Google TV live show overlay anomaly

On 02/28/12 around 12:30 PM, I was watching X-Play on G4 channel.
They were doing a segment on UFC Undisputed 3 featuring UFC fighters Erik Koch and Urijah Faber.

During the segment, a poll appeared on the screen asking "Which of these fighting styles is the most effective?", with "Boxing", "Muay Thai", "Jiu-Jitsu", and "Wrestling" as options.

At first, I thought this was one of these Twitter or SMS polls and after a few seconds, the results would appear on the screen. However, the poll was not changing. After ten seconds or so, I became curious and clicked one of the arrow buttons on my Logitech Revue keyboard controller. To my surprise, the highlighted poll option changed from "Boxing" to "Muay Thai"!

By some means, Google TV was aware of the show I was watching and presented some enhanced content as an overlay.

Mind. Blown.

notice the poll overlay?

Quickly Save Gmail Pictures to Picasaweb

Want to quickly copy a picture someone e-mailed you to one of your Google+/Picasaweb albums?
Do this:

1 -- click "Share" for the image you want to save to your albums

2 -- click "Cancel" on the Google+ share pop-up

03 -- visit your Picasaweb albums and see that this picture has been added to a Photos From Posts sub-album and you can copy/move it to whatever Picasaweb album you want. Awesome.

I am a big hunk, by the way.

Logitech Revue tips

just a list of little tips and tricks I have picked up for the Logitech Revue with Google TV.

• slide with two fingers on the controller scroll pad to scroll on whatever you are looking at on the TV (this only works on 3.1+)
• CTRL + ALT + DEL on the controller to restart the Revue (I never tried this on 2.0, let me know if it works)

some haikus

I like haikus. here are some stupid ones I wrote.


my energy wanes
a sprite would make me happy
give me a dollar

things that annoy me

This is just an unordered list of things that annoy me.

• when guys use bathroom stalls to urinate
• when people put toilet paper rolls on backwards
• when people write checks at store checkout

Google TV Pandora App Glitch

I've been enjoying my Logitech Revue for a week or so.
There's a wacky glitch involving the time bar though.
Hopefully this gets addressed with the Google TV 2.0 update.
Check it out.

Google+ and Picasa Web Albums

I have been uploading all of my pictures to Picasa Web Albums for about a year now. For the most part, it's been a great experience.

When Google+ arrived on the scene, I was excited because I hoped it would mean tight integration with Picasa Web Albums. Turns out, my hopes were true!

I have run into one problem with the service though.

Whenever you include pictures in stream posts on Google+, those pictures are copied into a Picasa Web album called "Photos from posts". This alone isn't really a big deal but there are a number of side effects that I don't like.

1) The pictures are copies of the original pictures. This means that any comments made on the pictures from within Google+ are on the copies of the pictures. When viewing the actual album, none of those comments are present.

2) The pictures are put into sub-albums underneath the "Photos from posts" album. This results in a slew of sub-albums titled by date (see Figure A). If any of these pictures/albums are deleted, then the accompanying Google+ posts disappear. That makes sense I guess.

Figure A

I think I know why it was decided to put these pictures in their own sub-albums as opposed to lumping them all directly within the "Photos from posts" album. Photo privacy (from the Google+ point-of-view) only seems to exist at the album level. There isn't any way to dictate privacy for each individual photo. Therefore, the only way for these "photos from posts" to adhere to differing privacy settings on a per-post basis would be to put them in unique albums. Rather than generate these unique albums at the top level, Google creates them as sub-albums within the "Photos from posts" album.

Suspecting this, I decided to try tinkering around with the arrangement.

First, I shared this picture of my mom's dog (which I already had stored in another Picasa Web album) on Google+. This created a new sub-album underneath "Photos from posts" called "November 6, 2011" (see Figure B). This created a post on my Google+ profile containing this new picture (see Figure C).

Figure B

Figure C

Now for the interesting stuff.

If I go to Picasa Web and copy another picture to the "November 6, 2011" sub-album, the actual post appears the same on my Google+ profile, but when I click on the dog picture to open the full-browser view, the new picture (a kiwi, in this case) copied to the "November 6, 2011" sub-album shows up (see Figure D)!

Figure D

If I go to Picasa Web and delete the dog picture from the "November 6, 2011" sub-album, the Google+ post disappears from my profile. It kinda makes sense, even though the sub-album still remains and the kiwi picture is still inside.

From perusing various Internet sources, I understand that Google Buzz handled its pictures in the same manner, generating Picasa Web albums to hold the pictures. I can't tell if Google just ported the same Buzz/Picasa integration to Google+ in order to save time or if it is all part of their big plan. The manner in which Google+ is using Picasa Web Albums just sort of feels like a hack to me.

Ultimately, from the perspective of Google+ and Picasa Web, this whole thing isn't really that bad. The pictures are all tucked away in one main album ("Photos from posts"). It isn't really getting in the way.

It is getting in the way from other points of view. Namely, the Gallery application on Android devices. This is actually the reason why I started researching this and why I wrote this blog post. My Motorola Xoom and Logitech Revue both have a Gallery application and they are both pretty slick. But I quickly noticed a slew of albums that just had dates for names. These albums are certainly cluttering things up.

Here are the results on the Xoom (Figure E) and the Revue (Figure F):

Figure E

Figure F

As you can see.. generated sub-albums everywhere! Ruining my Gallery experience.

A quick solution would be that these sub-albums should be appearing as one big album ("Photos from posts") that I would have to just ignore on the Xoom and Revue. It's not perfect, but it would be better than seeing dozens of one-picture albums.

I hope a solution for this arises soon. If you know of a solution, please leave a comment!