A 23rd-Century "Where's Waldo" Trek Parody. Search for Spock: A Star Trek Book of Explorations, beams the "Where's Waldo" concept into the 23rd century. You get to search for Spock yourself in this parody, which also includes activities crafts, games, and puzzles from Star Trek fandom. $14.99
For folks that are worried about the storage space on their phone, Google has a new way to help ease the load.
Today Google released Files Go Beta for Android devices. It’s billed primarily as a file management app, letting users quickly locate content on their devices in one spot. It will also show users how much space they’ve used on their phone, automatically recognize apps that aren’t used all that often, and recommend ways to free up space. Files Go Beta cam also identify duplicate images and suggest to delete them or clear up the cache on your device. And it does it all with Google’s card-based user interface.
If you want to share files, that’s possible, too. File sharing works similarly to Apple’s AirDrop feature, meaning you won’t need an internet connection to drop a file to a friend from your device to theirs. They just have to be near your device.
This is a beta app, and Google notes that there could be some bugs and issues that arise while using the app.
Files Go Beta seems like a worthwhile app in just the file management department, but adding the ability to quickly send files to friends and family is an added bonus. Do you think you’ll try out it out?
From whence does this Raclette personal cheese melter come? For those unfamiliar, Raclette is both a big ol' hunk of Swiss cheese, and a Swiss method of melting layers of the cheese over a fire, and scraping them off onto the likes of potatoes and charcuterie.
More recently, Raclette has also become associated with a tabletop party grill. Eaters cook their own meat and veg on top, and then melt the cheese into a hot mess of ooey-gooey promised land over their cooked food in a little tray underneath.
Boska Holland's twist on the original Raclette method shrinks the melting source from a roaring campfire to a set of 3 tea lights that sit underneath a nonstick Barbeclette pan to heat it. Once your cheese is bubbly, lift the pan off its oak frame and use the included spatula to slide it off onto anything from nachos to burgers to Swiss-Canadian poutine.
The Partyclette ToGo isn't limited to Swiss cheese. You can place cheddar, havarti, halloumi, Kraft singles, or any cheese that melts well onto the personal cheese melter and light it up.
I've got it. It's nice. At least on the app, I doesn't show you you're actual limit. It shows you how many you have least once you've got less than about twenty left.
It looks like Twitter was pleased with the 280-character tweet limit test that it kicked off back in September, because today the company announced that it’s rolling the limit out worldwide.
Most everyone on Twitter is now getting the 280-character tweet limit. The exceptions are users that speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, which will stick with the 140-character limit. That’s because “cramming is not an issue in these languages,” says Twitter.
If you’re worried that this will adversely affect your Twitter experience, the company says that there’s no need to be concerned. There were a lot of 280-character tweets during the first few days of its test, Twitter explains, but then only 5 percent of tweets were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were more than 190 characters.
The 280-character tweet limit is now rolling out, so you should see it shortly if you don’t already.
Google Search is a quick way to get information on businesses, especially if you want to check to see how busy a place might be before you’re able to pop in for a visit yourself. And while businesses in general have been supported for awhile to show wait times within Google Search, restaurants have been missing up until now.
Google announced today that it will begin rolling out restaurant wait time support within Google Search soon. The feature will be deployed in Google Maps soon, too.
With this feature, users will be able to use Google Search to look up a restaurant and, in addition to getting all the standard information like open and close times, the address, and even reviews, visitors will be able to see when the restaurant is busy. Users will also be able to click on a specific time to get estimated wait times for that period.
This particular feature has been a nice addition for Google Search, and with the inclusion of restaurants should go a long way to helping visitors.
A recommendation letter (or a reference letter) is written by
a manager (or coworker) to highlight an employee’s skills and achievements
during the time they worked together. It also contains information about the
employee’s attitude at work to give a potential employer a glimpse of what it’s
like to work with them.
Companies often request recommendation letters when
conducting a background check before extending a job offer to an applicant. In
some cases, they require applicants to send one a few weeks after submitting their resume.
Students also use recommendation letters when applying for
school admission, scholarship grants, and research grants.
Do you know how to write a great letter of recommendation? (graphic source)
In this guide, I’ll show you how to write a professional recommendation letter, so you know what to do when a colleague
or former employees requests one from you.
Why Make an Effort in Writing a Good Recommendation Letter?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re not the one getting a
job, so why bother writing a good letter?
Below are three reasons it’s worth making an effort to write
a good recommendation letter.
A potential
source of referral: What if by some twist of fate, you wind up applying where
the person you recommended now works? If you helped them before, they'd be more inclined to return the favor.
It’s a good professional deed,
and it’s nice to know that what you wrote helped someone get a job.
If the person who made the request was a model
employee, then you owe it to that person to write a recommendation letter
worthy of all the effort and sacrifices they made while working with you.
How to Write a Recommendation Letter + Examples and Templates
Use the company’s letterhead to make your recommendation
letter look formal. Put the date when you wrote the letter on the first line, and then write the recipient’s name,
position, and business address below that.
Here's an Example to Follow
October 22, 2017
John Smith
Chief Marketing Officer, ABC Startup
123 Main St. Northeast Harbor, ME 04662
Since this is a formal letter, start the greeting with “Dear” followed by the right salutation
for the recipient, so write either “Mr.”,
“Ms.”, or their professional
designation, such as “Professor” or “Dr.” for doctor.
The use of informal greetings such as “Hi” or “Hello” may be
frowned upon in certain industries where recruiters
and decision-makers are strict about such professional formalities, so
err on the side of caution.
2. Open Your Recommendation Letter Right
Let's look at how to start a letter of recommendation. The first paragraph or the opening of the recommendation
letter is easy to write because all you have to do is mention the details of
your working relationship with the person you’re recommending.
Include:
Your job title
The name of the person you’re
recommending
Their job title
Your working relationship: boss or
co-worker
Length of time you worked together
Example
“As
the Project Manager for Spectrum Finance, I was Kevin’s direct supervisor from
2010 to 2013. We worked closely on several product launches, and I enjoyed watching him grow as a business analyst in
our team.”
3. Write a Good Recommendation Letter Body
The letter body has two to three paragraphs that include
details of the skills, knowledge, and achievements of the person you’re
recommending.
To keep the letter concise, start with a list of the
person’s areas of expertise, and then try to remember situations where you witnessed
those strengths such as previous projects or a problem they solved at work.
Once you have this list, pick two to three items that best represent the
candidate’s value to a potential employer. You can also use the Challenge-Action-Result
format to write a short but compelling story about the candidate.
Write about your thoughts on the candidate’s soft skills or
attitude as an employee in the last paragraph of the body. Employers don’t hire applicants based on technical
skills alone, so mention positive attributes such as dependability, initiative,
and honesty, as well. If you feel like those descriptors don’t fit the
person you’re recommending, try:
Good communications
Leadership
Creativity
Analytical thinking
Teamwork
Example:
“Cassie’s knowledge of marketing and expertise in
public relations was a huge advantage to our business. She used her skills in
influencer marketing and writing to get our small brand noticed by prominent publications such as Marie Claire and
Cosmopolitan.
She also completed her tasks with minimal supervision,
that’s why I was confident in giving her more
significant projects to handle. Despite her hectic schedule, she’s
always on excellent terms with her colleagues and other teams.”
4. Nail the Recommendation Letter's Closing Paragraph
Write that you’d be willing to hire the person again, but
only if you can honestly say this. If not, you can end the recommendation
letter on a positive note by emphasizing how valuable the person’s contribution
was to the company, or stress how that the person’s skills will be an asset to
whoever hires them next. End the paragraph with an invitation to contact you if
the recipient has follow-up questions.
Examples
“For all the reasons I wrote above, I give Mark my
strongest recommendation for the position of Senior Web Developer. Please don’t
hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.”
“Louie is the kind of employee I would hire again with
no hesitation. I know she’ll make an excellent graphic designer and a valuable asset
to your team. Please email me if you have any questions.”
5. Close With a Professional Signature
Don’t just write “Sincerely”
followed by your name and leave it at that. Include your job title, office
email address, and work telephone number below your signature to show the
recipient that you’re a legitimate source of recommendation—not a phony paid to
give a good recommendation.
Those are the basic
parts of a recommendation letter. If you want
more examples, check out the fill-in-the-blanks template below and download the FREE PDF attachment for this tutorial.
Date
Recipient’s Complete Name
Recipient’s Job Title
Recipient’s Office Address
Dear Mr./Ms.Last Name,
It’s my pleasure to recommend my former subordinate/co-worker, Name, for the position of Job Title in your company.
Name worked with me as
a Previous Job Title at Your Company’s Name for almost Number of Years. During
that time, I was impressed by his/her overall performance, particularly in
his/her knowledge in Skill. He/She consistently worked hard to achieve Result
for our team.
Name is a reliable
Previous Job Title and a joy to work with who doesn’t hesitate to help his/her co-workers. He/she is also an excellent communicator and Soft Skill, that’s why
he/she doesn’t have trouble maintaining a positive relationship with our
clients. I’m confident Name will be a great asset to your team, just as he/she
was in ours.
Please contact me if you’d like to discuss Name’s
professional experience further.
Sincerely,
Your name and job title
Email address
Office telephone number
3 Quick Tips to Write a Better Recommendation
Letter
Tip 1. Keep it Short
The letter’s recipient could be a third-party recruiter, a company hired to do background checks, or the future manager of the person
you’re recommending. Whoever it is, that person will be busy with other items
on their to-do lists. They don’t have time to
read a long and rambling letter, so keep your recommendation letter concise.
Limit it to three to five paragraphs and no more than one page.
Tip 2. Send it Using the Right Format
If the company doing the background check sent the request,
you could send the letter using the same
method they used, unless their instructions say otherwise. If the request came from a former employee or
co-worker, just ask them how they’d like you to send it.
In most cases, employers prefer that you send the
recommendation letter via email by pasting the contents of the letter in the body of the email, and attaching it in both PDF and MS Word format.
Tip 3. Avoid Generic Descriptions
Bland adjectives like hardworking, dedicated, and friendly,
don’t help anyone. These words won’t add value to the application of the person
you’re recommending, and it won’t help the recipient decide on the candidate fit
either. These adjectives are nothing but empty promises that don’t demonstrate
how the person exemplifies them.
Replace these adjectives with a combination of strong verbs and specific examples. So instead
of writing that your coworker is dedicated
to their craft, talk about their eagerness to learn new skills and work on
different projects.
What If You Can’t Write a Positive Recommendation?
Decline the request. I know it’s not as simple as it sounds, but that’s the best you can do without lying to yourself and the person who
will read the letter.
It’s also better for the candidate if you say no. If you
wrote a lukewarm recommendation and their potential employer reads it, they might decide not to continue with the job
offer.
It might feel awkward to decline the request if you can’t
provide a good reason for saying no. Just say you’re not comfortable writing a
recommendation letter and that a letter from someone else might serve them
better.
If you really can’t back out because it’s company policy for
you to provide a reference, just write a brief
letter listing the person’s job title and responsibilities. Alison Green of Ask
a Manager has more tips on this subject at her article
on Inc.
Using a number of hand-drawn diagrams, minutephysics goes over the various types of time travel featured in books and movies like Primer, Harry Potter, Back to the Future, and Looper. The video covers free will, do-overs, alternate timelines, multiple selves, time machines within time machines, and many other things.
The debate appears to be between some of Unicode’s most prolific
contributors and typographers (Unicode was initially established
to develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can
be read across all computers and operating systems), and those in
the consortium who focus primarily on the evolution of emojis. The
two chief critics — Michael Everson and Andrew West, both
typographers — say that the emoji proposal process has become too
commercial and frivolous, thereby cheapening the Unicode
Consortium’s long body of work.
Their argument centers around “Frowning Pile Of Poo,” one of the
emojis under consideration for the June 2018 class. In an Oct. 22
memo to the Unicode Technical Committee, Everson tore into the
committee over the submission calling it “damaging … to the
Unicode standard.”
“Organic waste isn’t cute,” Everson wrote, aghast that the
technical committee would even deign to consider additional
excremoji. “It is bad enough that the [Emoji Subcommittee] came up
with it, but it beggars belief that the [Unicode Technical
Committee] actually approved it,” he wrote. Everson continued:
“The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute
graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely
everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a
CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT?
PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE
MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?”
I’m all for taking most of the Unicode Consortium’s work deliberately and seriously, but emoji are inherently frivolous. The frivolity of emoji is why they’re so sensationally popular.
This Nintendo Game Boy hand towel wins a 1-up, a Tetris, and a completed Triforce. Thank Elizabeth Dean of Seams Geeky for conceiving and handmaking the cotton water wicker, especially if you're on the click-hunt for a gift for a geek.
Show off your Game Boy loyalty hanging the hand towel in the bathroom or, better, double up on the the handheld console love in the kitchen, dangling your Game Boy hand towel from the handle of your FreezerBoy-clad refrigerator.
With G Suite, we’re focused on building tools that help you bring great ideas to life. We know meetings are the main entry point for teams to share and shape ideas into action. That’s why we recently introduced Hangouts Meet, an evolution of Google Hangouts designed specifically for the workplace, and Jamboard, a way to bring creative brainstorming directly into meetings. Combined with Calendar and Drive, these tools extend collaboration beyond four walls and transform how we work—so every team member has a voice, no matter location.
But the transformative power of video meetings is wasted if it’s not affordable and accessible to all organizations. So today, we’re introducing Hangouts Meet hardware—a new way to bring high-quality video meetings to businesses of any size. We’re also announcing new software updates designed to make your meetings even more productive.
Introducing Hangouts Meet hardware
Hangouts Meet hardware is a cost-effective way to bring high-quality video meetings to your business. The hardware kit consists of four components: a touchscreen controller, speakermic, 4K sensor camera and ASUS Chromebox.
The new controller provides a modern, intuitive touchscreen interface that allows people to easily join scheduled events from Calendar or view meeting details with a single tap. You can pin and mute team members, as well as control the camera, making managing meetings easy. You can also add participants with the dial-a-phone feature and present from a laptop via HDMI. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can record the meeting to Drive.
Designed by Google, the Hangouts Meet speakermic actively eliminates echo and background noise to provide crisp, clear audio. Up to five speakermics can be daisy-chained together with a single wire, providing coverage for larger rooms without tabletop clutter.
The 4K sensor camera with 120° field of view easily captures everyone at the table, even in small spaces that some cameras find challenging. Each camera component is fine-tuned to make meetings more personal and distraction-free. Built with machine learning, the camera can intelligently detect participants and automatically crop and zoom to frame them.
Powered by Chrome OS, the ASUS Chromebox makes deploying and managing Hangouts Meet hardware easier than ever. The Chromebox can automatically push updates to other components in the hardware kit, making it easier for large organizations to ensure security and reliability. Remote device monitoring and management make it easy for IT administrators to stay in control, too.
New Hangouts Meet enhancements greatly improve user experience and simplify our meeting rooms. It also creates new ways for our team to collaborate.Bradley Rhodes
IT Analyst, Woolworths Limited, Australia
Says Bradley Rhodes, IT Analyst End User Computing at Woolworths Ltd Australia, “We are very excited about the new Hangouts Meet hardware, particularly the easy-to-use touchscreen. The enhancements greatly improve the user experience and simplify our meeting rooms. We have also seen it create new ways for our team to collaborate, like via the touch-to-record functionality which allows absent participants to catch up more effectively.”
More features, better meetings
We’re also announcing updates to Meet based on valuable feedback. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise edition customer, you can:
Record meetings and save them to Drive. Can’t make the meeting? No problem. Record your meeting directly to Drive. Even without a Hangouts Meet hardware kit, Meet on web can save your team’s ideas with a couple of clicks.
Host meetings with up to 50 participants. Meet supports up to 50 participants in a meeting, especially useful for bringing global teams together from both inside and outside of your organization.
Dial in from around the globe. The dial-in feature in Meet is now available in more than a dozen markets. If you board a flight in one country and land in another, Meet will automatically update your meeting’s dial-in listing to a local phone number.
These new features are rolling out gradually. The hardware kit is priced at $1999 and is available in select markets around the globe beginning today.
Whether you're collaborating in Jamboard, recording meetings and referencing discussions in Drive or scheduling your next team huddle in Calendar, Hangouts Meet hardware makes it even easier to bring the power of your favorite G Suite tools into team meetings. For more information, visit the G Suite website.
Josh Buchea rounds up all the stuff that could be put into the <head> for various reasons.
Fun fact I just learned, the only acceptable elements in the head are <link>, <script>, <meta>, <title>, and <noscript> (update: also <base> and <template>). If you put anything else in there at all, all browsers will abruptly end the <head> and start the <body>.
Also, this proliferation of stuff-in-the-head is at least in part why manifest.json is a thing.
That escalated rather quickly.
This is pretty much what happens when they get sick. It's amazing how much there little stomachs can hold.
