Neil Ghosh

Google Earth lets the user explore rich geographical content and find out the places they plan to go. Google Earth provides users with satellite images, maps, landscapes and 3D building view to give them a better understanding of the surroundings.

One can search anything whether it is a building, a road, a landscape or any other thing. In this round up, we are sharing some bizarre and interesting Google Earth photos that will inspire you. Enjoy!

Bodies and Body Parts

We’re not sure what the lake is called but the picture is astonishing. It looks just similar to a man with top hat and bamboo taking a walk across the countryside, quite literally.

Google Escher Effect – Paris, France

Stitching up together satellite pictures and aero pictures of cities can bring about situations like this where the special aerial vantage points give rise to buildings’ pictures being taken at diverse angles.

Amazing House

Another glamorous house with inherent smiling face, this time with a body. It looks completely intentional.

KFC space logo

Yum! Brands Inc produced the logo near Rachel, Nevada, and asserted it’s the primary ad that can be viewed from space. If you remember, the same corporation had formerly wanted to broadcast a laser ad up onto the moon for Pizza Hut, however had afterward scaled back to purchasing ad placement on the side of a Russian rocket.

The Belly Flop that Shook the World

That was one titan-sized belly flop that produced that lake.

Iraq’s Bloody Lake

This red lake outside Iraq’s Sadr City gathered a fair share of macabre assumption when it was discovered in 2007. One tout told the tech blog Boing Boing that he was “told by a friend” that slaughterhouses in Iraq at times dump blood into canals. Nobody has offered an official clarification, but it’s more probable that the color comes from manure, pollution or a water-treatment process.

World’s Largest Fingerprint

This is another weird image from Google map that shows the world’s largest fingerprint.

Osmington White Horse

The Osmington White Horse, outside Sutton Poyntz, UK. This primeval figure is engraved into the white chalk of the sidehill – such horse carved shapes are called “Leucippotomy”.

Heart-shaped island highlighted by Google Earth becomes hit with lovers

The 130,000 sq yd isle of Galesnjak came to distinction subsequent to its extraordinary shape was highlighted on Google Earth.

Land Art near Munich Airport

Land Art or “Earth Art” coming out in an area closeto the airport in Munich, Germany.

Firefox Logo

Reap circle art made in the form of the iconic Firefox Logo close to Portland, Oregon,

Where’s Waldo in Google Maps?

Canadian performer Melanie Coles constructed a big image of the iconic “Waldo” onto a top on an unrevealed location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Will U Marry Me

Marriage proposal witnessed on a top side via Google Maps.

Terrain Face in Google Maps

The terrain in Alberta, Canada unintentionally shapes what looks like a human face when saw from the air or when watching the satellite photograph in Google Maps.

Bunny in Google Maps

Huge Pink Bunny made by a group of artists next to Artesina, Italy as seen in Google Maps.

Coca Cola Logo in Google Maps

This Coca-Cola logo in Google Maps was seemingly produced out of coke bottles immediately outside of Arica in Chile.

Portrait of Ghenghis Khan in Google Maps

Out of some kind of terror that they might overlook who he was, the people of Mongolia have engraved the similarity of Ghenghis Khan onto a hillside outside of Ulaanbaatar.

Google Maps Oddity

This is an extremely weird picture from Google Maps satellite picture of downtown Dallas. The rounded top structure in the upper middle is the JPMorgan Chase Tower. Adjacent to it is the high rectangular 2100 Ross Avenue building (dead center).

The Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – one of the world’s most decipherable illustrations – is furnished here in crop art in Germany.

The Palm Islands of Dubai

The Palm Islands are non-natural islands in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on which most important commercial and residential infrastructure will be built. The islands are the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Oprah Maze

She’s acquired a substantial syndicated show and a magazine called O, and she was dubbed the most influential celebrity in the world by Forbes. An Arizona farmer produced this 2004 tribute to the TV talk-show host.

Mystery Stone Arrow

Next to Sebago Lake in Cumberland County, Maine, we discover an extraordinary arrow arranged from stacks of stones: What makes the arrow actually weird is that rather than your customary pointing-style arrow, this comes out to be a demonstration of the kind of arrow you might fire with a bow.

Guitar-Shaped Mansions

This mansion has been built in the shape of a guitar that is apparent when view from the air.

I lOVE u

This would be the ideal place for the lovers as the Earth itself says I love u.

Graffiti in Google Maps

Site of an vanished volcano hole, the Cerro Prieto, located near Mexicali in Baja California (Mexico). It seems that, lots of visitors to the site have decorated it with their graffiti that appears to have been drawn with the purpose to be seen by people looking down into the crater from the eastern rim of the crater.

Auto Antics

Believe parking is rough where you live? In Westenbergstraat, Netherlands, drivers actually have to park on the sides of walls.

Face of Satan

Internet fan states he discovered the face of Satan using Google Earth

Issaouane Erg desert – Dunes (Algeria)

The contours and colors of the sandbanks in this desert are incredible. observe that the three dunes have approximately indistinguishable shapes. And there are tens of thousands just like those all around.

Giant Gulliver from Google Earth, Hunters Hall Park, Craigmillar, Scotland.

Here, you will see a giant Gulliver, present at Hunters Hall Park, Craigmillar, Scotland

Google Escher Effect pic from Houston

Here’s one more unusual satellite picture from Google Maps of some business district Houston skyscrapers. This outcome has become known as the “Escher Effect”, or the “Google Escher Effect”.

Roof Ad, New York City

Roof ad viewed via Google Maps in New York City, actually for a “Roller Skating” rink. Probably intended to direct LaGuardia Airport travelers, but many rooftop ads like this are commencing to endow you with impressions all the way through users of Google Maps and other popular online mapping systems which comprise aerial photos and satellite photos.

Show Me a Sign

This is an aerial picture of a road that looks like as if someone is asking you to show him a sign.

Ghost Town: Prypiat, Ukraine

Here is a Google map for a ghost town located at Prypiat, Ukraine.

Rocks

Not the most noticeable of Google’s determinations but at the top of these rocks on a tiny island off the West Coast of Ireland, it looks like if there’s a face with a pronounced Romanesque nose looking out to sea.

Ni Pena Ni Miedo (No Shame Nor Fear)

Written the sands of the Atacama Desert, Chile, are the terms “ni pena ni miedo” which interpret comparatively as “No shame nor fear”, and collectively they organize what must surely be the world’s largest poem.

Brunel 200th Birthday Maze

This jumble in the UK was prepared to rejoice Brunel’s 200th birthday.

Land Art – Bug in Illinois

Effigy Tumuli, by Michael Heizer, are a small number of special land art pieces constructed on Buffalo Rock in Buffalo Rock State Park, neglecting the Illinois River. (Built between 1983-1985).

Karl’s Maze, Germany

Karl’s Maze in Purkshof, Germany. Since 1921

Mystery Figure

Here is a mystery figure for you from Google Maps satellite.

Localised Black Hole Discovered

As we all recognize, the general relativity theory states that a black hole is a section of space from which nothing can get away – together with light. Astronomers have discovered lots of places where black holes may exist, but actually they missed one – about 60km north of Tokyo.

Wonders of nature

The ethereal image of a woman appears in a field in Ohio. Zooming in closer to the image brings out the eyes may be trees that the farmer has cut around and the mouth is just a obviously darker patch of grass.

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Would you like to create a custom Google Map of all the wonderful cities that you have visited so far. Or maybe an annotated map that offers easy driving directions to the wedding venue? Or maybe you have customers in different parts of the world and you would like to display testimonials on one Google Map.

These are just some of the many scenarios where you may want to build your own maps. Let’s now look at some of the best online tools that make it easy for us to create custom maps in the browser without requiring any programming knowledge.

How to Make Custom Google Maps

One of the easiest way to create custom maps is through the Google Maps website itself. Open maps.google.com and click Create Map under My Places (see screenshot). Next search for a place, or drop a placemark manually, and save it to your custom map. Repeat until you have added all the places to the Google Map.

You can later change the style of individual pins, add rich-text descriptions, photos and videos to a location – these will show up when someone clicks the location pin.

The same “My Places” option in Google Maps can be used for creating a directions map. In that case, choose the “Draw a Line” tool and move it along the desired route. Double-click to finish the drawing. Here’s a nice video tutorial that will guide you through the process of creating custom maps with Google Maps.

Create More Accurate Route Maps

If you have a smartphone, you may also use GPS recording apps like My Tracks (Android) that log your location at different times and then create a complete route from these different points. Drive to the starting point and hit the record track button on your phone. Once you have reached the destination, stop recording and the app will export the route as a Google Map.

The other option for drawing direction maps is QuikMaps. It basically converts Google Maps into a whiteboard and you can scribble routes on the map just like you draw freehand on any canvas. Once you have sketched the route, export it as a KML file which can be imported into Google Maps or Google Earth for easy publishing.

Create Google Maps from Excel Sheets

One slight disadvantage with the Google Maps tool is that they do not let you enter places in bulk. Yes, there are options to import KML and geoRSS files but how do you create these files in the first place?

Enter BatchGeo – an online tool that can import location data from a spreadsheet table and marks those address on a Google Map. You can copy-paste postal addresses or the latitude and longitude coordinates and BatchGeo will map them all after decoding. It’s useful tool but you cannot export the map with the free account.

Add Animation to your Google Maps

You may see flight tracking maps where multiple airplane images seem to move along different paths on a single Google map. If you would like to have something similar for your own Google Map, check out Animaps.

With Animaps, you can quickly create animated markers that move along a pre-defined route over the map. You can have multiple markers on the same map and their respective playback speed can be controlled as well.

Custom Google Maps for Advanced Users

Advanced users can create customized Google Maps by simply changing a few parameters in the maps URL. The Static Maps API has a complete list of parameters supported by Google Maps along with a few examples. The big advantage with static Image Maps is that you can modify them pretty quickly and they are easy to embed as they they do not rely on IFRAMES or JavaScript.

Also, if you would like to create personalized Google Maps that look very different from the standard maps and have custom data, follow these code samples in JavaScript.

Related: Record a Movie of Google Earth

This story, How to Create your own Google Maps, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 17, 2011 under Google Maps, Internet.

Vulcanologist is the best job title ever.

While looking for an astronomy meetup group around Hyderabad I had come across GHAC (Great Hyderabad Adventure Club ), which was also highly recommended by friend Kunal. I discovered there is no astronomy group yet so wanted to create one. However I did not go ahead as I became skeptical about how many people would be interested and it was a paid service. Last week when I came across the newsletter of GHAC meetup group, I saw there was a trek being organized by them at a very familiar and near by place of mine.It was Durgam Cheruvu : A Head To Tail Exploration Hike . I had already been to the IT park  side of the lake where there are boating facilities and lake side benches ( I has seen some people sitting their with their iPods and Kindle/Tablet). Hence was very excited about the rocky side.

As per schedule we started at 6.30 PM from the meeting spot after introduction and warm up. 23 out of 31 RSVP turned up. Most of the guys seemed to be working in Delloite Consulting. We had Vamsi as organizer.While entering to the area we found out that  they were going to blow the rocks up in few hours. So most likely it was last time were were seeing the rocks. I hope Save the rock society could have taken action but land is privately held .

After 15 minutes we climbed few small rocks and one of my friend got hurt her leg  while attempting to jump from one to another (which is always a bad idea ). Hence I stopped climbing any further and helped her getting down to the plain path. Pappu and Sukumar were very kind enough to provide first aid and accompanying us right till the end of the trek.It was great fun meeting them , they were one of the most experienced. Now we chose a relatively plain path and avoided rocks. Rest of the group kept on climbing rocks.

Finally we headed towards home at 9.30 AM. We were questioned by the guards of the private firmed about purpose of our visit. So I would recommend to inform them before hand when going to this place. Few more photos can be found here. I have also played around Miscrosoft Photosynth and created the following.

The following synth is directly created from MS Photosynth

Original Link

And the following is created using Miscrosoft Image Composition Editor where photos are actually stitched together to make a large picture

Original Link

A Wikipedia entry states that only 1% of Internet data and voice traffic is transmitted through satellite links while the remaining 99% is still carried by undersea cables spread across the world’s oceans. This explains why Internet services get disrupted when these undersea cables are damaged due to passing ships or in the event of an undersea earthquake.

You should also check the recently updated Submarine Map which gives some good idea about the physical routes of these cables lying under the sea bed. This is an interactive map so you can zoom-in or click on any particular colored cable to know about their respective owners. Fascinating stuff.

This story, A World Map of the Undersea Internet Cables, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on September 23, 2011 under Cables, Infographics, Wide, Internet.

Steve Kemper, journalist and author of Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway, was given permission to attend a 2001 behind-the-scenes meeting organized to garner feedback from Silicon Valley's finest. The pitch was given by Tim Adams, and in attendance were Segway inventor Dean Kamen, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, John Doerr, a well known VC at Kleiner Perkins, Segway's VP of Marketing Mike Ferry and Segway's Governmental Affairs Chief Brian Toohey.

In the following few excerpts from the book, Kemper describes the discussions that took place during the meeting. There are few interesting takeaways here about how Jobs works during meetings:

If you want me to leave, I will, but I can't just sit here!

Mike Ferry, Brian Toohey and Tim Adams had each put together PowerPoint presentations about the product. Tim called these presos "another dog and pony show." It's interesting to see how the typical "we pitch, you sit quietly and ask questions after," did not fly with Jobs:

"Good morning to everyone," said Tim, smiling at the front of the table. "Before we start, we'd like to ask you to hold your questions until after each presentation."

"Yeah, right!" snorted Bezos, followed by that honking laugh.

"Otherwise we might as well not be here," said Jobs.

"How long is your presentation?" asked Doerr. "Each pitch is about ten minutes."

"I can't do that," said Jobs. "I'm not built that way. So if you want me to leave, I will, but I can't just sit here."

It's worth noting that most of us can relate to Jobs' reasoning here; we all want to interact and participate in a conversation, not just sit back as someone pitches something.

There were notes scribbled on the palm of his hand

It's clear that Jobs fully invests himself into the meetings he attends. He thinks through the point of the meeting and the outcome of the conversation, and loves to use past product successes and failures as examples. When the conversation shifted toward the introduction of two Segway models to the market, Jobs used the iMac as an example:

Tim studied Jobs for a moment, then turned to the screen and put up a spec sheet about Metro and Pro. "As you can see—" began Tim.

"Let's talk about the bigger question," interrupted Jobs. "Why two machines?"

"We've talked about that," said Tim, "and we think—"

“Because I see a big problem here,” said Jobs. “I was thinking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep after Dean came over.” There were notes scribbled on the palm of his hand. He explained his experience with the iMac, how there were four models now but he had launched with just one color to give his designers, salespeople, and the public an absolute focus. He had waited seven months to introduce the other models.

What do you think about Segway's design? I think it sucks!

As we all know, Jobs is quite frank when it comes to voicing his opinion. It's a pleasure to hear him refer back to his three design mantras as he explains why he believes the Segway's design simply sucks:

“What does everyone think about the design?” asked Doerr, switching subjects…

“I think it sucks!” said Jobs.

His vehemence made Tim pause. “Why?” he asked, a bit stiffly.

“It just does.”

“In what sense?” said Tim, getting his feet back under him. “Give me a clue.”

“Its shape is not innovative, it’s not elegant, it doesn’t feel anthropomorphic,” said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.

“You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional.” The last word delivered like a stab…”There are design firms out there that could come up with things we’ve never thought of,” Jobs continued, “things that would make you shit in your pants.”

I understand the appeal of a slow burn, but personally I'm a big-bang guy.

We all know that Jobs is a risk taker. As the conversation shifted to the strategy of introducing Segway to the market, Jobs disagreed with Bezos. In the passage below, you can see Jobs’ belief that a small (less risky) launch in foreign country will bring more bad than good:

Bezos suggested starting slow, using one city or country as an experimental station. The perfect place to begin, thought Bezos, was Singapore. "You only have to convince one guy, the philosopher king, and then you have four million people to test it."

But Jobs was still shaking his head at Bezos's suggestion. Because of the Internet, he said, slow was no longer possible. People would learn about Ginger in a flash of bits and bytes, and would want one now. So a small launch in a foreign place was foolish, because if the machine was unavailable in the United States, the company would blow its chance for $100 million of free publicity in its biggest market.

"If you show this to Hennessy," Jobs said to Doerr, referring to John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University and a world-class engineer, "he'll shit in his pants." Evidently Hennessy did that more readily than Jobs did. "And if you offer to give him a hundred of them if he'll run a safety study and a usage study, that's a done deal in ten minutes," continued Jobs. "You do that at ten colleges and maybe at Disney, so people can see them but not buy them."

"I understand the appeal of a slow burn," he concluded, "but personally I'm a big-bang guy." For the first time that day he smiled. "The risk with a fast burn," he continued, "is that it exposes you to your enemies. You're going to need a lot of money to fight thieves."

Thanks to Steve Kemper for posting a detailed excerpt from his book on the Harvard Business School Blog. You can check out and buy the entire book on Amazon.

Last year we had a great time spent with  home For The Aged & Orpahn kids – OM SAI SEVASHRAM  as part of Oracle Global volunteers days 2010. This year also on September 19, 2011 we organized a trip to Botanical Garden.

After few few morning activities in the garden , we moved to the ashram itself for lunch and rest of the indoor activities. We distributed most of the stuff they had it in the wishlist and finally closed the event with National Anthem.

Finally got some time to write a post after long time. Lately life was not that eventful  anyway. Today I got a chance to participate in Google Dev fest here in Hyderabad at HICC. So i thought of documenting the notes I had taken during the sessions for future reference.

It started with the keynote by Rajdeep Dua about the Android 3.x Platform Overview and  Boris Smus about new features of HTML5. Rajdeep introduced fragments in Android platform which are used as independent component under the Activity and created/destroyed at the runtime. Also introduced about the compatibility library for Android 2.x so that we don’t have to maintain two code line separate for tablet and the phone. For layout rendering in phone and tablet its a good idea to specify screen size in the manifest file. Boris introduced the following new features in HTML5

• Pausing video automatically when user switches the tab so that it does not keep playing in the background.
• Pre-render the Hyperlinks where there are high chances that user going to click it.
• Support for detecting if the browser is online or offline.
• Graphics in CSS3 using webGL
• Native client programming in browser using C/C++ , stable chrome version 14
• Audio API and Visualization
• Full screen API
• Web RTC

And he ended with a “that was a lot” slide with a resting dog’s picture loved the humor. CFor more HTML5 check out http://www.html5rocks.com/

Tony Chan started with Android: Fragments and ADK Overview. Main highlight was Android market. There were lots of improvement. There is still no review process but Android team is trying their best to keep the apps harmless. Better error reporting , statistics and localized listing were incorporated. He also warned to double think before making an app free because it can never be made paid after that. He also illustrated fragment back stack (stack of UI component sequence which keeps popping when back button is pressed).  Transaction defines the rollback sequence of the UI screen. He also demonstrated code snippet to show how fragment component can talk to each other and pass “intent” via activity for better decoupling of fragments. He discussed about Open accessories  API and Android Development Kit (ADK) the hardware unit. Finally he concluded with jaw dropping demos of servo motor robot being controlled by Android phone’s touch and orientation. But the best part of the day came when he put the phone on the top plate of Gyroscopic robot and tried to tilt the robot so that phone fall off , but it did not !  The phone sensed the tilt and sent signal to the robot’s top plate to tilt in the other direction so that it remains horizontal with respect to ground and keep the system balanced . It  was simple a control system with feedback.

Now it was time for Building Integrated Applications on Google’s Cloud Technologies( by Alfred Fuller). He talked about the following

1. Google storage
   (S3 compatible , RESTFul APIs GET, POST, PUT , DELETE  methods )
2. Prediction API
   (Can upload training data, both text and number in CSV  format ) to learn and make the model, and later model could be used to predict new set of unlabeled data. I personally chatted with Alfred during lunch time and got to know that best machine learing Algorithm for training is automatically chosen by looking at the data. It can also show multiple results with probability and if user chooses the correct label , it can be feedback to the system again to learn more , so that model gets smarter. One data record  can also be marked as multiple label during training. Training data also can be added on the fly at any point of time. Now question is can google come up with unsupervised prediction e.g clustering into unknown labels.
3. BigQuery
   SQL like query language and highly scalable with  SSL access feature. REST APIs , JSON RPC are the major features in this. One can upload raw data and import to BigTable and then run queries. He demonstrated the performance of BigQuery with the wikimedia revision example with results. It turned out that George Bush’s entry was revised most number of times. It could be integrated to Google docs using AppsScripts.
4. App Identity API
   Public/Private encryption of data.

After the delicious lunch it was one of the most interesting sessions by Chris Broadfoot who talked about  “Displaying Large Geographic Datasets using  Google Fusion Tables“. Fusion tables looks like spreadsheets but have some more interesting features like merging records and Geo-Coding. Data could also be superimposed on Google Map and the result plot could be embeded as iframes. He also talked about fusion table SQL and styling the map. Data could could be populated into fusion tables using HTTP post requests. Plotting points in Fusion table is highly scalable unlike Map marker because it does not leave the rendering job to browser, it renders using the Google’s high end clusters of servers and only send the tile images to the browser.  During  Q/A I confirmed that mouse co-ordinates also tracked for interactivity in the tile images using extra scripts.

After that Boris performed some demonstration on chrome dev tools which is a in-built HTML/javaScript/CSS IDE in Google Chrome like FireBug extension in Firefox . Inline editing could be performed. He also showed how to use console.log(which, can, take, any, number, and, type, of, parameters) for logging. Revision history of all the changes was available.  Auto-completion of CSS atrribute names was one of the coolest features of dev tools.  He used CSS3 pattern galary to fetch some code for  nice background patterns  to change his slide’s background using the browser dev tool itself. various format of  colour picker  including RGB and HSL was very handy to change colors of the web pages without having to refer to a HTML color chart. Disabling cache and logging XMLHttpRequest were two more useful features of dev tools settings . In addition to that Chrome dev tools can be used as a full fledged debugger with the breakpoint feature. He also DeOfusicated some clumsy javaScript code using the pretty print feature. Remote debugging of webpages could be possible using weinre and starting the target chrome browser with special flag (which runs a http server at a the specified port ). Performance of code is possible to measure using profiler feature. Boris was kind enough to tweet his slides immediately after that session which can be found here.

Post tea break Alfred Fuller was back with his session “Building Robust, Redundant, Reliable Web Applications on High Replication Datastore” where he talked about dynamically scaling app engine datastore which is based on BigTable. He explained about Strong and eventual consistency with the examples of cash and cheque money respectably. He also discussed entity groups and its trade off in size and showed example of ancestor queries which leads to strong consistency.

The last session was by Google’s one of the Android advocate Anirudh Dewani and Tony Chan who helped with the demos. This session was dedicated to the designers who plays major role in the usability and look and feel of the Android apps both for tablet and phones. He hinted about using renderscript for high quality graphics which brings a lot of user attention. They discussed and showed Action bar feature in Honeycomb (Android 3.x) which has three key sections namely Icon at the extremely left , menus in the middle which tells the current navigation location in the app and action buttons which enables tasks which could be done in the current screen. One major difference between phone UI and Tablet UI is that there is more real estate (screen space ) in case of the later , so two panes can be displayed simultaneously. It is advisable to have a single APK for both devices but different layouts. He showed various never ending list layout and informed about carousel and viewpager libraries for 3D and 2D.  According to him , orientation change should not reduce the functionality of a screen in these devices. The best practice is to use the OS’s visual style and theme married with branding of the app and keep it consistent with all the screens. Developers have to keep in mind is that tablets are not just large phones as they are designed to serve different purpose.

Overall, it was very good event with lots of information and inspiration to get started with latest in web technology. Let me know if there is any information in the post can be corrected. I missed some other exciting session simultaneously going on in the other hall. It will be great of sombody can post those details here in the comments.

Shared by Kunal
should I add anything about it being an Engineer's Day?

Shared by Neil
We are so small, a pale blue dot

Sometimes, my favorite pictures from space are among the ones that look least interesting… until you understand what you’re seeing.

For example, this doesn’t look like much, does it?

Ah, but that picture shows so, so much. It shows everything!

That’s us. You, me, everyone. That fuzzy blob on the left? That’s Earth. The one on the right: the Moon.

In this one simple picture, you can see everywhere humans have ever been; hundreds of thousands of years spent on Earth, and a few brief days on the Moon. And this picture was taken from much farther than anyone has ever traveled.

This view of our home worlds was seen by Juno, a spacecraft launched on August 5. By August 26th, when it took this snapshot, it was already nearly 10 million kilometers (6 million miles) away. And yet this is merely a baby step compared to its total journey: it will take a long, sweeping path to Jupiter, traveling nearly 3 billion kilometers before arriving at its destination.

Take another look at that picture. See how close together they look? It took humans more than three days to bridge ...

Steve Jobs resigned today from Apple Inc. When he did it so last time in 1984 it did not turn out to be good for Apple Computers.He rescued Apple again when he was back in 1996 with fascinating products like iPod and IPhone in later years.

This particular movie was released 1999 which is mostly about Steve Jobs and his personal life. It also includes his contributions to Computer industry along with Steve Wozniak and controversies with Microsoft.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appeared together in this interview. Part 1, Part 2

Another remarkable documentary about  him and computer history is Triumph of the Nerds

Shared by Kunal
Wish somebody makes a similar infographic for Oracle acquisitions :)

$ google blogger post --blog "Lemurland blog" --title "Latest Madagascar trip" --tags "vacation, ring-tailed" trip_post.html 

$ google calendar add "Order palm tree tomorrow at 10 AM"

$ google urlshortener insert --longUrl www.example.com

You’ve got a problem with your computer, you call their technical support team and the person on the other side requires the machine’s serial number (also known as the Service Tag) before he can even log your request.

If you using a laptop computer, you can easily find the service tag by turning the machine upside but for desktops, especially the older models, the sticker that holds the service tag is often placed at a more harder-to-reach location.

There’s a alternate way to find the computer’s serial number without you having to slide beneath the table.

Open the command prompt (Start –> CMD) and type the following command:

wmic bios get serialnumber

Another command that will also print the model number (or make) of your computer is:

wmic csproduct get name, identifyingnumber 

The system model number can also be found using the System Information program available under All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools.

The above commands should work on Windows 7, XP and Windows XP Pro machine as wmic.exe didn’t ship with the previous editions of Windows. Refer to this page to learn about all other system details that you can retrieve with the help of wmic.exe command.

This story, Easily Find the Serial Number of your Computer, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on August 11, 2011 under Command Line, Software.