Google

After installing Google Drive on macOS, I suspected it was a bug in the program. Even though my system language is set to Traditional Chinese, Google Drive displayed Simplified Chinese. It looked really unfamiliar, so I researched it and found a fix to share with everyone. Just open Terminal and enter the following command, then restart Google Drive, and it will switch to Traditional Chinese: defaults write com.google.GoogleDrive AppleLanguages '("zh-TW")'

BigQuery lets you link a table to a Google Sheet stored in Google Drive, so the table updates right away whenever the Google Sheet changes. When you use this kind of federated table, some people run into an Access Denied error. Queries in the WebUI work fine, but when you query the table with the bq command line tool, you get the following error message: Access Denied: BigQuery BigQuery: No OAuth token with Google Drive scope was found...

Scheduling a time is an art! Every time I go back and forth over email to settle on a meeting time, I wish I could just send my calendar to the other person so they can pick a slot that works. Clean and simple! I kept thinking that the powerful Google should have a feature like this. Sure enough, after some research, I found that Google Calendar lets you share your calendar with anyone as a URL. All your events are anonymized as “Busy,” so the other person can only see that you’re occupied during that time, but can’t learn any details about the event (content, time, participants, and so on). ...

I have a habit: every new year, I back up all my data, so I won’t regret it if my computer ever breaks and all my files disappear. Google Takeout, which I’m introducing today, is a backup service provided by Google. You can download the backed-up files to your own computer. Most importantly, since it’s a service provided by Google itself, you don’t have to worry about your account data falling into third-party hands! ...

A few days ago, Google Dictionary was shut down without warning, and a lot of people panicked. We had all gotten used to looking up unfamiliar words on Google Dictionary whenever we came across them. Google said the dictionary’s features had been merged into Google Search and Google Translate, so the dictionary had completed its phased mission and it was time to say goodbye~ ...

Some people who play online games may have heard of the “communication lock.” It’s an anti-theft measure that game companies came up with. Before you can log in to your game account, you have to call a dedicated line from the phone number you registered with the game company, and only after the call connects can you log in. This method prevents a lot of gamers from having their accounts stolen. After all, hackers can easily get your username and password, but they surely can’t take your phone too, right? The Google 2-Step Verification I’m introducing today is actually a lot like that communication lock. ...

For a long time I’ve wanted to make an online business card with some of my info on it, like my email, contact details, education, birthday, and so on. But I never had time to build a site like that. Then I came across the “Google Profile” feature online, which was pretty close to what I had in mind. The “Google Profile” feature we’re introducing in this post is actually a lot like Facebook’s “Info” section. It shows some of your personal details, such as education, occupation, birthday, gender, photo albums, email, and so on. My approach is to print the URL of my online business card on my physical business card, which reduces how much information I have to fit on the physical card. ...

Google Cloud Connect is a small add-on for Microsoft Office designed by Google. It connects Microsoft Office to Google Docs, so you can save your documents to Google Docs in the cloud and collaborate online directly from Microsoft Office. The unfortunate part is that it doesn’t let you edit Google Docs documents directly inside Microsoft Office. It would be great if you could. To be honest, Google Docs is very handy, but it crashes quite often, and it has far too few features… ...

Google Desktop is one of the programs I install every time I reinstall my computer. It matters to me even more than Yahoo! Messenger! Simply put, Google Desktop is a file search and management program. You can find the files you need by searching for keywords. Windows has this feature built in too, but honestly the built-in Windows search is... slow and awful. It can take me 30 seconds to get results for a file, while Google Desktop returns results in just 1 to 3 seconds! Google Desktop isn't only for searching files, either. It has a built-in sidebar where you can add small gadgets such as Google Calendar, a to-do list, news, weather, and more. You can even write your own gadgets and put them in the sidebar~...

Google Public DNS is a service Google recently launched that lets you browse the web using Google’s free DNS. The benefit of Google Public DNS is that it makes your browsing safer, and your browsing speed may also improve. By the way, openDNS also offers a DNS service, and it’s pretty good too, so feel free to check it out. Google Public DNS is also one of the few Google services that doesn’t require going to a website to use it (you just configure it directly on your computer). ...