Author: Swadesh Parasher

10 handy google tricks that can make your job easier

We do use Google and its constituent services every day in one way or another. Most of us usually stick to the basics and get our jobs done just fine.

The things gets tricky when we want to get the precise outcome and it gets harder to achieve the same with the basic tools. Google comes bundled with the advanced – more precise tools to get the best of the internet.

If you delve a little deeper, there are many tricks hidden away that will help improve your experience. To help you out, here are 10 tips and tricks that you can use for four of the Google’s most popular features : Gmail, Maps, Google Drive and Google News.

Gmail

Activate Starring Feature

Sometimes you want to mark your mails from an important source, but the only way you can mark them is with the yellow tab or star icon. But, there is an hidden setting in Gmail which lets you do the exact thing with the ease – Multiple color star icons is you friend.

Start by clicking the gear icon in the upper right hand corner and scroll halfway down the general settings page to find the “Stars” setting. Here you can drag different stars and icons into the “In Use” section to activate them. The next time you’re starring an email, you can cycle through the different colors by clicking on the icon repetitively.

Keyboard Shortcuts

There are some keyboard shortcuts which may come handy while reading or composing your mail from Gmail. Simply go into the gear icon on the upper right general settings and active the shortcut. You can find a list of the different keyboard shortcuts by visiting this link.

Sign out Remotely

If you use Gmail on different devices and forgot to Sign out from one of them, you can sign out remotely through the details section. If you scroll down to the bottom of Gmail, you will see your last activity at the bottom right hand corner. Click on “Details” underneath this and you can sign out of all other sessions.

Google Maps

Adjust your route

When you’re searching for directions and you want to avoid a particular road or street, you can adjust your route by dragging it to a different path. This will create a new white marker which Google will use to calculate a new route and time frame. You can create as many of these markers as you wish.

Measure Distances

Another Google Labs tool that you can activate. Clicking the ruler tool at the bottom right hand corner of your map will let you measure the distance between two points in metres or feet. The fun part behind this option is you can choose the geeky option and measure the distance based on the size of American football fields, Olympic swimming pools and light years among other more useful measurements. This feature will only let you measure in straight lines, however.

Drag and Zoom

Google Labs has some incredibly handy tools, but it can be very easy to miss it considering its location. When you open up maps, you will find Maps Labs at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. One of the options you can choose is ‘Drag ‘n’ Zoom’ which lets you zoom in by drawing a box on the map. Click the magnifying box underneath the original zoom to activate it. The smaller the box, the further you zoom in.

Google Drive

Keyboard shortcuts

It’s probably no surprise that Google Drive has its own set of keyboard shortcuts which you can find through the cog icon. Scroll down the menu and you will see an option for keyboard shortcuts. Clicking this will bring up all the different key combinations available to you.

Attach Drive Files to Your Email

When you are composing an email, you can attach a file directly from your Google drive through your Gmail account by clicking the drive icon at the bottom of the new compose email format.

Google News

Personalise your news

Google News is the best way to keep yourself updated with the day to day events throughout the world about any topic. It can be used as the news portal with the very least of your effort. If you’re not happy with the articles you’re presented, with the customise section is what you’re looking for.

By clicking on the cog icon at the top right-hand corner, you can adjust the sliders for a number of topics to determine how often they appear. Also, you can add specific news sources to the list and adjust how often they appear on your feed, allowing you a more personalised experience.

Add specific topic

If you want to have a stream that related to specific search terms, then create your own section. In the customise section, go into advanced (found underneath the Personalize Google News section), and select “Create A Custom Section.” Here you can add in any search term and you will be presented with a feed correlating to that. Remember if you want to add more than one term, separate them with a comma.

December 10, 2012
[How To] bypass or disable windows 8 password prompt/window

Windows 8 has some effective tools which lets you interact with your PC architecture easily. There are many different enhancement and changes which can be confusing for the new users.

One of the new changes which is confusing for the users is the hidden option to disable or bypass the password prompt window. But, luckily there is a way to bypass the password screen. Here’s How:

1. Boot your PC and enter your password.

2. Press Win-X (by which I mean hold down the Windows key and then tap X).

3. In the pop-up menu that appears, click Command Prompt (Admin).

4. In the Command Prompt, type control userpasswords2, then press Enter. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same command works in earlier version of Windows.)

5. In the User Accounts dialog that appears, uncheck the box marked Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.

6. Click OK, then confirm the automatic sign-in option by entering your password (twice).

7. Reboot your Windows 8 OS.

After reboot you will find that your Windows 8 finally understands that you don’t want to enter the password every time you boot your machine.

November 24, 2012
Do you want new bulbs from from Philips whose hue will be controlled by smartphones?

Today’s market requires new technologies to be announced for their growth but no one expects some one to come up with something other than computers or mobiles. But this new update comes from Philips in the form of a new revolutionary bulb whose color or hue can be controlled by a particular android or iPhone or iPad. Well this also is connected to the same field of IT. An app allows a user to turn off or on the light from anywhere.

For the bulb to work first of all we need to have a starter kit (including a smart bridge and three bulbs) that starts at a price of $199. This kit contains a smart bridge that gets plugged inside the WiFi router in your home. Then the bulb is connected to any existing bulb holder which in turn is connected to the WiFi router. Thus the mobile is indirectly connected to the new bulb through the application. This LED bulb gives light of an intensity of 600 lumen.

This app also has many more extra features like matching the color of the bulb with a color from anywhere on the mobile screen including 16 million different hues.

What seems to be a probable future shows the use of this bulb everywhere. Since this app allows a person to control about 50 bulbs at a time and even allows to turn them on or off according to a timer. There have already been announcements regarding these types of new bulbs but none is released till now.

Philips is the first one to bring it down into the market for customers. This starter kit will be open for sale from 30th October at Apple stores for $199 and an additional bulb will cost about $59.

Now it completely depends on a person and the weight of his purse whether they will control the lights of his whole house or not. Maybe the government buys the whole lot for street lights.

Note: Make sure that you don’t lose your phone after that app or someone will be playing with your life and lights.

November 1, 2012
Google course builder may be the future of open source learning

Google is well known for its great innovative tools which helps millions of people every month to actually reap something beneficial or useful for them. They recently released another useful tool on the internet which can basically be helpful for the people who might seek knowledge on internet.

The open source course builder project lets anyone make their own learning resources, complete with scheduled activities and lessons. It is another very interesting and effective tools which gets “power searching with Google” to the next level.

The power-searching course “was a strong success and also generated some technology that we thought would be useful to share with the world,” says Norvig.

There are many websites, such as Udemy, that have long offered services for individual users to create (and get paid) for their own classes. Universities, however, are looking for an in-house solution, and a common code-base to evolve custom courses could be helpful.

Google Wrote on their research blog:

The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction.

Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institure of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in spain led by Universia, CRUE and Banco Santander-Universidades are considering how this experimental technology might work for some of their online courses.

There will be an option which will help educators to connect to the Google team working on the code directly via Google Hangouts.

[source: Google course builder, Google Research blog]

September 12, 2012
First look at Ubuntu for Android

Till date we had only heard rumors and seen still images of that project. But today Canonical released a video from the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) 13 event held in Porto Alegre, Brazil showing a device running Ubuntu and explained many of its features.

Canonical had claimed that the Ubuntu for Android,

“transforms your high-end phone into your productive desktop, whenever you need it.”

While it does look doing exactly that.

In the video, they have plugged the phone into the dock that led to the launch of Ubuntu system. No emulation was there by any means and it used all the power the phone has to offer. Which means that system features like notifications could be swapped between Ubuntu and Android seamlessly. Now the next thing that Ubuntu is supposed to have is the permission of OEMs like HTC, Samsung, Motorola would have to be interested in this project and give Ubuntu the access to their drivers for their devices.

While many experts are debating over whether Ubuntu for Android will prove to be the future of personal computing and that the desktop computers will become obsolete. We believe that both have their own future, their own use and limitation, it depends on the purpose you use it for. Something becomes “obsolete” when the all its functionality can be performed by newer technology taking resource consumption in mind. Mobile devices may well become more “mainstream” however.

August 10, 2012
[How To] Send Fake Emails, on behalf of anyone

If yes, then you will be pleased to know there are tons of great online services available for this job. Take EMKEI.CZ for example. This website offers the feature to send emails to any email ID, on behalf of any one (that is, from any email ID)

This is a prime example of email spoofing, taking benefit of the fact that the SMTP servers aren’t providing any mechanism for the authentication of the senders’ email. But you don’t need to know all these jargons, just fill the required details, and you’re ready to go.

The interesting part of this whole trick is, when the receiver gets the email, and replies to it, then that reply goes to the real owner of that email ID. The email passes any filter and doesn’t land in the SPAM folder.

To know that if you stand on the other side of the prank, all you gotta do is, view the source of the email, and look for the IP address of the sender, you can then visit sites like IP2LOCATION which can help you trace the location of the sender, the ISP, domain and other useful information, this can be enough to figure out if the email is genuine or fake.

August 9, 2012