For those GCal users among us, this nice little tech tip popped up from GoogleTutor. This quick little article notes how to include event name, date, time, and place all in one line to add the event without going to the details.
Quick Google Calendar Tip: Say It All In One Line!
From Lifehack.org
Last week I wrote an apparently controversial article on how I do my work completely online and why the operating system I use is no longer relevant: Firefox OS: Why My Hard Drive and Software are Obsolete.
In the many comments that followed, I was accused of being a Google fanboy, because I use so many Google apps: Gmail, Gcal, Google Reader, Picasa, Google Homepage and more. The truth is, I use those apps because in my experience they are the best online apps in each of their respective categories.
But it’s true that it’s never good to be under the thumbs of one company, and so by popular demand, here are the best alternatives to those Google apps. While it’s too late to save myself, perhaps you guys can get free from the Google stranglehold!
Top 10 Alternatives to Google’s apps
1. Thunderbird. As I noted in the previous article, I’m a fan of Firefox … and Mozilla’s open-source Thunderbird is right behind it in terms of usefulness, functionality, speed and extensibility. Thunderbird, although not an online app, is a great alternative to Gmail. If you add Mozilla’s Lightning or Sunbird, you can replace Gcal too.
2. 30 Boxes. Although the simple and fast Gcal meets my needs perfectly, 30 boxes is just as fast and easy, and is loved by many. If Gcal didn’t integrate with Gmail, I would probably be using 30 Boxes.
3. Netvibes. Although I love the speed of Google Reader, Netvibes can not only hold all of your feeds in an organized way, it can replace both Reader and Google Personalized Homepage. A great way to organize all your favorite services in a personalized way, Netvibes was my homepage of choice until I discovered Reader.
4. Zoho Office Suite. Perhaps the best online alternative to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho has just about everything you’d ever need: a spreadsheet, word processor, presentation program, project manager, notebook, wiki, web conferencing, mail, chat, database and CRM. This might actually be my choice of the future.
5. Peepel. This new offering takes my online OS model almost literally — it offers a desktop environment from within your browser. This service contains office apps, accessible anywhere online, including a word processor, spreadsheet and more. I haven’t actually given this a spin yet, but I intend to. It’s limited in its current beta release, but it has potential and plans to expand in the future. Replaces Google Docs and Spreadsheets
6. Bloglines. If Netvibes or Google Reader isn’t for you, Bloglines is another popular and excellent choice.
7. Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Yet another online office suite, Zimbra started out with email/calendar functionality and has since launched spreadsheet and word processing apps. I haven’t tried this, but have heard excellent things about it, and I love that it’s open-source with an API that could have many uses. Another alternative to Google Docs and Spreadsheets
8. ThinkFree Online. Billed as the “best online office on earth,” ThinkFree aims to ween people from Microsoft Office to is web office suite. It has spreadsheet, word processing and presentation apps, online storage, document sharing and more. Unfortunately, only some of that functionality is free, but it’s still an interesting suite. Replaces Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
9. OpenOffice.org. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention everybody’s favorite open-source office suite, OpenOffice. It’s not an online app, but it offers everything Microsoft Office can give you, but for free, and without all the bloat. This is definitely worth a try, especially if you’re not only trying to get free from Google but Microsoft as well. Replaces Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
10. Flickr. An obvious choice as a replacement for Google’s Picasa web photo service, Yahoo’s Flickr is actually much more popular. My free Flickr account wasn’t good enough for me, but it’s a great service loved by many.
Can you get free from Google’s grip? Yes, I believe you can. As I said before, I’m more than willing to try out the alternatives, but Google’s apps are the best I’ve found so far. For those of you who aren’t fans of Google, there’s a lot more out there.
Leo Babauta blogs regularly about achieving goals through daily habits on Zen Habits, and covers such topics as productivity, GTD, simplifying, frugality, parenting, happiness, motivation, exercise, eating healthy and more. Read his articles on keeping your inbox empty, clearing your desk, becoming an early riser, and the Top 20 Motivation Hacks.
Google-sponsored Open-Source OCR
From Google Operating System
Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software at the IUPR research group. "OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities."
"The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use," explains Thomas Breuel, who leads the project.
The software is partly based on Tesseract, the best open source OCR engine available for now. While the project is expected to be released at the end of next year and will be used for Google's book scanning project, the team has some interesting applications in mind:
* a web service interface
* PDF, camera, and screen OCR
* integration with desktop search tools: Beagle, Spotlight, Google Desktop
The most popular OCR software are ABBYY FineReader, Omnipage, Readiris and Presto OCR, but they're pretty expensive (starting at $100). A decent solution to perform OCR on a document is Microsoft Office Document Imaging, included in Microsoft Office XP/2007. Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 also lets you OCR imported images. A free online alternative is Scanr, a site that lets you digitize documents by sending a mobile phone photo by email.
From Google Operating System
Finally a new service at Google Labs: some people were really worried that Google's innovation went down the stairs.
Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. If you're in the US, call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say what you want to find. Here are some of the features:
* You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example.
* You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS.
* The service is fully automated, so it doesn't rely on human operators.
* It connects you directly to the business, free of charge.
In the US, 411 is the phone number for local directory assistance, but it's pretty expensive (more than $1). 1-800-FREE-411 is a free service that uses speech recognition to process your request and ads to monetize it.
Google tested several years ago Google Voice Search, a service that let you search Google by voice, but it's not available anymore. There's also Google SMS: send an SMS to 466453 with your query and get business listings.
If you're in the US, which 411 is better: 1-800-FREE-411 or 1-800-GOOG-411?
Update: This service has been around for a while (it was known as 520-Find). A post from October 2006 gives some interesting overview of Google 411:
Call 1 877 466 4411 (1 877 GOOG 411) and try your luck with two voices that I've come to think of as Mr. Google Smooth and Mr. Google Hawking. They won't tell you who they are, but they seem to be the voices of Google Local Search. (...)
If you call, nothing announces that you've reached Google, but a slightly arch and apparently human Mr. Smooth informs you your call might be recorded and then asks for a city and state. Mr. Hawking then cuts in, slow, methodical, and synthetic, to repeat your query. All good? Mr. Smooth then asks for a business type or name. He does all the traffic direction--the prompting for commands, the suggestions of ways you can interact, the questions. Mr. Hawking just gets to read back your queries and read out the searches.
Actual search results described below the fold, but just some general remarks: the voice recognition is pretty good, even with some "foreign" words, but not all English words.
Google Calendar doesn’t get much love or attention these days. Some users are wondering if Google’s forgotten about it. Still, it’s a pretty cool web app, especially if you learn the ins and outs and use it collaboratively with colleagues, friends, or family.
If you’ve been using it since it was introduced last year, you may know how to do many of these things. Maybe you even have your own tips and tricks for making it really rock. If so, share them in the comments.
1. Add holidays, moon phases, sporting events, and other public calendars. Click the “+” button next to “Other Calendars” in the Calendars list on the left-hand side of the page. Select the Browse Calendars tab. You can add the holiday calendar of your choice and also add phases of the moon or a Google Doodles graphical calendar. Are you a devoted sports fan? Search on the name of the team and you’ll be able to add all their scheduled games to your calendar. Couch potatoes can add TV show schedules.
2. Customize your view. You’re not limited to just the view options showing in the tabs along the top of the calendar. You can change the tab “Next 4 Days” to something that works better for you like “Next 2 Weeks” or “Next 3 Weeks” on the Settings page under the General tab. That’s where you can also specify date and time format, what day your week starts, whether to show weekends or not, and show weather for your location. Use keyboard shortcut “x” to move to your custom view. I’m partial to “Next 3 Weeks” because that’s about as far in advance as I’m thinking.
If the standard options for the Custom view still don’t get you the time interval you want, you can always select a custom interval on the mini-calendar on the left-hand side of the page by dragging with your mouse.
3. See where you are right now on your calendar. Here’s a little greasemonkey script that adds a red line for the current time to today’s box. That shows you immediately when you’re coming up on a meeting or other event.
4. Turbocharge your quick add. You probably know you can enter events as free text. Hit the keyboard shortcut “q” or click the “Quick Add” link in the upper right-hand side of the page. Then enter your event: time and title are the bare minimum; GCal will schedule it for today or tomorrow if no date is given. You can invite people by adding on their email addresses, create a recurring event by specifying repeat information, and specify by duration instead of start end time, if that’s more convenient. The Google help page for quick add claims it supports time zones — which would be great for those of us constantly flummoxed by time zone confusion — but that doesn’t seem to work right now.
5. Add events without even being on the GCal page. Elias Torres has developed a GCal Quick Add extension for Firefox. It doesn’t support adding daylong events in Firefox 2 (you get an “invalid date” error), but you can add events with a date and time by hitting
6. Receive event reminders and other notifications. GCal provides reminders by email, SMS, or pop-ups in the calendar itself. Specify your default reminder type under “Setting” > “Notifications.” To get text message notifications, you’ll need to verify your mobile phone number by specifying it on the Notifications page and then entering the verification code that’s sent to you by GCal. You decide what sort of notifications you receive about events and invitations. Note that event reminders only include those for your primary calendar.
7. Have a daily agenda emailed or text-messaged to you. On “Settings” > “Notifications” you can request that a list of events for the day be emailed to you. Another easy way to access your daily agenda is via SMS. Once you’re set up to access GCal from your mobile phone, just text “day” to short code 48368 (GVENT).
8. Access your calendar while you’re on the road. Text “next” to short code 48368 get your next event or “nday” to get events for the following day. Add events by texting event details, just as in the Quick Add on the web page.
9. Or access your calendar from your IM client. IMified makes it easy. Just add IMified to your buddy list and send a message like “help” to it. It will create an account for you. Add GCal to your IMified accounts by going to the Add/Edit Services link it gives you. Specify your time zone on the Account Settings page. Then when you send a message “M” to IMified you’ll get a menu that includes your calendar. It’s fairly minimal — one menu option for viewing upcoming events and one for adding an event. But when you’re on fire in your IM aggregator, it’s an easy way to check or add to your calendar quickly without going to another app.
10. Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Beyond “q” for quick add and “x” for your custom view, there are a few more keyboard shortcuts you’ll find useful. The keys “n” and “p” navigate forward and backward in whatever view you’re in. Use the escape key to exit from event creation or settings and go back to your default calendar view. See all the keyboard shortcuts here. If you’re a GMail user, you might want to install the GCalQuickTab Firefox add-on. It gives you a “g” and “l” keyboard shortcut to switch back and forth between GMail and GCal. Good idea, but the implementation is unfortunately flawed. Type an “l” into an email message and you’ll be switched to the calendar.
11. Add To Do lists to your calendar. Remember the Milk offers GCal integration — create a Remember the Milk account then tie it into your GCal. You’ll get a checkmark button for each date on your calendar that lets you review tasks that are due and overdue, add new tasks, and mark tasks as complete.
12. Get a bigger view of your calendar. If you’re using your calendar on a small screen, you might want to be able to maximize the calendar part and eliminate the list of calendars, the mini calendar, the search box, and other extraneous stuff. Try the Firefox Full Cal extension. It gives you a keyboard short cut (by default
13. Share your free/busy information on your blog. If your email is overrun with back-and-forths about scheduling telecons or face-to-face meetings, you might want to let everyone know up front when you’re available. You don’t have to share all your event details; just go to “Settings” > “Calendars”, click on “Share this calendar” for the calendar with the information you want to share, choose “Share only my free / busy information (hide details),” and save.
Then, go back to the calendar page (by clicking on the down arrow next to the calendar name in the calendar list, and choosing “calendar settings”), click on the “HTML” button in the “Calendar Address:” area and click on “Configuration tool” in the dialog box that pops up. You’ll be able to generate HTML for embedding the calendar within a web page.
If you blog on Typepad it’s even easier: just use their GCal widget. If you’re using WordPress, you could try this Google Calendar Widget.
14. Synchronize with your desktop calendar(s). Calgoo, in public beta right now, is a Java-based application for Windows, OS X, and Linux. It handles Google Calendar, iCal on the Mac, and Outlook on the PC, uniting the reigning trifecta of calendaring apps. Read more about it in our review.
15. Add events from GMail. GMail includes some natural language processing that looks for event-related information and if it finds some, it will offer an “Add to calendar” link to the right of the message. Click on the link and you can edit the event information then save. Alternatively, if there’s event information but GMail didn’t catch it, use “Create Event” in the “More actions…” dropdown to launch an event editor popup form, where you can type in event information right as you’re reading it in the email.
16. Display an agenda in GMail. Want to see what your upcoming appointments are when you’re right in GMail? Install the Greasemonkey script Add Calendar Feed to GMail. Now create a Google Bookmark for your Google Calendar feed using your private XML link from the Calendar Settings page and be sure to give it the label GMgcal. Then run the GMail Agenda setup from Firefox (”Tools” > “Greasemonkey” > “User Script Commands…” > “GMail Agenda Setup”). You’ll get a list of upcoming calendar events displayed between your contacts list and labels list on the left-hand side of GMail. Confused? Here are more detailed instructions for setting it up. It’s pretty useful to have a listing of upcoming events in your email.
17. Add a popup agenda with notifier to your Firefox status bar. The Google Calendar Notifier add-on gives you a popup agenda as well as notifications of upcoming events. You can tie the notifications into Growl, if you use that on the Mac, get popup notifications, and be re-notified of pending events.
18. View the weather forecast for your location. Under “Settings” > “General,” enter your location information and choose C or F under “Show weather based on my location.” Unfortunately, it’s only available for U.S. locations right now.
From Web Worker Daily
Google Spreadsheets has an interesting advantage over Microsoft Excel and other desktop applications: you can publish a spreadsheet and always have the latest version on the web without manually republishing it. Because Google Spreadsheets has an API, you can use the spreadsheet as an easy-to-update structured file always available on the web, as an input for web applications.
Pamela Fox wrote a post on Google Maps Blog that details how to create a map from a Google Spreadsheet that contains geographical information.
First you need to build a spreadsheet that has a header and a list of locations described by title, latitude, longitude. There's a nice batch geocoder that uses Google Maps API and can help you build your spreadsheet: copy the generated text in a text file and import it in Google Spreadsheets.
Once you have the spreadsheet, you need to create the connection with Google Maps. There are three ways to do that:
I have been doing a lot of exploring and surveying in the desert recently, and have been trying to find the right GPS mapping solution. The solution I found incorporated stuff I already had (laptop and GPS) with the help of some excellent, nearly free software. The best part is that it works even better than the $900 in-car GPS solutions as it uses always up-to-date satellite data, and is easily sharable.
Basically you run Google Earth and use some great donation-ware to link it in real time to a GPS. This means that your mapping software and maps worldwide are not only free, but you also get hi-res satellite views and in some cases 3D buildings (in downtown areas). Only a year or so ago this would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in proprietary GPS mapping gear; it would be difficult to share it once done; each map and satellite shot would cost extra; and it would have been an ordeal to get it all loaded up and working properly for each area you wanted to go.
What you need... (my set up is listed below). To get started you need a computer that can run Google Earth and you need a GPS. If you want this setup to be mobile, it's of course best to use a laptop, and if you plan on using it as a primary navigation solution, I would suggest a tablet PC or UMPC with a daylight-readable screen. I use a hand-me-down Fujitsu Stylistic 5000 tablet PC that I keep in a "ruggedized," water-resistant case with drop protection by Otterbox. Tablet PCs and UMPCs are great for in car use as they have daylight readable screens, and their touch screen interface and form factor are easier to use in a vehicle. The Fujitsu ST 4000 and 5000 also happen to fit the Otterbox case for a very rugged combo.
To connect the GPS to Google Earth on a PC I recommend Goops (there are a couple other options out there like Earth Bridge, but I have not tested them yet). For Mac you will need GPS2geX).
The GPS I use is the tiny Globalsat BT 359, which has a very long battery life and works wirelessly by Bluetooth to my Mac, PC and even my Treo (there are also some GPS's that have data logging memory built in like the DG-100 and TrackStick, though I have not used these yet). This style of GPS is only meant to be used in conjunction with another device as it has no screen or memory.
So once you have a GPS and your laptop has the right software, you will need to pair your GPS to the laptop via Bluetooth and make sure it's recognized by Goops (or whichever linking software you are using). You are now able to track your real time position and history in Google Earth. Goops can even color code your track history based on your speed (red for fast; blue for slow), and give you speed and altitude data on the fly. You can also track multiple networked units as well. Below, the red, levitated track is a plane.
The trick here is that Google Earth DOES work even when disconnected from the Internet. You just need to be sure the cache is updated in the area you are going to (you can set your cache to 2 gigabytes in the preferences to maximize this). So before I go somewhere I just zoom in pretty close and "fly" over the area or route, and this loads all the hi-res satellite imagery into the cache for off-line viewing. This solution is WAY easier than buying map CD's and downloading them into a GPS, and satellite imagery is way more useful for navigation.
My favorite part of this is that you can save your track and share it with others via Google Earth. They can replay your track and even download it to their GPS (with the $20 Google Earth Pro upgrade) and follow your footsteps. The following is my set up, but as I mentioned above, you can mix and match based on what gear you may already have or prefer.
-- Alexander Rose
 clipped from lifehacker.com
Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband service. Sign up today and we'll send you your TiSP self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD.
|
