New Question Types in Google Forms

Google Forms added two new question types for dates and time. There's a pretty useful date picker, but you can also enter dates manually. You can customize the time questions and enable "duration" to ask questions like "how much time a day do you spend on Facebook every day?".



To add a question to your form, click the arrow next to the "Add item" button and select "date" or "time" from the list of question types.

If you're wondering what's next for Google Forms, the source code reveals that Google will add support for rich-text editing, embedding images and that Google Forms will integrate with Fusion Tables and Google Scripts (codename "maestro").

{ Thanks, Herin and Daniel. }

Are These Circles Moving? 6 Places To Find Amazing Optical Illusions Online

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve adored optical illusions. Believe it or not, but 1993 found me browsing my parents’ hefty Escher art book, looking for more and more drawings I couldn’t quite figure out. This fascination continued through the famous Autostereogram era, when I learned to see those cool 3D images in seconds, becoming a source of jealousy to all my cross-eyed friends.

Optical illusions, be it Escher-style drawings, surprising geometrical shapes, well-taken photographs, or even intricate video illusions, are a great way to pass some idle moments, without resorting to yet another endless Facebook or Twitter browse. It can also be quite an educational one — what better way is there to learn about things such as complimentary colors but seeing them with your own eyes?

Not surprisingly, the Web is full of visual illusions of all kinds, and if you enter the words “optical illusions” in your trusty Google search box, you’ll find many good specimens. But here at MakeUseOf, we strive to doing the hard work for you, scanning the multitudes of Google results, and finding the absolute best places to get some optical illusion fun. So get ready to be amazed!

Optical Spy

Can you believe that all center dots in the cubes above are the same size? Optical Spy is a great place to find dozens of original optical illusions, visual challenges, amazing anamorphic street art, and other visual gems. The website is divided into different categories, and includes a blog where you can read more about special visual effects and why they occur. If you like visual challenges such as hidden words or tasks you have to complete only with your eyes, you’re going to love Optical Spy.

Mighty Optical Illusions

The above video shows a simple immobile structure, but for some reason, balls placed on it defy the law of gravity. This is one of the many illusions you’ll find on Mighty Optical Illusions. The website has been around for quite a while — long enough to have been mentioned in our previous post about optical illusions back in 2010.

Mighty Optical Illusions is a mighty collection of everything that’s visually interesting, including photos taken at just the right moment, works of art, and videos, along with regular illusions. Many of the illusions come with fascinating explanations, and the “Random Illusion” button on top can keep you busy for hours. I did find that videos in posts sometimes don’t match the text above them, but all in all the website offers a fun experience.

Illusion of the Year

Look at the mask above, do you see anything special about it? If not, I’ll solve the mystery for you at the end of this paragraph. Illusion of the Year brings together amazing illusions from all over, picking the best ones every year. The illusions are sometimes created especially for the contest, so it’s a good place to find illusions you won’t find on other websites. The Illusion of the Year website is not the best looking one I’ve ever seen, but sections such as the top rated illusions are a real gem for illusion lovers.

And no, I didn’t forget about the image above! Look carefully in the center part of the mask, is it really one face, or two faces of a man and a woman kissing?

Brain Bashers

Are the lines on the board straight or curvy? Brain Bashers is a website dedicated to much more than optical illusions, but its optical-illusion section boasts a respectable collection of what I would call “classic” illusions, like the one you see above. Despite its unimpressive looks, Brain Bashers offers a fun experience for illusion lovers, as it turns many optical illusions into dynamic challenges. Most illusions featured on Brain Bashers comes with a bar you can move your mouse over. When you hover over the bar, the image changes, and the solution comes to light. Try it!

Pinterest

Can you manage to see 4 complete circles? As a social network dedicated solely to images, Pinterest is the perfect place to find cool illusions. All you have to do is search for them. The search will not yield a consistent feed of optical illusions, but will definitely bring up some cool visual games and puns you’re bound to enjoy. And since Pinterest’s results rely on the way people categorize their pins, and not on Google’s algorithms, there’s lots to be found you may miss on a simple Google search.

Brusspup – Illusions and Science

Looking for some awesome visual illusions on video? Tim already found 10 incredible ones you really don’t want to miss in a previous Stuff to Watch article. After you’re done with those, though, you’re going to want to head over to the brusspup YouTube Channel, and watch everything you can get your hands on. Some of these already appear in Tim’s post, but there’s plenty more to watch. Believe me, you don’t want to miss these.

Your Turn

The real challenge with finding good optical illusions online is that many of them hide under websites that look like they were made in the early 90s. This doesn’t mean there aren’t other good websites I missed, or never managed to find. Know of a wonderful place to see some optical illusions? Do you even like optical illusions? Tell us all about it in the comments!

Image credit: Optical Spy

The post Are These Circles Moving? 6 Places To Find Amazing Optical Illusions Online appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The Old Google Image Search in Chrome

There's a weird regression in Google Image Search if you use Chrome 27+ and enable "Extended Instant API" in chrome://flags. Extended Instant is a feature I've mentioned a few months ago and it's still a work in progress. It integrates Chrome with Google Search, replaces the new tab page with a special version of the Google homepage and removes the navigation bar and the search box from Google's search pages.



Back to Google Image Search. For some reason, when Extended Instant is enabled, Google Image Search switches to the old interface: thumbnails are smaller and you can mouse over to see more details about the images. When you click an image result, Google sends you to a new page that loads the original image file.

Google's Red Sign In Button

Google now shows a red "sign in" button on the homepage, at the top of the search results pages, in Google Maps, Google News, Google Translate and many other services. The button is a lot more visible than the old gray "sign in" button.

Here's the Google Image Search homepage in Internet Explorer. The red button clearly stands out from all the other promotional messages.

After the Gmail sign in page, Google's standard sign in page also has a new interface: "One password. All of Google. Want to enjoy the best of Google? Just stay signed in. One username and password is all you need to unlock more features from services you use every day, like Gmail, Maps, Google+, and YouTube."

{ Thanks, Jérôme. }

Open Gmail Links Using Google Apps in iOS

The latest version of the Gmail app for iOS added a feature that opens links using other Google apps: Chrome, Google Maps and YouTube, assuming you've already installed them. It works well for Google Maps links and YouTube links, but not that well for other links: some open using Chrome, but most links open using the internal browser of the Gmail app.

If you don't like this feature, you can disable it by tapping the settings icon next to the account switcher, picking Google Apps and unchecking the apps you don't want to handle Gmail links.



You can't change the default browser in iOS, but some Google apps include an option to use Chrome. For example, the YouTube app opens all the links using Chrome, if you've installed the app, and you can disable this feature from the settings. When you open a page from a Google app like YouTube, Gmail or Google+, Chrome shows a button that sends you to the previous app, just like the Android back button.

How To Set Windows As Default OS In Boot Camp On Mac

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



Installing Windows on a Mac with the help of Boot Camp Assistant is the best method out there to run Windows on Mac hardware. There are a couple of advantages of using this method over other methods. Boot Camp is an official Apple software, which means that when you install Windows on Mac machine, all [...]

How To Shutdown Windows 8 Quickly By Changing Power Button Action To Shutdown

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL POST



The lack of easy access to shutdown, hibernate, sleep, and restart options in the newest iteration of Windows operating system has forced many users to install third-party Start menu programs, pin shutdown and hibernate options to the Start screen, and also add shutdown, restart, and hibernate to the Windows + X power menu. While it’s [...]

Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results

Producing your own video content is great. Search engines and users alike love video content. It increases user engagement – keeping visitors on your page – but moreover it’s just makes your content more interesting, adding value. You’re already doing this? Awesome – but do you upload them all to YouTube and just embed them on your site? Yes? Then you’re doing it wrong.

We’ve talked about Rich Snippets before – pieces of meta you can add to a page that Google will understand and potentially include in the search results. Authorship is one example; here’s one of my own search results, standing out nicely on a video game review search.

In short, users are more likely to click on something when it’s not just a bland text result.

What you really want then, is for Google to recognize that your page contains a nice juicy video that you put time into creating, and to rank that page higher or with potentially more visibility. Here’s another result from the same search result, though it’s actually ranking further down the page since it’s less relevant. Still, it highlights nicely rich, video content.

How To Get Video Previews into Google

This is not an easy task, and as ever – there’s no guarantee that your site will benefit from them. However, here are the basic steps needed:

1. Host your own videos. Don’t use YouTube.

2. Make sure they are marked up correctly.

3. Use an HTML5 video player.

3. Submit a special video sitemap to Google.

What’s Wrong With YouTube?

There’s nothing wrong with YouTube per se, but you’ll be in competition with yourself. YouTube is indeed a great inbound marketing tool. Users may stumble across your video, love the content and try to find more at a site address listed, particularly if it’s a viral teaser or “full instructions at the link in the description” type video. But they may also just click through to another related video and never visit your site at all.

The point is that when you make YouTube videos to accompany the page you’re trying to rank with, you’ll more than likely be outranked by your own video as a YouTube result; it won’t be a pretty thumbnail pointing to your page, it’ll be pointing to YouTube. There’s a time and place and a reason to use YouTube videos. Outranking your own content is not one of them.

Hosting & Player

The simplest option here is to upload video content to your own site, so we’ll use that for demonstration purposes. There are ways of using a premium Vimeo account, or some other third party hosts, but since you already have webspace you might as well use it. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic, be sure to have this all cached with a CDN (see my tips on how to speed up a WordPress blog).

Next, we need a suitable player – something that outputs HTML5, but can fallback to Flash or Silverlight when absolutely needed. For this, let’s use MediaElements.js; it’s a capable player for all kinds of media. You can find it directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Usually we would embed the video using a shortcode like this:

[video src="myvideo.mp4"]

However, this won’t result in Schema.org markup being used, so instead we’re going to manually code it like this:

<video width="600" height="400" controls="controls" preload="true" itemprop="video" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">
<source src="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<meta itemprop="name" content="Technophilia Technology Podcast, Episode 63 - Generic Podcast Listener"/>
<meta itemprop="contentURL" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" />
<meta itemprop="description" content="Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast" />
<meta itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png" />
</video>

Which still results in this:

Warning: Don’t switch back to visual editor or your code will be butchered apart. Yes, not ideal. The best would be to adjust or code your own plugin that would load the MediaElements.js player AND output suitable markup. Nevertheless, this is what we have.

Check your markup using the Rich Snippet Tester, but be aware that it won’t show a video preview in the tool – just check if the markup is correct:

Video Sitemaps

Unfortunately, this is where things get really difficult. If you search the WordPress plugins directory for “Video sitemaps”, you’ll find a few plugins claiming to do this. However, they only work with YouTube links, which for our purposes is completely worthless. There isn’t a free WordPress plugin that will work for our needs, but you can manually code a video sitemap like this (I’m being lazy and not writing a proper description, but you should):

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"> 
 <url> 
 <loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/2013/63-generic-podcast-listener/</loc>
 <video:video>
 <video:thumbnail_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png</video:thumbnail_loc> 
 <video:title>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:title>
 <video:description>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:description>
 <video:content_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4</video:content_loc>
 <video:duration>5204</video:duration>
 </video:video> 
 </url> 
</urlset>

(included above are the basic minimum of required fields, except for duration – in seconds – which optional but recommended)

Alternatively, Yoast – the creator of the famous WordPress SEO plugin (featured on our Best WordPress Plugins) – offers a premium plugin to handle this side of things, and it integrates nicely with the MediaElements.js player. The downside is the price, at a whopping $60 for a single site or $250 for a developer licence. Then again, if you’re putting at least an hour into making each video, they really deserve a little love and attention on the SEO side.

Submission To Google

Finally, log into Google Webmaster Tools and point it toward your video sitemap. Mission accomplished.

It’s a shame there’s not an easier way to do this, but that’s what you get for being on the bleeding edge of Internet developments. Video previews in the search results will give you a competitive edge, but remember – if your accompanying content or the video itself isn’t up to scratch, that effort will have been wasted.

Do you know of a better way to handle this in WordPress? Let us know.

The post Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Why Won’t Windows Play My DVD Or Blu-ray Disc?

You insert a DVD into your Windows 8 computer – you want to watch a movie. Nothing happens.

You try opening Windows Media Player. It can’t play the disk.

What’s going on with Windows 8 and DVDs? And for that matter, Blu-ray discs?

You’re not the first person to ask this, and you won’t be the last. The answer, basically, is that Windows 8 cannot play DVDs or Blu-Ray disks out of the box.

Why? Because the software technology for playing these disks isn’t free — Microsoft previously paid $2 for every copy of Windows sold, just for the right to use the patented technology needed to play DVDs . Considering the ever-increasing number of devices without optical drives, Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth paying for features many people can’t even use.

So what is a movie-loving Windows 8 user to do? There are basically two options: finding third party software that can play your disks, or paying Microsoft for the privilege. Let’s go over both possibilities.

Option A: Install A Different Media Player

Windows 8 can’t play DVDs out of the box, but that doesn’t mean third party programs can’t. We’ve written a lot about VLC, and this program can easily play any DVD (and unencrypted Blu-Ray disks – there’s experimental support for encrypted Blu-Rays in the works, but that’s an issue for another article entirely).

VLC can be a little hard to use, but not for playing DVDs: just click “File” followed by “Open Disc”.

In most cases the menu will show up, allowing you to play your DVD however you like.

Want more of a lean-back experience? I highly recommend XBMC – so much so that I even wrote an unofficial XBMC manual. The program is designed to make browsing media on your computer easy, but also supports DVDs out of the box. It takes some setting up, but you’ll end up liking it – and the DVD playback is basically automatic.

Both of these options are fantastic for DVDs, but somewhat lacking for Blu-Ray. The format, created by Sony, is a tough nut for free software to crack – it’s heavily encrypted, so you may need something commercial for the job. You’ll need to pay for software, such as WinDVD Pro.

Before you buy anything, though, know that most computers that come with a Blu-Ray drive include some sort of Blu-Ray software. Check your computer for software if it’s new, or check your collection of disks if you upgraded to Windows 8. You’ll probably find something that can play Blu-Ray discs.

Option B: Give Microsoft Your Money

Couldn’t get the above solutions to work? Well, you can also pay Microsoft. It’s not as though Redmond simply stopped offering DVD and Blu-Ray support – they just started charging for it, along with their Media Center software.

Microsoft briefly offered this software free of charge, but that period is over. How much does it cost now? That depends on which version of Windows 8 you currently have: Windows 8 Pro users need to pay considerably less. Here’s what you can expect to pay:

• $99.99 if you’re just using Windows 8 (ie, not Windows 8 Pro) – you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro Pack, which comes with Media Center and a bunch of other, unrelated features. Microsoft itself advises people to purchase third-party DVD software instead of doing this.

• $9.99 if you’re already using Windows 8 Pro – you’ll only need to download the Media Center Pack.

Upgrading is simple: just open the Control Panel, then click “Add Features to Windows 8″. You’ll be shown the upgrade available, depending on which version of Windows 8 you’re using.

Enterprise users: you cannot download the Media Center Pack. Stick with the free and/or commercial options outlined above.

Conclusion

Is it annoying that Microsoft stopped supporting DVDs by default? Yes. Is it understandable? Considering they were paying for patents customers may or may not even be using, probably. As a long-time Ubuntu user I grew accustomed to these shortcomings, but it’s a new problem for Windows users – and an especially frustrating one for people who paid for an upgrade only to lose features.

What software are you using to play DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on your computer? Fill us all in using the comments below, or just complain bitterly about the change. Whatever you prefer.

The post Why Won’t Windows Play My DVD Or Blu-ray Disc? appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Things You Should Do After Installing WordPress

After you have installed WordPress, you may tweak a few settings to further optimize the performance and security of your WordPress website. Here's a complete guide to optimizing your WordPress installation.

---

This story, Things You Should Do After Installing WordPress, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/05/2013 under WordPress, Internet.

The Most Essential WordPress Plugins

See this always-updated list of the best WordPress plugins that will add new functionality to your WordPress blog. All listed plugins are available for download in the WordPress.org repository.

---

This story, The Most Essential WordPress Plugins, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/05/2013 under WordPress, Software.

Google Image Search Shows the Images From a Page

There are many extensions and applications that let you see all the images from a web page. Another way to do that is to use Google Image Search. Search for [site:URL], where URL is the address of the page. This doesn't work for domain names, subdomains and subdirectories because Google shows the images for all the URLs that start with the name you've entered.



Example: [site:http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html].

It's not a new feature, it's just another way to use the site: operator.

Tag Friends On Instagram Photos With The New ‘Photos Of You’ Feature [Updates]

A new Instagram update for Android and iOS brings a new feature that lets you people in your tag your Instagram photos. This Facebook-borrowed feature is not surprising since the social network bought the photo-sharing app lock, stock, and barrel. Some slight differences remain, however: The new Photos of You Instagram feature allows only the photo taker to tag a photo, and not everyone the photo is shared with. You can tag not only your friends, but any Instagram account, social hangouts like coffee shops, or even a pet.

When you upload a photo to your Instagram account, the app will give you the option to tag the photo with the usernames of your friends. The Photos of You section will appear in your profile and a notification will tell you when someone else has tagged you in a photo. You can adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it.

The idea is to thread together all your memories, some in photos taken by you and some taken by friends. It should also make it easier to share and discover photos around specific tags and people. Earlier, you had to trawl your activity feed to search for mentions of your username.

You can play around privately with the Photos of You feature until May 16^th, after which the Photos of You section would go public on all profiles. Read the specific how-to on Instagram’s Help Center.

Source: Instagram Blog

The post Tag Friends On Instagram Photos With The New ‘Photos Of You’ Feature [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.