Ref : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/choose-which-messages-get-downloaded.html

While this is also a useful feature for those on the go, I think that many folks would find a ton of time savings via Gmail Filters.

In Gmail, one common use of these filters as a way to allow custom, automatic processing of messages as they arrive. I put each mailing list into into own “label” (folder) automatically, to keep my Inbox tidy. For some of the lists that I don’t read very often, I even set the message status as “has been read” for those, to keep the number indicator low in my folder list. (different colors per label / folder make things easier to distinguish, even after many hours per day at the monitors)

There are numerous advanced filter possibilities, as well as some undocumented features that work well, in my limited experience.

I find Gmail (via their Google Apps / Standard Edition) to be of quite a bit of value for myself and the family. However, many folks simply don’t know what the service is capable of, and it’s painful to see them struggle with their email.

As a friend, a few quick Filters can really help them out for a long time to come. There are numerous other tweaks that can help them via the Gmail Labs, as well as the standard Settings page (force https mode, etc.)

If you have an especially helpful tip or set of tips for filtering or Gmail, please forward and I will give due credit, thanks!

FYI, from http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=197188

Google Blog post and Engadget post both discuss how Google Voice (sign up here; the new requests are happening more quickly these days!) can take over for the voicemail on your cell phone. (current google voice folks : hit this, then choose “Activate Google voicemail on this phone” by your cell number listed there; follow instructions carefully)

Extremely handy, since you can now check those voicemails over the phone (@ your GV number), or via email as a clickable audio link. In addition, if you need to keep a copy of the message, you can download it from GB as an .mp3 file.

https://www.google.com/voice/voice/sprint and http://newsreleases.sprint.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=127149&p=irol-newsArticle_newsroom&ID=1347107&highlight= also highlight how Google Voice / Voice Mail (GV / VM) will work with the Sprint network.

Another snippet basically says :

Application Development Addresses Voice Services and Data

Voice services continue to play a central role in mobile communications, even as data grows. Application developers have created a number of voicemail and messaging services that take advantage of call forwarding capabilities. Sprint announced today that it will not charge customers for certain types of call forwarding. Conditional call forwarding for busy calls or calls not answered using the customer’s wireless phone will be free, beginning mid-November. (Standard charges will continue to apply for immediate call forwarding.)3 This change will give Sprint customers the opportunity to access third-party voice services, including the new voicemail feature in Google VoiceTM.

Google Voice lets users manage and control their voice communications and comes with a suite of voicemail and text messaging features. On Monday, Google announced it will offer a Google Voice feature that allows mobile phone users to take advantage of Google Voice without having to sign up for a Google Voice phone number. Further illustrating its open, collaborative approach, Sprint is working with Google to develop additional functionality to support services such as Google Voice that will deliver an even richer experience to Sprint customers.

“We’re excited Sprint customers will be able to take advantage of Google Voice voicemail with their mobile phones. We look forward to continuing this relationship and working closely with Sprint in the future,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Product Management at Google. “Free call forwarding and Sprint’s Open approach create more opportunities for developers, large and small, to build innovative and useful applications.”

Here’s the small print:

3 Although no charges will be applied for conditional call forwarding (meaning busy calls or calls not answered), some Sprint customers may incur a $0.20 per-minute charge if they choose to forward calls directly into voicemail or to another number without first allowing the call to try to reach the number and getting a busy signal/no answer. This is called unconditional call forwarding (immediate).

Also :

“Looks like it will be free on 11/08/09! ”
“Google Voice™ – starting 11/8/09, all Sprint price plans will include free conditional (no answer/busy) call forwarding (*73,*74,*28). ”

http://insidesprintnow.wordpress.com…sprint-110809/ for more information on Google Voicemail, check http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10384414-1.html

Sprint folks : note the text warning GV displays; charges may be incurred for now, so safer to wait until after the 8th of November. Cool bits!

As always, you can send Google your continuing feedback about the Google Voice service. iPhones and many other cell carriers also supported :

“As of now we only officially support the following carriers listed on our site (Alltel, AT&T, Cricket Wireless, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon). We are working on extending the support to more carriers soon. Please note that Google voicemail for your existing number won’t work with phone plans that don’t support conditional call forwarding. Currently, T-mobile prepaid plans do not support this feature. Please contact your phone carrier for more information.”

Have a great day . . .

http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#packagetracking

Yes, Google may rule the Earth someday, but they’re pretty handy in the meantime

I’d really be interested to see them do this. I’m all for companies voluntarily seeking to reduce, reuse, recycle.

When it becomes cheaper to do so, everyone will use cleaner power – surely a win all around.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/google-solar-power-mirror/

Excerpt below; for full article please click link above.

Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Google in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.

The company’s engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.

John Leveron – Google Profile

Awesome Sauce from Google.

Yes, it’s “full of win”™

Here is one Calendar possibility anyway.  I am pretty entrenched in Google Apps at this point, for many things.  I certainly understand if others don’t choose them.

google calendar

Data portability is a good thing, so you are not locked in to a sole provider. This also keeps competition and innovation high, in order to retain customers.

A live example of this calendar is at http://leveron.com/w3c/public-calendar-example.php

Google offers new privacy options http://bit.ly/IYSSq

I’ve been really impressed with Gladinet Cloud Desktop so far.  I’ve been able to seamlessly push and pull things from a few different cloud objects, including from within programs.  Being able to redundantly store that long letter locally, as well as remotely at the same time is pretty good tech.

My first test was with Google.  While Gladinet supports Google Apps, it is not quite as mature there as it is for Picasa, and standard Google accounts (yourname@gmail.com type email addresses). I expect that will mature with continued releases.

Webdav and FTP were certainly no issue, and the plugins for those allowed anonymous mode as well.  I appreciated the flexibility modes regarding bandwidth, as well as scheduling options – the Pro version includes scheduled backup options.

It can push to a cloud like Amazon S3 (that also worked well).  I suspect as others become more prominent in this field (like Rackspace) there may be plugins added for those as well; the Gladinet code seems pretty modular, with one or more plugins per service (support for Adrive added, and they’ve supported others like Box.net for some time).

With the Premium Edition it looks like Gladinet has plans for a rather “feature enhanced” enterprise type version. That’s usually what I try to choose even for home “power” use, when I can.

While SkyDrive is not perfect yet (Microsoft still has the 50 meg file size limit per file, which is sure acceptable given they give you 25 gig for free) it has been easy to drag and drop things back and forth, create new folders, etc. all from the Windows side.

Gladinet screenshot

Due to their plugin architecture, I expect we’ll be seeing nice incremental upgrades to this technology. While it’s easy enough for some of my non-tech friends to use, it also will definitely find a home with many of the IT folks I know.

I have to admit, the free 30 day test drive of the full professional mode helped sway me to buy.  I admired their product confidence in offering a full “free” mode for 30 days, yet still allows all of the core functionality for free after that time.  They seem to know that once you experience this in action they’re more likely to close a sale.  As well, they are taking care of their active beta testers. A business like this, I can deal with!

I haven’t tested this on anything but Windows 7 RTM (go go, final code!), 64 bit ultimate.  Lots of applications don’t work smoothly (some not at all) under this, since it’s so new; Gladinet works fine.  I suspect it’d be breezy on a standard Windows XP 32 bit installation, eh?  You can download either the 32 bit or 64 bit version for free from their site.

For those that want the full scoop you can check out their complete version comparison chart;  Gladinet also has their own blog, forums, and they tweet their version upgrades.

I’ve added this to my “must have” list this year. Even if I never get an Amazon S3 account on the European side, or my very own EMC Atmos . . .

If you’d like to purchase Gladinet Cloud Desktop Professional Edition for Home Use or their Professional Edition (non home use) I’d appreciate it if you’d use these purchase links; fair disclosure is to tell you that while it won’t cost you anything additional, I would get a small commission should you purchase.  Thanks

This is likely of little interest unless you are hosting your own bits, and are looking for “Tech”.  Fair warning, and all that tommy-rot.

https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/ for web site optimization.

http://www.validome.org/google/validate validate your sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz etc.

http://blog.bit.ly/post/93170671/a-big-week-for-little-urls URL shortening, with custom logging. I like their transparency, and checks for “bad” sites.  http://bit.ly/ create an account, get [anonymous] stats of clicks. Just how popular was that YouTube video link you sent out?

Double Thumbs

Various header checks for compression : http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/ http://nontroppo.org/tools/gziptest/ http://www.seositecheckup.com/html_compression_status.php

The W3C is really the de facto standard : here’s some great tests and info from them :

The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages

• The MarkUp Validator. – Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
• The Link Checker – Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.
• The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.

Developing mobile-friendly content? The MobileOK checker is a one-stop service to check your Web site and improve its mobile-friendliness.

Also in the works is the Unicorn, our project to build a Universal Conformance Checker for the Web.

Specific Tools – for Specific Needs

• Semantic Extractor – Sees a Web page from a semantic point of view. Extracts such information as outline, description, languages used, etc.
• RDF Validator – Checks and Visualize RDF documents
• Feed Validator. – Checks newsfeeds in formats like ATOM and RSS.
• P3P Validator – Checks whether a site is P3P enabled and controls protocol and syntax of Policy-Reference-File and Policy
• XML Schema Validator
• We also have developer several human-centered test tools: the Mobile Test Harness (code) is Web-based harness for browsers test suites, that offers users the possibility to record results on whether the browser they’re using passes or not a set of test suites; and MUTAT – an (older) human-centered testing framework developed in perl (code)

Open Source

All software developed at W3C is Open Source / Free software. Which means that you can download and use them for free, if you like. It also means that you are welcome to participate in making them better, cooler, more useful for you and everyone.

• Check each project for instructions on how to download their source code, and install them on your system
• All the QA tools are maintained by the volunteer developers of the QA-dev group. Why don’t you join?

http://validator.aborla.net/ more validation, alternate folks

Validate your feed at feedvalidator.org

[space reserved for expansions, as I hit more links / receive comments about this with good quality links <hint!>]