Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

A few weeks ago I announced my newsletter Practicing Google: Weekly practical resources on Google products and related tech . Now that it’s picking up subscribers and engagement, I’m ready for the next step. I’ve launched Practicing Google on Product Hunt . The Practicing Google page on Product Hunt. Product Hunt has a community of tech-savvy makers, creators, and entrepreneurs. Many likely use Google products, so there’s a good overlap with the audience my newsletter addresses. I hope they will find the newsletter interesting and relevant enough to subscribe and share it. I have been thinking about, researching, and tweaking the newsletter for the past year . While I always wanted to publish a newsletter, I started working on it in early 2019. Deciding on a format and picking a topic I know well and I could consistently write about took months. But the hardest part was coming up with concise and descriptive text for the name and tagline . My brain remained empty for mo...

In January 2020 Leanpub announced the cancelation of the Conference Purchase Program . The program allowed conference and event organizers to buy at steep discounts multiple copies of ebooks to give away to attendees. Were eligible the ebooks for sale at the Leanpub self-publishing platform the authors enrolled in the program. It seemed like a good idea, especially considering the growing interest in swagless conferences. But it didn’t work well in practice. The announcement of the discontinuation of the Conference Purchase Program in the Leanpub Author Update newsletter. The program provided a self-serve tool. But it turns out conference organizers were looking for a different process . They wanted direct negotiations with authors and more extensive records, such as invoices, additional payment options, and transaction tracking. Given the accountability and transparency requirements of many organizations, this is understandable. The Conference Purchase Program wasn’...

If you blog about Google or cover the company in the news, you likely need quality images to illustrate your posts and stories. A collection of high-resolution Google stock photos is available in the press area of the company’s official blog The Keyword . The page with the photos is a bit hidden. To navigate to the page, click the 3-dot icon on the blog’s home and then click Press Corner. Android figurines in an official Google stock photo . Source: Google. You can filter the photos by type, such as Headshots for portraits of company executives like CEO Sundar Pichai , Senior VP of Hardware Rick Osterloh , and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki . Select type Logos for, well, product logos. You’ll find most of them like Chrome, Gmail, Drive, and many more. Finally, Life at Google features photos of facilities, Googlers, and work scenes. The images are 2800x2800 PNG files except for Life at Google, where they are 2800x1867 JPEG files. You may use the photos for publication with credi...

Lunescope Moon Viewer (formerly Moon Phase Pro) is an Android app for simulating the appearance of the Moon. It combines visualizations of the phases and eclipses with a lunar globe. Lunescope Moon Viewer on my Pixel 2 XL phone. The app shows the phases and their calendar, presents the lunar topography in an interactive 3D globe, simulates eclipses, and provides orbital data, local rising and setting times, and other numerical information. The globe is a realistic representation of the surface and has hires textures from space images. The eclipse screen summarizes the event’s circumstances at a glance and illustrates what to expect , which is helpful for planning observations. These summaries aggregate the times of the various stages, their durations, the appearance of the Moon, and its position in the sky above or below the horizon. Lunescope is not just a good astronomy tool, it stands out among Android apps for its integration with the Google ecosystem . It’s a lightwe...

Whenever I can, I try to support bloggers and creators by buying their books or paying contributions. Hoping someone appreciates my writings and work, I set up a Buy Me A Coffee donation button on my blog and a link in my newsletter. Buy Me A Coffee is a creator support and crowdfunding platform similar to Patreon. The Buy Me A Coffee home page. Although it’s a smaller and younger startup, Buy Me A Coffee has some interesting advantages over Patreon . For example, it accepts one-time payments, not just membership subscriptions, and it doesn’t require an account for supporters. As a Google user there are a couple more Buy Me A Coffee features I like such as signing up with Google and supporting Google Pay via Stripe . I connected both supported payment processors, PayPal and Stripe. Creating a Buy Me A Coffee account is straightforward. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes, even to someone like me who obsesses over tweaking and playing with settings. Connecting Buy Me A...

I’m starting the weekly email newsletter Practicing Google: Practical resources on Google products and related tech . I’ll send out the first issue on January 24, 2020. The newsletter will help you do more with Google. I encourage you to subscribe, it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time. About the newsletter Each Friday I’ll send you links to tips, tutorials, apps, in-depth information, and other practical, actionable, or hands-on resources . This content will expand your toolbox and help you do more things with Google products and related technologies, such as web apps and tools. The logo of the Practicing Google newsletter. The value of Practicing Google is it distills my extensive experience with all things Google. I’ve been using Google products since 1998, starting from the search engine. Besides a Google early adopter, in 2009 I was an Android early adopter . As a member of the Google Product Experts Program (formerly Top Contributors Program) since 2014, I ...

The Mercury Reader Chrome extension is a reader mode tool for cleaning off the clutter from web pages. It reformats the pages by removing distracting elements and leaving only text and images for a cleaner experience. Mercury Reader is one of my must-have extensions and I use it daily. A post of my blog reformatted with Mercury Reader. It’s installed on all my Chrome OS devices and it’s available whenever I need it. I can fire it up when visiting sites with tiny or illegible fonts, uncomfortable color combinations, pop-ups, excessively wide text margins, pages encrusted with ads, or with designs that interfere with reading. I don’t use a permanent ad-blocker , so Mercury Reader doubles as an on-demand ad blocker. The extension removes distracting features such as navigation elements, sidebars, headers, and ads . Besides the images, it leaves only the text and sets it with clean fonts and attributes that make reading more pleasing. Although it does a good job in most cases...