Posted on September 2nd, 2010 by Ellis Benus | No Comments »
This is right up my alley.
Lifehacker reader Gavin Coelho didn’t have enough space for a full size desk. His solution was to build a hollow shelf-style desk that he could tuck his Macbook, external hard drive, and cabling inside. He keeps it cool with a small fan—which vents beneath the shelf—and runs the power and monitor cables through the wall. When it’s time to take the laptop with him, he just slides the shelf off the supports and unplugs it.
People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
I am working up to my old workout where I did everything…
Most importantly, it takes 45 minutes to do my full weight and abbs regiment, so I have to get to the gym early enough to do the full workout and get cleaned up in time for work.
Posted on August 27th, 2010 by Ellis Benus | No Comments »
Google Rocks our Faces Off Daily.
The Gmail Blog announced that Google Calendar ‘s repeating events scheduler got a user friendly upgrade as well as adding an awesome new feature to schedule events with other people.
Using the Google Calendar Connectors API, you can see openings in other people’s Google Calendar’s to schedule your event when you know people are free.
Posted on August 27th, 2010 by Ellis Benus | No Comments »
SearchTempest was just introduced to be by Lifehacker.com
But, two things to keep in mind when searching very far from your home location:
On larger items you are going to have to drive a longer way to pick them up.
On smaller items, you will have to pay for shipping as well as pay without the protections of eBay or other sites…
Lifehacker said:
Whether you’re searching for directors’ chairs in Beverly Hills or a boat trailer in upstate New York, SearchTempest aggregates locale Craigslist searches in an as-big-as-you-want-it search radius to help you find the best deals.
SearchTempest is a highly customizable Craiglist aggregator. You can start searching immediately be plugging in a zipcode, specifying the radius you want to search in—anywhere from 25 miles to around the world—and the keywords you want search for.
The default search results are generally pretty spot-on but you can further refine and expand your search by including eBay and Amazon results, whether or not it has pictures, and more. Once you find an item you’re interested in you can quickly get directions from your source zip code to the item in question.
SearchTempest is a free tool and requires no registration. Have a favorite tool for searching Craigslist? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
If you have Google Voice, then that number will show as where you’re calling from.
Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.
If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).
We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install thevoice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly—so stay tuned!
or 
buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
