The only shortcut you need to know in Google Drive

Otto Frederick Rohwedder
courtesy of Wikipedia

Google Drive is the greatest thing since sliced bread (Sorry! Otto Frederick Rohwedder inventor of the first loaf-at-a-time bread slicing machine).  It's a useful tool and if you're anything like me, you'll want the most efficient way to do things with that tool.  For all the applications that are part of the Google Drive suite that means keyboard shortcuts.

Why take a dozen clicks of your mouse or touch-pad and seconds of your time to copy the formatting of a portion of text when you can hit Ctrl+Alt+C instead?  Why?  Because you can't remember what Ctrl+Alt+C does.  That's why.  We can remember the shortcuts that we use everyday like Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V for copying and pasting.  But things that you don't do everyday or keyboard shortcuts that you see once on a list on the internet are quickly forgotten.  What's the solution?  Dozens of post-its? Keeping a list on a pad next to your work space?  An awesome tattoo on your forearm or the back of your hand? And let's not forget that each application has unique keyboard shortcuts.

Ingress: A Game Ripe with Educational Possibilities

For the past several months I've been testing my wife's patience with a game from Google called Ingress.  Ingress is an augmented reality massively multiplayer online game.  The game uses your Android or iOS device's GPS to show you an augmented view of the world around you; this world has portals that look very much like fountains of light erupting from local points of interest like public works of art, monuments, cenotaphs, popular hangout spots, etc.

Two world-wide teams vie for control of these portals (and the future of all mankind) using game mechanics that I won't get into here, except to state that the goal of the game is to link portals together to create large triangular fields.  The area of these fields are constantly totaled and the team with the combined greatest area of triangles is winning at that moment.

Richmond as seen by someone Ingressing.  The points
are portals and the shaded areas are triangular fields.

It seems simple enough, just make big triangles on a map by standing on a portal and linking it to two other portals that you've been to before and that are already connected thus completing the three sides of a triangle.  However, the lines connecting the vertexes of triangles cannot intersect any other lines.  This makes making longer lines far more difficult.

Since the app will only show you portals within about two kilometers of your current location, creating large triangular fields require either a lot of luck or careful planning and teamwork.  Fortunately, a Smurf or a Frog (colloquial names for members of the blue Resistance and green Enlightened teams respectively) can see real-time maps by visiting ingress.com/intel to plan their "ingressions".  They can also join online communities that work as teams to create huge fields and/or destroy the opposing team's fields.