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How to transfer naked baby photos to your mom’s computer
December 21, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Sharing photos, documents, video and other files with my family is something I frequently do around the holidays. In particular, I find myself sharing photos of my recent adventures and happenings with my parents.
My Dad is a big photography buff and tech geek (Love you, Dad :) ). Growing up, he always had a nice camera draped around his neck and recently he digitized (scanned) our thousands of family photos and put them onto the home computer. So, we have a stockpile of photos of my basketball games, my sister’s horse shows, naked baby bubble baths, easter egg hunts, trips to the beach, etc.
My Mom is not a tech geek. Recently she told me that she has heard of copy and paste, but doesn’t know how to use it. I recently taught her how to text message and my sister taught her how to book airfare online. However, my mom loves to look at family photos. The easiest way I’ve found to trasnfer photos onto my mom’s computer is by using a USB stick. I hope with the following video, I’ll be able to teach my mom how to transfer photos at any time:
For more videos of Googlers teaching their parents tech, check out
TeachParentsTech.org
.
My mom, me, and dad near Lake Tahoe, CA many summers ago.
Posted by Will Patrick, Enterprise Marketing Team
Holiday tips for Google Calendar
December 20, 2010
The end of the year is such an exciting time – classes are just about over and the holidays are coming. But things can also be a little stressful while you’re wrapping things up. Whether you need to schedule time to study for all your exams or just need to remember to buy a gift for your grandma, here are some Google Calendar features that will help make your life easier for the remainder of 2010.
1. Tasks
Have a lot to remember? Make a
to-do list
! Activate tasks by clicking the Tasks calendar listed under My calendars. You’ll see the Tasks pane expand on the right. Attach a due date to an existing task by clicking the right arrow next to the task, then clicking on the calendar icon to select a date.
2. Event time zones
This new feature
is great if you're traveling for the holidays. Use it to plan events in whatever time zone you’ll be in, or even schedule flights with different departure and arrival time zones.
3. SMS notifications
Get event reminders on the go by setting up SMS notifications. After
registering your mobile phone
, set SMS reminders for individual events within the event page, or create
default SMS notifications
so you won’t miss a thing.
4. Quick Add
If you’re really in a hurry, use
Quick Add
to create events on your calendar. Just click the Quick Add link and type the details of your event (like "Study group at 6PM tomorrow in Gilchrist Hall") and Quick Add will pop the event on your calendar.
5. Background image
This one’s just for fun! Change your calendar background to something festive by first
enabling the Lab
, and then going to Calendar settings to choose your image.
Get started using Google Calendar
to make your life easier over these next few weeks, or check out our
Getting Started Guide
to learn more. Happy holidays!
Posted by Alice Brown, Google Calendar Team
Copying and pasting - not as ubiquitous as you think
December 20, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Copying and pasting definitely would have come in handy back in 1996 when I was typing out college application after college application, one by one, on my (at the time) super sophisticated word processor. Thankfully, my mother split the process up with me and helped me crank out 6 neatly typed applications, with minimal need for White Out.
Fast forward to 2010. I was at home chatting with my mom as she filled out an offer for one of her clients (she’s a real estate agent), when I noticed that she was typing each of her clients’ names, letter by letter, over and over again throughout the form.
And that’s the moment that copying and pasting forever changed her life.
Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
Kids, robots and Android phones
December 17, 2010
There’s no doubt that kids love robots and my son has had an Android phone since he was a toddler. It isn’t until we start pairing them together that something truly special forms—the Cellbot!
People have been connecting smartphones with robots for years and in early 2010 some Googlers started to get involved in their 20% time. We first demoed robots from the
Cellbots.com
community in the
Google booth at ISEF 2010
in May. It was amazing to watch how engaged the kids were with understanding how the robots worked and what technology was used for the Android phones to talk to them (hint:
it’s Bluetooth, WiFi and Google Chat
).
In July we let students from the
CAPE Program
take them for a spin and the kids swarmed around the robots while making up games for them. We also took some Cellbots on tour to
Stanford Engineering’s 11th Annual eDay
with a table of robots for everyone to play with.
Then in October we showed off some of the
20% Robotics Task Force team’s work
to the
Home Brew Robotics Club
. This time we saw children and their parents actively discussing clever ways to pair their own custom built robots to Android phones.
Today we’re proud to have released some great enhancements to App Inventor for Android and open-sourced some Java and Python apps that further this concept, which you can read about
on the Google Code blog
. We encourage students everywhere to explore this technology and for educators to build curriculum around these fun learning tools for all ages.
Posted by Ryan Hickman, Engineering Project Manager
Searching for the sunshine and snow
December 17, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
In the town where I grew up, the average temperature fluctuates from 66°F to 83°F. I remember the weather guy on the local news spending more time telling funny stories than sharing the weather forecast. It wasn’t until I moved away for college, where clear skies could give way to thunderstorms in just minutes, that I learned the real value of quick access to a weather report. That’s also when I taught my mom how to check the weather report right from Google for any location in the world. By just typing “weather 08544” she could easily decide whether or not to call and remind me to bundle up.
Looking at the weather forecast is a great way to stir up nostalgia, prepare for a vacation, or decide what to wear in the morning. Whether you’re hoping for sunshine or snow, cross your fingers and head over to Google.com to search for the weather.
Before I knew why weather forecasts exist
Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager
Sharing holiday greetings with Google Maps
December 16, 2010
The holiday season means spending time with family, seeing friends from home and visiting new places. Along with building a snowman in the backyard, for many students the holiday season brings lots of travel!
It’s fun to plan these holiday trips, and to help you share your plans, we’ve designed holiday cards you can email to friends and family. In addition to choosing a holiday cover and adding a personal message, you can select specific directions, a Street View image, or a place to include on the inside of the card.
Since I grew up in New England, the holidays always make me think of skiing. I can send my friends cards with some
inspiring ski scenes
in Street View, or send
directions to Squaw Valley
for an upcoming ski trip.
I can also send friends and family suggestions for
a restaurant
for a holiday dinner or include directions there.
Thanks to
Christoph Niemann
for inspiration
.
You can spread holiday cheer with these online cards, whether sharing winter imagery in Street View or directions for your travels. Start sending at
googlemapsholidays.appspot.com
. Happy holidays!
Posted by Katie Mandel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps
Find a great place to eat in the neighborhood
December 16, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
For my mom, learning new technology can be pretty overwhelming. Except, of course, when that new technology makes her life easier in a very direct way. (The shopping center really didn’t know what hit it when she got a hold of a bar code scanning app on her mobile phone.)
Since my mom’s a big-time foodie, I thought it’d be perfect to show her how to find great local restaurants using Google Search.
Who knows? Maybe if she finds one she likes, she’ll feel inspired to take her darling son out for a bite to eat (hint, hint, Mom). If you’d like to get more quick videos to help your parents use technology in their everyday lives, check out www.TeachParentsTech.org.
My parents and I at a theme park around 1996. Any guesses as to who was most excited to be there?
Posted by Miles Johnson, Search Marketing Team
Letting everyone do great things with App Inventor
December 15, 2010
Cross-posted from the
Research Blog
In July, we
announced
App Inventor for Android, a
Google Labs
experiment that makes it easier for people to access the capabilities of their Android phone and create apps for their personal use. We were delighted (and honestly a bit overwhelmed!) by the interest that our announcement generated. We were even more delighted to hear the stories of what you were doing with App Inventor. All sorts of people (teachers and students, parents and kids, programming hobbyists and programming newbies) were building Android apps that perfectly fit their needs.
For example, we’ve heard of people building
vocabulary apps
for their children, SMS broadcasting apps for their community events, apps that track their favorite
public transportation routes
and—our favorite—a
marriage proposal app
.
We are so impressed with the great things people have done with App Inventor, we want to allow more people the opportunity to do great things. So we’re excited to announce that App Inventor (beta) is now available in
Labs
to anyone with a
Google account
. To see App Inventor in action, check out this video:
Visit the
App Inventor
home page to get set up and start building your first app. And be sure to share your App Inventor story on the
App Inventor user forum
. Maybe this holiday season you can make a new kind of homemade gift—an app perfectly designed for the recipient’s needs!
Posted by Karen Parker, App Inventor Program Manager
Your desktop background is your palate
December 15, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Last holiday season was the first time that I accumulated enough funds (read: got a “real job” and stopped living on my mother’s account) to purchase a substantial holiday present for the person who gave me life. The gift? A new laptop to replace her archaic machine from the Ninth Circle. Simply gifting someone else’s creation wasn’t enough, though--I wanted to personalize the experience.
My mother’s a hopeless sap: all of her online passwords are variations of her children’s names (please don’t hack her!); she can never find anything in her purse because it’s engorged by our baby pictures; and her visceral reaction to the question “how are you doing?” is “oh, they (my sister and I) are doing quite well!” So to personalize the laptop, my sister engaged her masterful design skills to produce a desktop background of my mother’s Two Wonders of the World: her daughter and son, with a mint green background, no less (her favorite color). When the day arrived, she ecstatically expressed her appreciation for “a real present...finally!”; the real ringer, however, came when she saw the illuminated screen. She was brought to tears.
Your desktop background is more than the tone with which you begin your computing experience; it’s your palate. Make it dynamic and fun, but most importantly, make it you.
I constantly change my desktop background. Here are a few instances:
Commemorate an important event or holiday, like a birthday or a national day
Promote or anticipate a major upcoming event, like a new movie or sports event
Rectify a bad day (or week) with a motivational quote or inspirational figures (a silhouette of Martin Luther King Jr. is a personal favorite)
Demonstrate loyalty to “your side” if you’re part of a rivalry--from sports teams to mobile phone operating systems (e.g. I’ve had an Android army robot before)
Mirror seasonal or environmental changes, such as a snowy background for the holidays or a beach during the summer
My mother and I, when I still listened to her attentively
Posted by Bing Chen, YouTube Partnerships and Platform Marketing
Find results at the right reading level
December 14, 2010
You may have had the experience while searching on Google of finding results that are either too simple or too complex for the task at hand. A
new feature in Advanced Search
lets you display the reading level of results and filter based on level.
To use the new feature, click “Advanced search” next to the search box and make a selection under “Reading level.”
If you choose to “annotate results with reading levels,” you’ll start seeing a handy bar graph showing the range of content for a particular topic at the top of the results page. This way whether you’re looking for a
basic explanation
of the [physics of frisbees] for your first science fair project,
or you’re designing radical new saucers
as part of your college aerospace class, Google can help you find just the right results.
By choosing “show only basic results” or “show only advanced results” you can sometimes find those needle-in-a-haystack pages that speak your language. For example, most results for [
newtonian physics
] are clearly for specialists in the field, but narrow that to the Basic reading level (hint: click on the “Basic” bar chart label), and you might just find something that actually makes sense. This can be particularly help for people who are learning English as a second language.
On the other hand, if you’re doing serious research on a topic with a lot of fluffy content online (eg:
puppies
), you can use the reading level tool to cut through to the more
learned and interesting results
. Who knew there was a scholarly journal of
pop culture
?
The reading level tool might even help you choose a research topic for your next project. Many searches return results that are on one extreme or the other: a lot of rudimentary information or a bunch of pages intended for Ph.D’s. With reading level information, you can get a sense of how much content has been published to the web at an appropriate level.
Posted by Noah Coccaro, Software Engineer
Searching for the right movie
December 14, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
When I head home for the holidays, I most look forward to seeing my family and labradoodles. I know I’ll also be catching up on sleep, reading, and seeing some new movies. While picking up Jane Austen will be an easy decision, figuring out which movies to see will be a tougher choice. My brothers, parents and I will have the inevitable debate between low-brow humor and action options.
When I was home for Thanksgiving, we decided on a movie we wanted to see, only to research showtimes and find that the time didn’t work for everyone. To help your families make the movie selection process easier, I’m sharing some guidance on how you can easily find movie listings and showtimes by searching on Google.com.
While we know this won’t solve all of the comedy versus action movie debates, we hope this will help you find some great movies to watch with your family over the holidays. To see more videos on easy ways to help your parents with technology, visit
www.TeachParentsTech.org
.
When the only movies I watched were cartoons
Posted by Katie Mandel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps
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