Gtricks.com

Google Site to Teach Online Data Backup: Data Liberation Front

abhishek — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:23:11 +0000

It is very easy to backup your online data from Google services. However, most of the people don’t know this and thus Google has created special site to teach people how to move their data in and out from Google services and products.

Google services like Gmail, Blogger, Google Reader, Picasa has already implemented export and import function in their settings page. Nevertheless, there are few like Adwords or GMaps for which users aren’t aware of. Keeping this in mind and for escalating user experience, Google engineers at Chicago have come up with DataLiberation.org, which guides to back up data or in simpler words, move data in and out of Google products.

As per Data Liberation Front,

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products.
Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

You can get all your data out of Google and that too free. In addition, this process doesn’t require any time or additional effort from your side. You can even suggest features and vote for existing ones at Google Moderator Page. Google has also created a dedicated blog to inform you about Data Liberation here.

Following are the few important Google products with which you can backup your data:
• Blogger
• Bookmarks
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Docs
• Orkut
• Gmail
• And more here.

So, whenever you want backup your online data or want to take something out of Google, just use these Data Liberation guides to find out the perfect way.

Synchronize Bookmarks with Latest Google Chrome 4 Beta

abhishek — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:18:32 +0000

Synchronizing Bookmarks can be of great help for people with multiple computers. It could prove very useful in cases where person access nearly same sites at office and at home. The Chrome blog has announced a new feature for Google chrome, which lets users to automatically synchronise their bookmarks. So now, you don’t need to export bookmarks in Chrome and then importing them in another system.

To sync you Chrome bookmarks, first you need to update your chrome to the latest version, that is Beta 4. You can check your installed version by clicking on “Wrench” icon and then selecting “About Google chrome”. Else, you can download latest beta 4 version of Google Chrome from here.

Now, to synchronize your bookmarks, follow these steps:
1. Click on “Wrench Menu” .
2. Select “Synchronize my bookmarks”.
3. Sign-in with your Google account with which you want to keep these bookmarks.
4. Go to other computer and follow the same process. Chrome will ask to merge sync bookmarks with the previous original bookmarks.
5. Click on “Merge and Sync” and you are done.

Watch below the same tutorial in video format by Google :

You can synchronize bookmarks with as many as computers you like.

The best feature of synchronising the bookmarks is that it works in real time. It means, as soon as you bookmark website in one computer, the other computer/laptop saves it at same time. This syncing feature was made possible by XMPP-based server technology, which is also used in Google talk.

Google Doodle for Melbourne Cup 2009

abhishek — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:11:28 +0000

Google Australia displayed Beautiful logo for Melbourne cup in whic the letters are wearing colourful hats.

The Melbourne Cup is Australia’s major Thoroughbred horse race. Billed as The race that stops a nation, it is a race for three-year-olds and over, over a distance of 3,200 metres. It is the richest and most prestigious “two-mile” handicap in the world, and one of the richest turf races in the world. [wiki]

Music, Social and Images Search Redefined by Google

abhishek — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:28:35 +0000

Last week, Google has added new functionalities to make music, social and image search easier for users. They have added these changes to their core search functionality, so that it would be available to all the users by default.

Search for a Band, Singer, Song Name Directly
[image by Google blog]
With the new Music Search feature, you can directly search for band, singer, song name or album title in the search box and Google will recognize it automatically and return relevant searches. One of the best feature of musical search is that, you can play your searched song within Google search and that too without spending a penny. Google has also made a special page to discover music faster and easier here.

Know What Your Friends are Looking For on Web

Social Search is an experimental feature from Google which lets you view relevant and suggested results for your queries. The results include blogs, photo albums, web pages and reviews that Google find related to you and your social life. Google will try to compute your social life based on your Gmail contacts, twitter and freindfeed profiles. To activate this feature, you need to go to “Google Experimental” and select “Social Search Experiment”.

Image Search Revolutionised by Searching for Similar Pics

The most useful feature that Google added last week was Similar Images on Images Search. With this feature, you can directly click on similar images link below image to find relevant and analogous image. The idea is to reduce the dependence of keywords on image search.

For example, for a peacock search, you would find various peacock pics but if a white peacock interests you then clicking on “Find similar images” below white-collared peacock will show you various pics of the same. Try out here.

Google Celebrating Halloween – 2009

abhishek — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:39:34 +0000

This time Google is celebrating Halloween in a special way. The Home page is decorated with a special Doodle made of candies. But when you click on it, the Google home page changes its logo into more candies-filled-doodle.

Halloween (also spelled Hallowe’en) is an annual holiday celebrated on October 31. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holy day of All Saints, but is today largely a secular celebration.

Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, carving jack-o’-lanterns, ghost tours, bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films. [Wiki]

Google Halloween Logos:

Blogoscoped forum reports that Google has new Easter egg for Halloween. They have added following notorious code in their robots.txt file:

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Halloween Logos from other search engines and websites:
(from SEO Round Table)
Yahoo:

AOL:

YouTube:

Bing:

Google Thailand Celebrating Loy Krathong – 2009

abhishek — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:12:47 +0000

Our user Bob reports that Google Thailand is celebrating Loy Krathong festival with a beautiful doodle showing candles and rafts floating in full moon.

Loy Krathong is held on the full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar. In the western calendar this usually falls in November. “Loi” means “to float”. “Krathong” is a raft about a handspan in diameter traditionally made from a section of banana tree trunk (although modern-day versions use specially made bread ‘flowers’ and may use styrofoam), decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, candles, incense sticks etc.

The festival probably originated in India as a Hindu festival similar to Deepavali as thanksgiving to the deity of the Ganges with floating lanterns for giving life throughout the year. [wiki]

Top 10 Gtalk Tricks that Everybody Must Know

abhishek — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:59:55 +0000

Amongst the various Google talk tips and Tricks available, there are certain that everybody must know. Compiling here, top 10 tricks that lets you make most of Gtalk:

1. Use Gtalk in Your Mobile

Do you know, you can even use Google talk in your mobile phone and stay connected with your friends on the go? The official Google software for chatting with your friends works with only iPhone and Android. There is another way to use Gtalk by use of SIS or JAR software for generic phones. You can download this J2ME client here.

2. Exploit Keyboard Shortcuts to Save Time

Using keyboard shortcuts is the great way to maximize your productivity. You save your time by doing variety of functions without even touching mouse just by pressing few buttons.

The following keyboard shortcuts are must for any Gtalk addict:

• Ctrl + E – It centralizes the selected text, or the current line.
• Ctrl + R – It justifies to the right the selected text, or the current line.
• Ctrl + L – It justifies to the left the selected text, or the current line.
• Ctrl + I – The same thing does that Tab.
• Tab – It is giving the area to each of the windows opened by Google Talk.
• Ctrl + Tab – The same thing does that Shift + Tab .
• Shift + Tab – The same thing does that Tab but in reverse.
• Ctrl + Shift + L -Switch between points, numbers, letters, capital letters, roman numbers and capital roman numbers
• Ctrl + 1 (KeyPad) – It does a simple space between the lines.
• Ctrl + 2 (KeyPad) – It does a double space between the lines.
• Ctrl + 5 (KeyPad) – A space does 1.5 between the lines.
• Ctrl + 1 (NumPad) – It goes at the end of the last line.
• Ctrl + 7 (NumPad) – It goes at the begin of the last line.
• Ctrl + F4 – It closes the current window.
• Alt + F4 – It closes the current window.
• Alt + Esc – It Minimize all the windows.
• Windows + ESC – Open Google Talk (if it’s minimized, or in the tray)
• F9 – Open Gmail to send an email to the current contact.
• F11 – It initiates a telephonic call with your friend.
• F12 – It cancels a telephonic call.
• Esc – It closes the current window.

3. Hide your Gtalk Status – Make it Always Idle

Gtalk doesn’t provide facility of remaining invisible like Gchat (Gmail embedded chat) gives. However, you can trick your online status by showing it as idle always. This way, your friends will assume that you are not on your desk. Tweak your Gtalk status by downloading gAlwaysIdle software. More…

4. Dress Your Gtalk Application with Additional Themes

Are you bored using the same white Gtalk every day? Now, you can dress your Gtalk application with custom and downloadable themes to add a little spice to boring Gtalk. You can download Gtalk themes from various sources such as http://gtalk.anthonysottile.com/ , http://gtheme.sravi.com/ and more.

And even make your own Google talk themes from this tutorial.

5. Make Your Chatting More Interesting by Text Decorations

Tired of same plain text messages? Use the following tags to convert your messages into Bold, Text Underline and Italics:

Enclose text in asterisk(*) to make bold effect.
Enclose text in underscore( _ ) to make it italicized.
More….

6. Have Two or More Gtalk Running at Same Time.

If you have two or more Google accounts, and want to use both at same time for chatting with friends, then this is the perfect trick for you. With this trick, you can run multiple copies of Google Talk application in you Windows.

All you need to do is to right click on Google talk shortcut and select Properties. In the target field append the parameter /nomutex so that it becomes like C:/Program Files/Google/Google Talk.exe /nomutex. It’s done. Now whenever you double click on Google Talk Desktop icon, it opens a new instance for a new Google account.

Similarly, you can run multiple copies of Yahoo messenger with this tutorial.

7. Use Gtalk Bots to Make Your Life Easier

Google bots are automated robots that respond to your queries. For example, or the news bot will fetch you latest news on your preferred subject inside Gtalk window and the translation bot automatically converts the text to the specified language you have send. Following are few Gtalk bots to make life easier :

1) Transliteration Bots.
2) IBN News bot.
3) GK Answering bot.
4) Listen Online Radio with this bot.
5) More.

8. Amaze Your Friends with Hidden and Secret Set of Emoticons/Smileys

Google has always something special hidden for its fans like Google reader Easter Eggs. There are certain emoticons that you won’t find anywhere documented. Find these secret and hidden emoticons to amaze your friends here.

9. Direct Shortcut to Chat

If you frequently chat with particular friends in Gtalk, then you can create direct shortcuts to chat window to start conversation. This is the quickest and direct way to start a chat with friend.
For this, right click on your desktop and select New > Shortcut. Now add the following line in the location of the item :

gtalk:chat?jid=username@gmail.com

Where username@gmail should be replaced by your friends gmail address.

10. Use Google Talk without Downloading and Installing

You can use and enjoy all the features of Google talk without even downloading and installing it on your computer. For this bookmark http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout in your internet browser. Using this bookmark, you can directly launch Google talk in gadget mode.

Best 10 Gadgets for Gmail that are Damn Cool and Useful

abhishek — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:54:43 +0000

You can substantially increase the functionality of Gmail by adding Gadgets. Gadgets also increase the productivity as you can use variety of services within single Gmail Window.

Here are the 10 best Gadgets for Gmail that you won’t find in Labs and are damn cool:

1. Find Meanings, Synonyms and Word Definitions

With this gadget, you can easily find meanings, synonyms by searching within Thesaurus, Dictionary, and Encyclopaedia without leaving Gmail. In addition, if Gmail’s Spell checker isn’t working, then you can use this gadget to find all spelling mistakes in your mail

Gadget URL: http://www.openinventions.com/spellcheck/openinventions_spellcheck.xml

2. Find Locations Directly with Google Map Search

Quickly find locations on Google maps with the help of this Gmail Gadget. It could be particularly useful when you received IM or mail from your friend or client requesting you to reach somewhere ASAP. Alternatively, in confusion about the location of the place, this gadget is absolute for you.

Gadget URL: http://www.google.com/ig/modules/mapsearch.xml

3. Access All Features on Twitter inside Gmail

Are you a Twitter addict? Do you want to tweet even when you are working? This Twitter Gadget provides all the functionalities (yes, updates too) within your Gmail window. What could be more exiting then working, mailing and simultaneously tweeting?

Gadget URL: http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml

4. Manage your Task Easily with Remember the milk plugin

Do you have trouble in remembering your tasks? Do you frequently forget the work for the day and couldn’t manage your jobs? Then, Remember The Milk Gmail gadget is a perfect tool for you. You can easily manage, review and postpone your tasks inside Gmail with this smart list tool.

Gadget URL – http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml

5. Connect with Friends with Facebook Gadget

With this Gadget, you can check your friend’s pics, get alerts, and do variety of things within Gmail.

Gadget URL:http://www.brianngo.net/ig/facebook.xml

6. Control Your Space with this MySpace Gadget

Without opening MySpace website, you can control all your social activities like sending and receiving emails, accessing notes and much more.

Gadget URL:http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/100080069921643878012/myspace.xml

7. Scrap Directly, Visit Profiles with this Orkut Gadget for Gmail

For those of you who didn’t knew, Orkut is the Social networking and discussion site operated by Google. With this Orkut Gadget, you can directly access all the features right within your Gmail.

Gadget URL:
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105297062528314471242/doomer_orkut_scrapbook.xml
Or http://scrapur.com/apps/orkut.xml

8. Get the World’s Biggest and Free Encyclopaedia inside Gmail

Wikipedia is the most sought after site for generic searches beside Google. Even Google places Wikipedia articles in the first positions for most of the terms. With this Wiki Gadget, you can directly search for articles and references.

Gadget URL : http://www.google.com/ig/modules/wikipedia.xml

9. Get Quick Calculations inside Gmail

With this Calculator Gadget, you can do quick math inside Gmail. It has basic functions with standard interface and supports up to 12 digits.

Gadget URL: http://www.poturi.net/gadgets/calc/calc.xml

10. Convert Long URL’s into Short Ones

This Bit.ly Gmail gadget allows you to convert long URL’s to really short ones so that your mail doens look horrible with links. Very useful while composing uncluttered emails.

Gadget URL:
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml

Related: How to Add Gadgets in Gmail

[Problem] Email Address Drop-down Suggestions Appears Even after Deleting

abhishek — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:30:22 +0000

One of the annoying problems with Gmail is that even after you delete an email address, it still appears as drop-down suggestions, when you start typing name in “To” box.

This problem is not as simple as it looks. Even hitting the delete key after highlighting the suggestion will not work. And most of the times, when you delete the email address from “My Contacts” list, then too the name or email address pops-up as soon as you start writing/typing in “To” field for sending messages. This problem can be easily solved by following method:

Step 1: Click on “Contacts” on the left sidebar of Gmail. Now select the option “All Contacts”. Gmail has two depositories for email addresses. One is “My Contacts” which you have imported or have saved previously. The other is “All contacts”, where ALL contacts are automatically saved if you have send them a mail previously, though you haven’t added them in your contact list.

Now, from “All Contacts” find the name/email address of the person and manually delete it.

Step 2: Log out of your Gmail account and clear the browser cache.

Now, the deleted email address won’t appear in Gmail address suggestions and will protect you from sending a mail accidently.

Google Reader Latest Easter Egg

abhishek — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:41:26 +0000

Google never fails to amuse its users. By Recursion trap, Doodles and Easter Eggs Google always have some interesting stuff to keep its users happy. This time, Matt Cutts shares latest Easter egg in Reader.

For those of you, who didn’t knew about Google Reader Easter egg – There is a secret Ninja mode of reader which can be activated by pressing keys in certain sequence.

The key combination is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, b, a.

The latest Google Reader Easter egg is hidden inside the “Like” button. In the ninja mode, the “Like” button changes into “Heart” and when you click on it beautiful hearts pop-up. Clicking on “Heart” button again (or disliking the feed) makes pop-up hearts to break. Try yourself to view the magic effect.

PS: The above key sequence is also known as Konami code in honour of popular video game, Contra .