page titles.
Here’s what I suggest, but there were a lot of “Welcome to blah blah church”. The worst was rumc.com, with the title of “Home Page”. Very useful, thanks.
The last one is an interesting case of multiple URLs. I typed in christtheking-atl.org, which took me to cathedralofchristtheking.org. No problem. Then I noticed that all of the e-mail addresses were “@ctking.com”. I wonder why they don’t redirect there? Turns out that ctking.com doesn’t even load! Very strange.
That’s about it. I could have spent longer digging through all of them, but that took long enough as it was. The other sad thing is that I e-mailed all of these churches over 24 hours ago and I’ve only heard back from three of them. This e-mail is a way to get them favorable coverage on a pretty high-traffic blog (Atlanta Water Shortage), yet most haven’t even bothered to reply.
Have heart, small churches! Big budgets don’t always help.
The Google Earth Blog points us to a few new tutorials about using KML.
The first is all about time animations, including the London Eye and Frank Taylor’s Blue Marble.
The second deals with using KML in the Google Mashup Editor.
The full story in the Google Earth Blog goes into more detail explaining each of those KML articles.