Google asks, ‘Shall we play a game?’ with hidden Chrome adventure

intro_text adventure.gif

Wanna sleuth your way around a tech giant’s Mountainview campus? Google has embedded this retro text adventure game and all you need is a web browser (and infinite patience) to play.

To launch Google’s text adventure game

  1. Launch your Chrome, Firefox or Edge browser.
  2. Search for ‘text adventure’.
  3. RIGHT+CLICK on the results page and select Inspect
  4. CLICK the Console tab.  The text “Would you like to play a game?” appears.
  5. Enter ‘yes’ at the > prompt

Cheers (with special thanks, to Di, for passing this along)!

quincy
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Group Planning with Google Maps

Google Location Voting

Planning a group outing just got easier.

As part of a recent mobile update you are now able to share a list of places (e.g., restaurants) with your friends and they can vote their preferred meeting place. This should cut down on the volume of email/sms traffic it takes for a group to pick a watering hole.

Just create a list, then share it; your friends will be taken right to Google Maps mobile, where they will be able to cast their vote 👍👎 on proposed venues. They can even add additional locations to the decision matrix.

Cheers!

quincy

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Lego Bugatti

lego

Lego’s Tech team built this is a 1:1-scale Bugatti Chiron using mostly standard pieces (excepting a few special pieces to replicate functions from the actual car)

Lego Bugatti Chiron by the numbers:

  • 13,000 work hours
  • Over one million pieces
  • 339 different types of Lego pieces, traditionally snapped together  (no glue)
  • 1 really cool pneumatically powered variable spoiler
  • 2,304 Lego Power Functions L-Motors (the same ones that power the Lego toys)
  • Top speed of 18 mph

And details? The replica features the same startup lighting sequence as the original car.

Why? To show that they can.

For the science behind the feat watch this brief clip.

Cheers!

quincy

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Self-Driving Motorcycles

SelfDrivingBMW.gif

Are driverless motorcycles on the BMW project board?
Maybe, but for now, the motorcycle manufacturer is using its autonomous motorcycle tests to develop technologies to improve the safety for conventional riders.

“We want to teach the motorcycle how to ride a bike,” said Stefan Hans, the engineer who leads the self-driving motorcycle project for BMW Motorrad.

Cheers!

quincy

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Gmail Smart Reply Settings

Gmail announced that desktop users will soon be able to turn off Smart Reply, the slightly creepy way of using AI to suggest replies. Mobile users can already disable this option in their Gmail account settings).

The option to disable this feature, although welcome to many, may fall on deaf ears to others. It turns out Smart Reply is quite popular. According to the Wall Street Journal, Smart Reply is responsible for 10% of all Gmail responses.

To Turn Off/On Smart Reply

  1. in Gmail, click Settings.
  2. Select Gmail account (if you have multiple accounts you’ll need to repeat for each).
  3. Scroll down to Smart Reply and select/deselect as preferred.

This Thursday, POTUS will SMS every US cellphone

Finally, a legitimate reason to use for ALLCAPS.

From TechCrunch:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will this week test a new “presidential alert” system that will allow the president to send a message to every phone in the US.

The alert is the first nationwide test of the presidential alert test, FEMA said in an advisory, which allows the president to address the nation in the event of a national emergency.

Using the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, anyone with cell service should receive the message to their phone.

“THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed,” the message will read, due to be sent out on Thursday at 2:18pm ET

 

via FEMA to send its first ‘Presidential Alert’ in emergency messaging system test — TechCrunch

Cheers!

quincy

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Amazon, Oracle, et al: “… you are not a JEDI, yet!”

The Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short) pits cloud vendors Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and the like in a $10 billion bidding war to be the DoD’s sole cloud solution.

Fore more check out Why the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI deal has cloud companies going nuts — TechCrunch

Cheers!

quincy

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