The coverage of Google Street View in Australia was already pretty comprehensive when it rolled out last August, but the search giant is continuing to expand its reach. The Google Australia blog says that a recent update has added extra coverage around Port Lincoln, Tweed Heads, Cairns – and a few more areas of a little city called Sydney. Street View is never likely to cover 100% of the population, but compared with many more populous countries, including the US and the UK, Australia seems to be doing pretty well (or pretty badly if you see the whole thing as a horrendous intrusion on privacy).
Expanding Street View in Australia [Google Australia Blog]Weblog Google Operating System points out a new search option in Google Image Search that filters images by colour. Colour search isn’t available as an operator yet, but a simple URL hack will do the trick. To start searching Google by image colour, all you have to do is append &imgcolor=colorname to the URL of a Google Image Search—where colorname is replaced by one of a number of colours of your choice. So, for example, your search URLs might look like this:
The photog nuts at weblog Photojojo show off their MacGyver chops, demonstrating how to develop film in a pinch with coffee and vitamin C.
Let’s get it out of the way off the bat: The whole coffee-plus-vitamin-C trick isn’t a replacement for regular developer. The results, however, are distinctive, and if nothing else, it appeals to our love of all things MacGyver. So provided you’ve got a few common grocery items like instant coffee, vitamin C powder, and some more specialised goodies like a daylight developing tank, you’re ready to roll. Granted, we’d much prefer a totally grocery-store friendly version, but this one still gets an A for ingenuity.
How to Develop Film Using Coffee and Vitamin C! Srsly! [Photojojo]Windows only: If you need to lock input to your computer temporarily, skip applications that require to you key in fancy combinations to unlock things. BlockInput unlocks itself. The options for BlockInput are simple. You select which hotkey you want to use to activate the program and how many seconds you want to the application to lock the input from your mouse and keyboard. The default is CTRL+Q and 5 seconds, presumably so the first time you test the program you don’t find yourself staring at the computer for the next half hour waiting for it to unlock. Whether you need a window of time to wipe down your mouse and keyboard with some sanitising wipes or you have a particularly sensitive application you want to make sure isn’t disturbed, BlockInput is a dead simple solution. BlockInput is freeware, Windows only. BlockInput [via gHacks]
Windows only: The latest beta version of Google Chrome adds support for user scripts, but if you want to enable them you’ll need to follow a couple of quick steps.
Windows only: If you’re looking for extremely granular control over file copying, and fewer failures, you don’t want to miss RichCopy. We’re big fans of replacing the default and clunky Windows file copier with more speedier solutions, like Teracopy or FastCopy. If you’re looking for speedy transfer and detailed control over all manner of things, like what files should be copied or overwritten based on age, size, attributes, or even the security settings for the directory they are in, RichCopy has you covered. RichCopy doesn’t have shell integration, unfortunately, like many of our favourite replacements, but given the kind of detailed tweaking you can do in RichCopy, you’ll likely be opening the application to tinker in the sub-menus anyhow. RichCopy was previously an internal tool for Microsoft developers to use, but now has public release. There’s no serious support for the tool, and it falls into the as-is category. That said, I didn’t have any problem copying 15GB of data from one drive to another in a matter of minutes, thanks to RichCopy’s snappy multi-threading support. RichCopy is freeware, Windows only.
RichCopy [via Digital Inspiration]Windows only: Tiny utility Rightload makes short work of uploading files to almost any server, whether you have your own FTP or just want to quickly send images to Flickr. Once installed, take a trip over to Tools -> Manage Servers to configure your accounts. Rightload supports FTP, SFTP and Flickr out of the box, but you can get more plugins from the download page, including Imageshack, Rapidshare, and Tinypic. After configuring, you can upload files by dragging them into the window, or simply use the Rightload options from the context menu—once the files are uploaded it can even generate links or image tags. The context menu options don’t work in Vista 64-bit, but they have a set of Send To shortcuts for you that do the same thing. Rightload has been around a while, but they’ve recently added support for HTTP upload sites and custom plugins, making this a must-have utility for anybody sharing files online with friends or embedding images into a forum. Rightload is a free download for Windows only. For more on powering up your context menu, be sure and check out our top 10 right-click tools.
RightloadMatt Thommes at the Paint in the Tech blog finds it tedious to create filters in Gmail the multi-click way. His solution? Export a single filter, then make a few clever tweaks to the resulting XML file. Thommes doesn’t get too in-depth in exactly how the XML reads and can be tweaked, but shows how, if you’ve got a filter that works for silencing certain emailers or smartly labelling certain mail, you can easily add other email addresses or actions to it by firing up your editor:
