How to show older images on Google Maps Street View

A quick tweet explaining how to show older images on Google Maps Street View turned out to be one of the most rewarding things to happen to me this week.

Google Maps Street View Time Machine is hardly a Google Maps hack - it's been a core feature since 2014 - but its icon is so subtle that a lot of users just don't know it's there.

In fact, even though it's a feature I've loved for a while, I had to dive into the page code to even find out that it's called 'Time Machine'.

How to show old photos on Google Maps Street View Time Machine

What I really didn't expect was the number of 'thank you' replies I would get, or the sometimes sad but always heartwarming reasons why people wanted to show old Street View imagery.

Loki, Latin and Adfero

(This post contains very mild spoilers for season 1, episode 2 of Loki, but I'll avoid any really significant details.)

A funny thing happened while watching episode 2 of the Disney+ Marvel series 'Loki' this week. In one particular scene, Loki addresses a crowd in Latin and I was surprised to recognise a word without the aid of the subtitles.

That word was "adfero" and if you look it up, the first definitions you'll find say that it means "to bring" or "to carry", but it also has a more specific meaning.

"Adfero" can specifically mean "to bring news" or "to report" and I know this because when I graduated and got a job writing online news articles, 'Adfero' was the name of the company who employed me.

Loki © Marvel 2021

Interestingly enough, there was another word in Loki's speech that I also recognised as the name of a tool we used internally. I won't say which word as it was never a public tool, but it was doubly surprising to hear a second Latin word I recognised, and for the same reason.

There's no deep meaning to this post, it just amused me and I wanted to record it here. The end of this month marks ten years since I left Adfero but I still have good friends I met there and I see the names of former colleagues achieving great things in the Manchester SEO community and beyond.

Language can be a funny thing. You hear a word in one place and recognise it in another, and suddenly find you can translate (or at least guess) snippets of text or speech in languages you don't even speak.

In an era when instant translations are increasingly available of text and even spoken word (on YouTube, for example) it's sometimes nice to spot something the old-fashioned way and get that momentary thrill of realising you know something in a completely different language.

Counting Down to Ten Years as a Freelance Writer

In early June 2011, after (very nearly) five years working at the online news agency and content creation company Adfero (later Axonn Media), I handed in my notice.

During those five years I had produced around 7.5 million words (this is literally true, not an exaggeration) of original, researched breaking news content, static pages and features for SMEs and global household brand names.

An artist's impression of what my last ten years looked like...

At different times in 2006-11 I was varyingly:

• A 'desk head' responsible for a team of 8-10 correspondents.
• A performance-related pay correspondent with additional workload.
• A self-managed correspondent producing headline news for Adfero's own websites.

There was nothing new left to try and I wanted a change of scenery. Which is ironic, as I switched from working at home, to freelancing at home.

On June 30th after taking a few days off to celebrate my birthday, Adfero offered to release me from working the rest of my notice period, and I left without fanfare (or even a 'good luck' card - try not to neglect your homeworkers in the post-COVID years, people!).