Tag: Pinterest

Windows, Google Lens, Pinterest and a Small Island off the Coast of Spain

This was today’s Window’s Spotlight image. As is frequently the case, Windows chose today to not give us a link directly to the image in the center of the lock screen. They are promoting another Window’s product as is all to frequently the case. The link on the upper right just gives you some generic information about the Cantabrian Sea, as if that is a clue to what the image is of.

Doing a search for Cantabrian Sea, Spain windows 10 spotlight doesn’t even get you close to finding a match. So today I have to take a screenshot of the lock screen, save it to my system and then do a Google image search for the image in question. I do this pretty regularly because I’m virtually suicidally curious on most days. I want to know who the photographer is. I want to know the location. I want to know everything about the image that I can find out.

Unfortunately Google has broken image search and wants us all to use Google Lens instead. Lens also identifies the photo as the Cantabrian Sea based on the fact that I named the screenshot cantabrianseaspain having no idea what else to call the damn thing besides the throwaway names of test or stuff, dozens of which are usually in my temporary file folders. I’m not going to accept the default screenshot# name that the Windows wants to give it, there are hundreds of those in the same temporary folders. I really should clean those out one of these days.

If you scroll down in the results of your useless Google Lens search you will discover that Google helpfully offers to run the search again using the old Google Image Search that mercifully hasn’t been taken down or put behind a paywall yet. The first few times I tried this search after the switch to Lens I raged at the screen for several minutes trying to get the stupid search to give me results that were informative in any real way. It was after the third or forth try at using Lens that I noticed the link to the old image search hiding at the bottom of the search results.

Lens has improved on the desktop site, at least. This time I noticed a link at the top labeled “find image source” which is the thing I’m generally looking for when I do image searches.

They identify it as the Urdaibai Estuary which is only slightly less enigmatic than Cantabrian Sea. Under that result the old Google Image Search results can also be found if you scroll down. Google may not be on a downward spiral into insignificance yet after all.

In any case, the answer to the burning question of where is Gaztelugatxe:

Gaztelugatxe is an islet on the coast of Biscay belonging to the municipality of Bermeo, Basque Country (Spain). It is connected to the mainland by a man-made bridge. On top of the island stands a hermitage (named Gaztelugatxeko Doniene in Basque; San Juan de Gaztelugatxe in Spanish), dedicated to John the Baptist, that dates from the 10th century, although discoveries indicate that the date might be the 9th century. With another small neighboring island, Aketx, they form a protected biotope that extends from the town of Bakio to Cape Matxitxako, on the Bay of Biscay.

Wikipedia

Now the Bay of Biscay I’ve heard of before even if I’ve never heard of and won’t even attempt to pronounce Gaztelugatxe. Not even on a bet. Featured in season seven of Game of Thrones. Still haven’t seen it (sorry George) but San Juan de Gaztelugatxe looks like a place that might be interesting to visit. Time to find a version of the image that I can use on Pinterest since I have a board that I collect these kinds of images on there. Again, a Windows spotlight search yields one image of the path from the other direction, but not the one of the island that made me want to go there. It’s taken from a specific location next to the bridge to the island with the tides low but not at their lowest.

There are thousands of other shots of the island from both directions but none of them from the specific direction and location shown in the image. The whole process is so maddening that I get up and decide to take a walk.

Postscript

In October I run across the draft still sitting in the editor. Wait. Why didn’t I publish this…? I come across the same dead end that sent me out on a walk in April. It took a bit to find the unaltered image from my own files and then I did another search only to discover that it is exclusively on istockphoto.com. I’m not paying them just to post a photo on Pinterest. The board is going to get the screwed up version. Oh well.

Bucket List?

What do you see in your future?

spotify – Road to Nowhere – Talking Heads

I have to have hope. I have to have hope for a future, or there is little reason to plan for a future. As everything stands right now; between the pandemic exacerbated by Donald Trump’s incompetence and malfeasance and his zombified supporters still clamoring for more of the same, it has been a little hard to imagine a future that isn’t bounded by the four walls of my house and the daily walks with the dog.

But if we were to suddenly find ourselves able to travel outside of the city, or even inside the city to somewhere that wasn’t a doctor’s office for an appointment, where would I go? What would I want to do, in order to make life worth living just a little bit longer?

I am a notorious hater of all things touristy. I don’t want to get on an over-sized floating hotel and cruise to the tropics, or even fly down to the tropics to sit on a beach. Not my kind of thing at all. I would spend all that time reading, and I can read right here at home just as well as I can read there. Save the travel expenses. Pretend to be gone and do some intense reading alone at home.

There are destinations that I could find the urge to travel to, if travel was a thing that was possible and I could afford it. I would prefer to do my traveling like so many other writers have done. Hiring on as help on a freighter or just taking passage on one and getting off at whatever port suited me and exploring to my heart’s content. Were I still in my twenties and situated the way I am now, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take this route of exploration.

I could easily be dead within a week of leaving port, but that wouldn’t have mattered to twenty-year-old me. I would have enjoyed the extremely short adventure anyway. Since I’m no longer 20 but more like 60 with a family that needs me to survive past next week, I have to surrender to the reality of my physical state and admit that I’m not up to working my way across the ocean anymore, even if I really never was. Maybe the travel would be more like Anita Willets-Burnham chronicles in Round the World on a Penny than it would be like Mark Twain on the one hand or the average cruise ship passenger on the other. Frugal, but safe and expansive.

I have a board on Pinterest where I have posted images of places that have struck an emotional chord with me:

They are from all over the world. When it comes to places I would like to visit, there is far more to see than there is time to see it in. Just the other day I ran across another story of a destination that would be well worth the trip:

A spectacular parade that began after nightfall in Egypt and around lunchtime ET proceeded along the length of the avenue, which is lined on either side by over 600 ram-headed statues and traditional sphinxes, statues with a lion’s body and a human’s head. 

The extravagant march included participants in pharaonic dress, a symphony orchestra, lighting effects, professional dancers, boats on the Nile, horse drawn carriages and more. 

nbcnews.com

Sure the opening event is over, but the trip to see this newly reopened path would be an amazing adventure for the amateur archeologist in me. Egypt is a no-brainer. Yes, tourists go there and there are tourist traps all over the place there. Doesn’t matter. The architecture is what I would go for. The same goes for Rome and Athens or any place that has reasonably intact ruins that beckon to be explored.

I was lamenting the lack of hope in the world today to The Wife recently. How it was going to be a long time before we’d be able to get out of Texas and do the exploring we both want to do. Her response? You won’t do anything touristy so we’d have a hard time going anywhere anyway. I’d suggest sailing with Cunard from the US to Britain, but that would be a touristy thing and you won’t do it. She might swallow her teeth to hear me say this, but that trip sounds great. It would be even better if the ship sailed up North a little farther and gave us a view of the Northern Lights for a few nights in a row. A week on the ocean looking at the stars sounds like a great time to me. I’ll be looking at stars because I’ll pretty much be confined to deck unless I want to be drugged senseless, but I could go for that anyway. I haven’t seen a decent night’s sky in more than ten years. Seven nights on the ocean sounds like heaven.

After we dock in Britain at the other end of the journey, we could cross over to Ireland to visit her ancestral kin there and have a pint of Guinness at the brewery. We could stay a week or a month getting to know the place, wherever it is we land at. Sounds like a plan to me.

I’m not into aimless wandering and I’m not related to anyone in Ireland that would care. You won’t know until you get there, dear. Who’s wandering aimlessly? I have a goal: Guinness at the brewery. That is my goal.

Crossing Europe by train? I’d go for that in an instant if it was cheap enough. Trains and their support structures are an engineering and architectural wet dream combined. I’d never have to leave the train or the station. I’d just hang around gawking at the structures until we’re ready to move again. No need for additional itinerary.

Which is the only real problem. There are tons of things to see in every city and town along the way through Europe, and there is no way to appreciate this fact unless you get out of the vehicle you are traveling in, lace up your shoes, strap on your pack and start walking. That is the way to travel. Hiking cross country has been a thing I always wanted to try but never had a chance to do. When you have to work every day of every week just to keep the lights on and the roof over your head, there is no time for sightseeing or joyriding unless you work it into the routine that you have to keep up.

This proposed form of travel struck the Wife as a unique form of torture. It would. She blew out both her knees in marching band. Each step is precious to her these days. I’d send her ahead in a car to scout out a place to sleep for the next week or month while I did the hiking I love. It’ll give her time to chat up the natives, that’s what she does best anyway. She just slows me down when we’re out walking. Having someone to talk to can make all the difference, but in the end you have to make the distance in the time allowed.

spotify – The B-52’s – Roam

Like so many other lists that people make, the bucket list is one I will have to pass on. There will not be a list of ten things I’d like to do or see before I die. I won’t limit myself to a list of places that I would like to go. You never know if the thing you really should see is the thing right next to what you are supposed to see unless you take the time to go there and look around. No travel itinerary will allow for that kind of loitering. That is my objection to touristy travel. I want to sip tea until I’m ready to leave, not until the group is ready to leave. An itinerary is for tourists, and I don’t do touristy.

Pinterest Image Spam

My Pinterest account hovers on the verge of abandonment. I do need someplace online to catalog the images I’m fond of now that Flickr wants to charge me to keep more than a thousand images online. Poor Flickr, Another victim of the downfall of Yahoo! Like Tumblr, I abandoned my Flickr account rather than submit to the authority of Verizon.

Instagram is much easier for sharing my own images and I use it routinely for sharing images I create on my phone. If you want to test it’s usefulness, try getting a photo into Instagram from a Windows desktop. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…Are you back yet?

Yeah, that’s right. You can’t load photos if you don’t have a camera attached to the computer. So much for Instagram’s usefulness to me at home, although it does at least attempt to address the fact that you can’t author images without a camera. If the platform has a camera though, any image you have on the device can be used, even if you don’t author it.

Don’t do a Google image search and then save images directly to your Pinboards. Pinterest stupidly just sends you back to Google when you try to reverse lookup your image, and it doesn’t highlight the image you clicked on as being the result you saved to the board in the first place. Pinterest is almost completely useless as an image catalog that is easily accessible. If you want to save images to Pinterest that you found through an image search, you have to go to the page the image comes from and then save the image to Pinterest directly. You’ll have to do that anyway the next time you think you might want to use that image for something.

The most use I’ve had for Pinterest is saving images that Windows has thrown at me as part of the Windows 10 logon screen, and I’ve wanted to track down exactly where the picture was taken. Bing, for its part, is nearly as useless as Pinterest as far as establishing authorship for any given image. This is one of those things that we as internet users really need to start addressing. Where do these images and ideas come from? Who is responsible for them? Who owns them? There is no collecting authority for image authorship, but there probably should be.

Pinterest is currently the bane of all image searches on Google, and this makes me question why I use it at all. Mostly I use it because I can’t afford to keep a copy of every single image I might want to reference later. I’ll either run out of hard drive space, or have so many files to sort through that I can’t find the image I want anyway. So I group them on Pinterest according to some loose heuristics and pretend that organization makes sense.

However, every time I go looking for an image from Bing or any other cool image platform (including Pinterest) I am inundated with useless Pinterest image results. Useless? Try right-clicking on this image and then clicking on one of the Pinterest results. Now find the image on that board. Go ahead, I’ll wait again.

Are you back yet? No? I didn’t think so.

Time’s up. Did you find the image or where it comes from? Now you know my pain. I was presented the image as this thumbnail on Pinterest:

I had to screenshot and then crop the central image because I couldn’t find the image in the 20k+ images on the author’s one board. Then I pasted it into a blank Chrome tab and did an image search appending this string:

-site:pinterest.*

To the search string. Magically, all the Pinterest results are removed from the results if you add that string. I then discovered that the image came from an etsy account and that the steampunk wrist band I was looking at was sold out. Oh, well. Cool image anyway. In replicating the exact search I had done moments ago, now I discover that some of the Pinterest results do take me to the exact image I want to see. This is doubly frustrating because I have wasted all the time it took to write this daily beef. Fuck you, Pinterest!