Category Archives: Google and Gmail

How to block notification requests in Chrome

Oh the irony.

Anyway, the steps:

  1. Go to Chrome Preferences
  2. Advanced
  3. Site settings (or “Content settings”)
  4. Notifications
  5. Click the “Ask before sending (recommended)” switch off. It should then say “Blocked”

Yeah it’s a counter-intuitive caption on that button. It implies that switching it off will just drown you in a sea of unwanted notifications without asking you.

But it seems to work.

Update 2023: It’s moved a bit, so now try:

  1. Chrome Settings
  2. Search for Site Settings
  3. Default behaviour: Choose “Don’t allow sites to send notifications”

If you use Firefox or Safari, this How To Geek article covers those. The article notes that Edge doesn’t currently have an option to turn them off for good.

Where did I take that photo?

I couldn’t find anyone extracting out the geolocation geotagging EXIF data from their photographs so they could pull it up on something like Google Maps.  There are stand-alone programs with embedded maps, but the bits and bobs lying around on the average system ought to be enough to just generate a URL to a mapping website.  The following bash script echoes the  URL that geolocates your JPEG.  Because my camera doesn’t emit it, I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the seconds part of a location, but I did detect that you don’t have a camera the same as mine.  Drop a line if you’ve used this and fixed it.

#!/bin/bash
# emit a hyperlink to google maps for the location of a photograph
declare Seconds=""
Seconds=`exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x02 $1 | grep -oP "[\d|\d\.]+$"`
if (( $Seconds=='0' ))
then
  Seconds=`exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x04 $1 | grep -oP "[\d|\d\.]+$"`
fi
if (( $Seconds!='0' ))
then
  echo
  echo "Script does not support seconds being specified"
  exit
fi
echo -n "https://maps.google.com.au/?q="
declare NorthSouth=`exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x01 $1`
if [ "$NorthSouth" == "S" ] 
then
  echo -n "-"
fi
echo -n `exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x02 $1 | grep -oP "^[\d|\d\.]+"`
echo -n "%20"
echo -n `exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x02 $1 | grep -oP "(?<= )[\d|\d\.]+,"`
declare EastWest=`exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x03 $1`
if [ "$EastWest" == "W" ]
then
  echo -n "-"
fi
echo -n `exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x04 $1 | grep -oP "^[\d|\d\.]+"`
echo -n "%20"
echo -n `exif -m --ifd=GPS --tag=0x04 $1 | grep -oP "(?<= )[\d|\d\.]+(?=,)"`
echo

Can’t copy address bar from Google Chrome

I’ve had periodic problems with Google Chrome on Windows (Version 32.0.1700.102 m, but this has also happened occasionally in the past); sometimes it will refuse to copy the address bar.

Instead of copying, it will clear the clipboard.

Copying from other places, such as a web page (content or using Right-click / Copy Link Address) works fine.

Not sure if it’s an environmental issue — only seems to happen on my work machine; I haven’t seen the same at home.

Very odd.

Blogging it here because I can’t see any mentions of it online (which might be because it’s just me). Will post back if I find the solution.

Update 2014-01-31: I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome… it seems to work again, for now.

Update 2014-02-05: The problem seems to have come back. Very odd.

Update 2014-02-20: Some old posts on a related problem seemed to suggest it might be a Chrome Extension causing issues, so I removed all of mine. The problem seems to still be intermittently occurring.

Postscript: As per the comments, if you have Remote Desktop running, try shutting it down.

A week to go for Google Reader – and… why is Feedly taking liberties with Chrome?

G Reader shuts down in a week.

I’ve been trying Feedly, but and have been trying to love it, but it’s annoying in a couple of significant ways.

Firstly, after clicking on a feed, I want to use the cursor down or Page Down key to move through the items in that feed. Unlike G Reader, Feedly doesn’t put the focus in the right place. Drives me up the wall.

Secondly, it’s embedding itself in multiple places in Chrome. First it put an icon of itself in the bottom-right of every browser tab (which even shows up in print outs, would you believe?)… and just in the last few days it’s started creating its own tab, which doesn’t even have a close icon on it. Is this conceited or what?

Feedly embeds itself into Chrome

Frankly this does not bode well for my future with Feedly, if they’re going to take liberties like this.

Perhaps it’s time to look at alternatives — even if they don’t have accompanying smartphone/iPad apps.

Anybody tried The Old Reader?

Any other good ones which are as close to Google Reader as possible?

Chrome crashing in OSX – fixed by re-installing

I’m no OS X expert, so I was a bit befuddled to find Google Chrome began crashing on startup a few days ago. Was it some evil Apple plot to lock Google out of the Mac?

Chrome crashing on start up in OSX

All the grisly details from the automated report are below… it's not the most readable of reports.

The fix: What I did was to download Chrome again and re-install. That seems to have fixed it for now.

Continue reading

Bye bye Google Wave

Google Buzz went west; the lesser-known Google Jaiku is shutting-down in January. No surprise to hear another aborted Google social media product will go belly-up: Google Wave to go read-only from 31/1/2012, and being switched-off on 30/4/2012.

They must really be hoping that Google Plus stays the distance.

NoFollow not working?

Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.

I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.

But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.

Google Apps to support last two browser releases

Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.

I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.

Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.