I literally LOL’d when I saw the mute button on Gmail – what could it possibly do?
I don’t know if a lot of you have noticed it, but it is a little button at the end of the “More actions” option.
Turns out this is exactly like the new “Ignore†button in Microsoft Outlook 2010, and if you select a conversation and mute it – all future emails part of that conversation are directly archived without showing up in your inbox.
From Google Help:
If you’re subscribed to a mailing list, you’ve no doubt been subjected to the ‘thread that just won’t die!’ If you’re part of a long message conversation that isn’t relevant, you can ‘mute’ the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox.
By using the ‘m’ shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention.
Muted messages are not marked as read, are still searchable, and can specifically be found by searching for:
Someone asked me how to change the color of a bar graph in an Excel sheet, and I thought I’d write a quick post about it since it is a fairly straightforward thing to do.
Say you have a bar graph which displays two parameters – Good and Evil, and Excel throws up a graph like this:
Now say you want to change the color of these two bars to green and red. The guy who asked me about this was right clicking on a bar, and then selecting a color from the “Shape Fillâ€. The trouble was that it was coloring both the bars like this.
Instead of this – double click one bar, and it will open up the “Format Data Point†dialog. Next select “Fillâ€, and then “Solid Fillâ€. Select the color you want from there, and it will only color the bar you have selected.
It just takes a few seconds, once you know it, but knowing it sometimes takes a few hits and misses.
Google has recently announced a feature that allows users to log in to multiple accounts from the same browser, and it’s a really neat thing for people like me who regularly use two Gmail accounts.
This feature is being gradually rolled to all users, so if you don’t see the option on one of your Google accounts, sign in to your other account to see if the option shows up there.
First go to Google.com and sign in from the link on the top right hand side of the screen. Then click on Settings –> Google Account Settings which is present at the top right of the screen.
You should see a screen like this with an option of “Multiple sign-inâ€. Click on the “Change†link and follow instructions to enable this.
When you next log in to Gmail, you will see an option that asks if you’d like to login to another Gmail account. You can use that to open another account.
The next new feature is to allow users to drag and drop attachments from Gmail. If you are using the Chrome browser, then now you have the option to drag and drop an attachment from Gmail, and save it anywhere on your computer.
I really like this feature because I always find it difficult to save attachments anywhere other than the desktop, and then my desktop gets cluttered in no time. If only Firefox supported this feature….but I guess that can only be a matter of time.
The iPhone 4 was launched yesterday, and it seems that there are issues with the reception when the phone is held in a certain manner.
Here is a video that better explains this.
What is really interesting about this is that someone wrote an email to Steve Jobs asking him about the issue, and Jobs responded saying – “Just avoid holding it in that way”.
I found it quite amazing that Steve Jobs replied to that email, and the solution is holding the phone in a different manner!
There is another way of getting rid of the problem and that is by using a $29 rubber bumper, which means that if there is no contact between the hand and the phone – it works fine.
It looks like this problem existed with the earlier versions of the phone as well, and the Nexus one had a similar problem as well.
I came across this when I saw that iPhone 4 was a trending topic on Twitter, and happened to click on it. I was amazed at range and passion of people’s comments about the iPhone 4 in general and this issue in particular.
Facebook announced today that it has collaborated with mobile operators throughout the world to provide access to a new mobile version of Facebook for free. The new site is called 0.facebook.com, and you won’t be charged any data usage charges, if you are with one of their partnering mobile phone operators.
Reliance and Videocon have partnered with them in India.
It’s free: Thanks to the help of mobile operators we collaborated with, people can access 0.facebook.com without any data charges. Using 0.facebook.com is completely free. People will only pay for data charges when they view photos or when they leave 0.facebook.com to browse other mobile sites. When they click to view a photo or browse another mobile site a notification page will appear to confirm that they will be charged if they want to leave 0.facebook.com
You can go to the blog post announcing this to read details and see other countries and operators that will offer this service.
I know that some of you have blogs of your own, so today I am going to tell you about a new feature that I started using on OneMint, and will be of interest to other bloggers and website owners as well.
Now, I know all you smart readers are wondering why I am telling you about a blog feature now, when I have never done so in the past. That’s because this feature has been developed by my best friend Robin (same guy who helped with the hack attack), and the thing works quite well.
I link to several websites in my posts, especially the carnival posts. Then there are people who leave comments and their names are links back to their own websites, if they chose to do so. Other bloggers and webmasters do the same thing.
Most websites link out to a large number of other web-pages – internal as well as external over a period of time, and some of these links go bad. Geeky types call this link rot. I see some of this in my carnival posts, and bigger blogs with a large number of comments will notice this with external links to the commenter’s blog, especially if the post is older than a year.
When a visitor clicks on a broken link often such a page appears:
Broken Link
The trouble with this is that these are links pointing to other websites and if they are broken, I lose a visitor who could have stayed on my own blog a little longer. And, since its an external page – I have no control on it, and cleaning up after broken links becomes a nuisance.
Clean 404 is an excellent new tool which automatically detects broken links on your website (internal and external), and when someone clicks on such a link, it redirects them to a page which contains search results from your page plus Google and Amazon ads, like the one you see below.
Clean 404 Broken Link Page
The good thing about this is that not only does it show users relevant links, it shows them Google Adsense ads and Amazon affiliate ads as well, and if you use any of these two services, your ads will be shown to the user. The ads will be in the ratio of 60:40 in your favor. 40% of the ad revenue from this source will go to Clean 404.
So, not only will you get a chance to retain visitors despite of link rot, you will get a chance to make a little money as well!
Installing it is very easy, as you just have to include one line of code in your page. You can find details here. When you install it, you will see a Clean 404 icon appearing on your sidebar. There are configurations which allow you to get rid of this, but it impacts the ad ratio.
In summary you get the following benefits:
1. You don’t have to worry about checking which links go bad – Clean 404 does it for you.
2. Clean 404 automatically finds bad links and redirects users to a page which has ads as well as relevant links.
3. User experience is greatly enhanced as they don’t see a broken link any more.
4. You get to keep your visitor and possibly earn some money too.
This tool was launched today, so all you early adopters can take it out for a test ride right-away.
I came across a useful new feature in Gmail today. It is the simple, yet extremely useful ability of dragging and dropping attachments directly in your messages, instead of having to browse through your PC to get to them.
First I tried dragging and dropping a couple of pictures from the hard drive, and that didn’t go down too well. The first picture appeared in the message, but was too large to be sent, and the second one was taking so long I canceled the operation. I think the image size was too large, and if you are doing this with pictures, then stick to either one at a time or smaller file sizes.
Then I tried a 3 MB Powerpoint, and that got attached in about the same time I’d expect it to take, so the feature works, but is not as smooth as MS Outlook users would come to expect it.
One of the most common emails I get is folks inquiring about investing in the Tata Motors Fixed Deposit Scheme. I have a more or less standard response that I type out every time, and each time I think that I will save it in a notepad, and use it next time, but somehow I never get to it.
Today I discovered a much more efficient way of doing this, and I want to share the video which taught me this. This video is from Amy Andrews who runs Blogging with Amy, and she lists out the steps to create a canned response in Gmail. This is a Labs feature, and I have a feeling a lot of people like me need this type of a thing. I came across this video on Problogger.
Weakonomics had a post on the future of money, and it made me think about my recent car buying experience, and how different it would have been if I didn’t have the iPhone. Although I have written about car buying tips once earlier – I thought I’d write a post about my car buying experience specifically with respect to the iPhone.
The way I went about the whole exercise was to search cars around my area first. Cars.com is a great place to do that online, and it has got an app too. So I downloaded the cars.com app, and used it on my iPhone to browse cars.
One thing I noticed about Cars.com is that it doesn’t update as frequently as it should. You see several cars there which have already been sold, so it is always a good idea to call up the dealer and find out if something you liked is still available.
On the iPhone you can just tap the listed phone number, and it places the call for you. It saves you the trouble of keying in the numbers, and that was a big reason I used the app even when I had the computer handy (it is only now that I realize how lazy I have become).
If the car was still available – I usually used to make a note of it on Google Docs. I used to go online and update it from my phone itself.
Next up was figuring out the KBB value for which I used to go to their mobile site and although I am a little disappointed that they don’t have an app yet – the mobile site works fine too.
Once you get to the dealer’s – you see several cars that you hadn’t checked out earlier, and it’s really useful to have the phone to go online and check the KBB value immediately.
On the Cars.com app – there are a few tools and one of them calculates monthly payments for you, and I used that quite a bit to see how much each car would cost per month.
Finally, when I did buy the car – I forgot my insurance papers and was able to go online on the phone and check the insurance number from there itself.
I used the Chase app to check my bank balance a couple of times, used the GEICO app after I bought the car, but I didn’t use these apps as much as the others.
As I think about it – the phone changed my car buying experience quite a bit, and made it easy too, but in all honesty, I think I would have bought the same car even if I didn’t have the phone. It made the process easy, but it didn’t do anything that I couldn’t do without it. I don’t have any insights to offer into the future of money, but if you have a smart-phone that can make life easier for you in a lot of ways. If you don’t have one – then you are probably just missing out convenience and nothing more.
One of the things I wanted to do during my vacation here was to enable internet on my iPhone. I got a lot of conflicting information about this, and that delayed the process, but otherwise, it was a pretty simple thing to get done.
Before I describe how I did it, let me state that I do not know if this is the best or cheapest way of doing it, but it is just something that has worked for me.
Here is what I did:
1. Get an Airtel prepaid connection. This was the first thing of course. I got a prepaid connection. I didn’t ask about any data plan or anything else; just got a simple connection and activated it.
2. Activate GPRS: After getting the connection I activated GPRS by dialling this number: *567*2# — and following the instructions. The instructions were mainly about which plan you want to chose etc. The whole process takes about 5 minutes for you to go through, and I think Airtel activated GPRS in about an hour or so.
3. Reset Network Settings: After activating GPRS, — I waited a night before doing anything else. I was told by someone who used the service earlier – that Airtel sends you setting details – that are needed before you can go online. While this might be true a few years earlier or perhaps on some other phone models, — this is not necessary on the iPhone 3G.
But, you do have to reset your network settings on the iPhone before it can access the internet, and I got that tip from the comments on this post.
Here is how to do that:
Go to Settings à General à Reset à Reset Network Settings
The system will prompt you with an ugly red button which says “Reset Network Settingsâ€, and on top it says “This will delete all network settings, returning them to factory defaultsâ€
This concerned me a little bit because frankly I do not know what this actually does. All I know is that I hit the button and the iPhone restarted.
When it loaded up the next time, a little “E†appeared next to “Airtel†on the top left on the screen, and internet started working for me!
I have used it for about a day and so far everything looks fine. At the end of it all, the process was fairly simple and straightforward, and the speed is quite decent too. The apps work fine, and I had to just turn on “Location Services†in Settings General à Location Services to work with the maps app. Everything else worked on its own, and I hope it works for you too!
