Viewing posts tagged with Google
Mar 2009
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12 months agoAnonymous: Well beyond the horrors of Orwell's "1984"?
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Google Knows Where You Live So Your Friends Don’t Have To!

Google LatitudeSo I’ve been playing with Google Latitude recently and it’s both interesting and creepy. Primarily designed to be used on mobile phones, the service can also be used on laptop computer; it detects your approximate location and lets you share this information with friends, optionally with status updates. The idea of adding a geographic component to a friend status list à la Facebook/Twitter sounds like the next logical step.

More interesting, though, is the data required to drive such a service. Google Latitude is powered by the Google Gears browser plugin, which also facilitates offline access to Gmail and a variety of other web enhancements through its in-browser database component. Vaguely mentioned in passing is another, lesser-known feature of Gears: Google’s WiFi location database. Essentially, Google has wardriven major cities in the US and other countries, searching for wireless networks and plotting each wireless router it finds on the map by the geographic coordinates of the drive-by vehicle that detected the wireless signal. With a large enough database, this allows Google to pinpoint most laptop computers on the map by looking up the hardware address of the wireless router they are currently connected to and determining the approximate position on the Earth. Scarily awesome!

Jan 2009
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13 months agopapillon: Google should pay you for advertising.
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Make Gmail Your New Year’s Resolution

GmailWelcome to 2009! If you haven’t joined the revolution, now is the perfect time to switch to Gmail. With the best spam filtering in the industry, instant search, built-in video chat, intuitive message organization using labels and conversations, free POP and IMAP access, and virtually unlimited storage, why use anything else?

Unless your using Yahoo Mail span (sorry!), you can even forward your old e-mail address to your new Gmail account and to move your existing and new e-mail messages all over to Gmail. This means you don’t even need to send friends one of those annoying “I changed my address” messages; it will all be automatic. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed and have higher credit scores.

Oct 2008
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Make Firefox Look Like Google Chrome

As cool as Google Chrome is, many of us have been reluctant to switch due to the lack of AdBlock Plus. With a few quick tweaks, however, you can give Firefox some of the same look and feel:

Make Firefox Look Like Google Chrome

Of course, you’re not getting Chrome’s performance improvements by doing this, but it’s at least a start. Shown above is my Firefox 3 looking like the Chrome browser [running in Linux with the chrome-like GTK theme and the MurrinaChrome Emerald theme]. Here is what I did to achieve this:

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Mar 2008
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2 weeks ago: thanks a million, this was very helpful!
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Label *All* Forwarded Messages In Gmail

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of checking each of your multiple email accounts and have finally decided to have all of your mail forwarded to your main Gmail account. You login to the extraneous accounts and set them to forward to you@gmail.com. You login to Gmail and setup filters based on the To: header so your forwarded mail is automatically colored orange. It sounds like a great plan — and it is — until you discover that only some of the forwarded messages are getting labeled. Huh? As it turns out, those mailing list messages are addressed To: mailing.list@school.edu and those viral marketers can’t be bothered with the To: header at all, so your filters aren’t very effective.

Fear not, however, because there is a simple solution to this problem! This trick works because of plus addressing, a feature in Gmail that allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding a plus symbol (+) after your username. In other words, all mail sent to you+anything@gmail.com will arrive in your inbox. You can take advantage of this when aggregating your email accounts by having your secondary accounts forward to a unique plus address. For example, set your school email to forward to you+school@gmail.com and set your spam account to forward to you+junk@gmail.com.

Now for the real key: Gmail has a secret “deliveredto:” search operator that will catch all mail arriving at the given email address — whether or not you were listed in the To: header. In other words, this will even apply to messages from mailing lists and bcc emails. To automatically label you forwarded junk mail, for example, create a new filter and type deliveredto:you+junk@gmail.com in the Has the words textbox. Congratulations, now all of your forwarded email will be automatically labeled! The deliveredto: operator expects you to enter the entire email address, but if you want to filter on just a portion of the email address, you can place it inside of double quotes (for example, deliveredto:”+junk”).

Gmail Junk

Coincidentally, an Official Gmail Blog post about plus addressing appeared about six hours after this was published. Although plus addressing is nothing new, this is the first time Google has publicly acknowledged its existence on their blog. The official blog post did not mention the real secret to making plus addressing work, though, which is the “deliveredto:” operator.