By Greg Cunningham
owner of Tech-hachapi
Hiding people and memories, Google Doodle games
Tech Talk
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Greg Cunningham.
Google Photos can automatically make "Memories" from the photos you store with them. But maybe the memories they make for you aren't necessarily good memories for you. What can you do? Thankfully, there's a straightforward way to make Google forget certain people and even animals.
Open the Google Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet. (The Memories feature doesn't show up when you open photos.google.com.)
Click your profile icon in the top-right corner and select Google Photos Settings. Now click on Memories and open Hide people & pets. In the gallery now on your screen, clicking on a face or a pet removes them from your Memories. Click the back arrow in the top-left corner when done. Exiting saves your changes.
Later, if you miss the folks you've removed, you can repeat the process. Clicking on their face again adds them back to your Memories.
Google Doodle games
You've probably noticed that the Google Home page often has a drawing based on the word Google; these are called Google Doodles. A Doodle usually lets you know about something important that happened when the Doodle shows up.
But sometimes, the Doodle is also a game you can play right in your browser. The best Doodle games are playable long after the first time they appear. Here are some of the most popular.
• Halloween 2016: http://www.google.com/doodles/halloween-2016
Click the Play button to start the game. In this game, you play as Momo the cat and draw symbols using your magic wand to defeat the menacing ghosts.
The levels get pretty hard, or I'm just no good at it, which doesn't seem likely.
• ICC Champions Trophy 2017: http://www.google.com/doodles/icc-champions-trophy-2017-begins
The ICC Champions Trophy is a tournament for the eight top-ranked One Day International (ODI) competitive cricket teams globally. So, in celebration of the ICC Champions Trophy in 2017, we have this Doodle cricket game played with crickets. The 2017 game was notable because Pakistan beat India by 180 runs.
This Doodle game gave me a brief insight into the sport of cricket, at least where the term 'runs' comes from.
• Celebrating Garden Gnomes: http://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-garden-gnomes
After a bit of the history of garden Gnomes, the object of this game is to fling a flower-planting gnome as far as you can using a catapult. Once you get past the first gnome, you can try other gnomes of other shapes and sizes.
One gnome is surprisingly aerodynamic (a sentence I never thought I'd type.)
• Basketball 2012: http://www.google.com/doodles/basketball-2012
Make as many baskets as you can in 24 seconds. We played more than a billion games on the Doodle game during its four-day run in 2012.
When shooting, timing is everything.
• 30th Anniversary of Pacman 2010: http://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pacman, Googlers went to great lengths to bring all the sights and sounds of the original Pacman game to your browser.
If you want to play Pacman at full screen as Namco Bandai intended, go here: http://www.google.com/logos/2010/pacman10-i.html
I didn't waste many quarters on this back in the day, and I'm still not very good at it.
• Baseball: http://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2019
To celebrate the Fourth of July in 2019, Google released a tribute to the classic American game of baseball.
• Crosswords: http://www.google.com/logos/2013/crossword/crossword13.html
In 2013, Google celebrated the appearance of the first crossword puzzle with a tribute to Arthur Wynn, the creator.
It even looks like it's filled in with a pencil, not a pen, as is correct. No answer or hints provided, but your work checks itself, right?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
A teacher asks her students what they want to be when they grow up.
Teacher: "How about you, Johnny. what do you want to be when you grow up?"
Johnny: "I want to be the CEO of a multi-billion tech company... just like my father."
Teacher: "Wow. I didn't know your father was the CEO of a tech company."
Johnny: "He's not. But he also wants to be one."
Do you have a computer or technology question? Greg Cunningham has been providing Tehachapi with on-site PC and network services since 2007. Email Greg at greg@tech-hachapi.com.
