Playing the ‘spot all squares’ game to solve a CAPTCHA gets old quickly, but the other day one of them caught myeye – is that set of traffic lights in Melbourne?
The clues all add up:
- Australia Post mail box, and post office;
- Herald Sun sign on shop;
- a leafy green road with two lane road, wide enough to overtake on;
- and green painted traffic signal masts, which Whitehorse City Council loves to do.
So somewhere in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne – but where?
Unfortunately this is the first time my “nothing good happens east of Punt Road” policy has failed me, so I had to phone a friend – who suggested the Mitcham Road shopping strip in Mitcham.
And boom – there it is.
But try as I may, I couldn’t find the same parked cars found in the Google reCAPTCHA scene in the images captured by Google Street View, no matter what date I picked, which leads to the question – where is Google getting their reCAPTCHA images from?
My Geoguessr streetview-enthusiast corespondents tell me that a lot of Captchas come from unreleased coverage which is not published, like they drive there multiple times in the same month and only one date will get published.
I hadn’t considered that – but it makes sense.
I recognised this place straight away, earlier this year on a Sunday I walked from Mitcham station to the small supermarket there to cash in 200 or so cans and bottles for the hopeless Victorian CONtainer Deposit Scheme (where container deposit locations are next to nonexistent east of Box Hill/Forest Hill), only to be told that all the bins were full and they couldn’t take any. Envirobank Nunawading wasn’t open being a Sunday so I was forced to drag everything back to the container deposit desert (still unchanged) that is Ringwood and wait until Monday.
Luckily for me a container deposit machine finally opened near me, through the first time I visited the glass collection hopper was already full and not accepting any more.