Wizardry object profiling in Muggle world

I have always thought of my blog and to a major extent the hard disk drives or any such storage device as an example for Pensieve. According to Pottermore’s fact file on Pensieve,

MAGICAL PROPERTIES

Memories can be siphoned into the basin to be recalled at a later date

PURPOSE
To clear the mind of certain memories; to examine memories at a later date; to show memories to a second party

That is precisely what we do over here in our blogs, at least, I know that I do it over my travel blog, so that I can revisit my travels anytime and reminisce about those moments.

Do you have any other example that can fit with the fact file of Pensieve?

Now that, that is out of the way, let us see one more object profile from Pottermore. It is the Marauder’s Map.

MAGICAL PROPERTIES

Shows the location of any person or ghost on Hogwart’s grounds, isn’t fooled by an Animagus or an Invisibility Cloak

PURPOSE

Mischief

 

When I saw this I was reminded of the Google Location services,  even though it isn’t exactly the same but still very close in concept. Do you know that you can login to your google account and enable the location services and can share your current location to people whom you chose to share with. They will be able to know the exact location of yours, irrespective of the latitude and longitude. The only difference is that it is a bit secure than Marauder’s Map because you select the people you want to share your location with and not just any random stranger (even though I think they can if they hack it a bit , I guess…every such thing has a hack or a loophole).

What do you think? Anything else resemble the Marauder’s Map for you?

 

 

I am a Beeeeeee!!!

Google’s Doodle for today was related to Earth Day. But there was a link asking ‘which animal are you?‘. Now, how can I resist that quiz? I love these kind of small quizzes right ? So obviously I took it and look what I got…
Yay!!! A Honeybee…. Isn’t that cool…..Which animal are you?

Eiffel Tower

When I saw Google’s Doodle for today, which said “Google celebrates the 126th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower opening its doors to the public for the first time” , it reminded me of my trip to Paris, even though I didn’t manage to get time to climb that tower. May be next time. It’s a beautiful structure to photograph, especially during that night with the full moon in the background. Here are some of my photographs of that ‘the enormous metallic structure which is now a globally recognized, iconic piece of architecture‘

Auto Awesome!!!

Google+ has this feature called ‘Auto Awesome’ which you might have known if you share your photographs through it. Sometimes they are very subtle but sometimes they surprise me a LOT. Like this one. Yesterday I uploaded some photographs to share with my friends (I was the main photographer in the tour so I had the most number of photographs to share) in Google+ and this one was taken with my phone while doing a walk around the estate. It was close to sunset and the view was beautiful.

A few minutes after my upload and share, I got a notification that there has been an Auto Awesome picture added. And I was just floored by the picture. For a second, I was wondering if it indeed was my photograph or if it was a painting. I couldn’t have edited it any better. Well done “Auto Awesome” feature 🙂

Auto Stories and Movies

I hardly check my Google+, especially the one that is associated with this blog. I do have my Europe and UK Tour photos uploaded and shared in this account. But I never thought that Google will use them to create something out of it. From the pictures

a) It automatically created a story ‘Trip to Italy and Switzerland’ which contains only the photographs of Italy and Lucerne. I wonder how did it / they actually filter out only the pictures specifically of those places alone from the album ?

b) It created a movie out of the photographs with some good music and my Google name at the beginning. Shucks, now this is where I would have been really happy to see my real name (sigh).

I am not sure how I feel about it, should I be worried that they are able to do these kind of things with the publicly shared pictures ? I tried to search for options to create a story, but nope, no way to do it. You can edit and change the title and stuff but creation of it is not allowed. The movie…where did they pick up the music for that ? Is someone sitting in Google and doing these stuff or are they creating bots to do such things ? Honestly it is a bit scary. But its cool too. Gee, talk about confusing me more when I am already in a state where I just want to go and hibernate for say another 2 years ? It is just one of those weeks. And Google, even though is my friend, does scare me a bit too.