For the uninitiated, GTD stands for Getting Things Done. GTDInbox is a Firefox extension (though a Chrome version is in the offing) that makes it it downright easy for you to stay on top of your email.
Once you install it, it sets up some additional labels for you. Then, you are expected to label all your future email with one of those labels. You can sort mails into Contexts, References and Labels, then specify a status for each (i.e. Action, Working On, Someday, or Finished). These emails will now show up in a Todo list in the sidebar, and can be addressed as individual tasks. Once that’s complete you can simply process the emails as per priority. Read up on how to usehere. Quick Access To Unread Emails In The Inbox
Here’s a Gmail productivity tip that I picked up a few days back. There are times when all you want to do is get hold of all the unread messages in your Inbox. Now you can do the same with just one word. If you are using Firefox, just search with the string “is:unread in:inbox” and bookmark the results page. Now, go to the Organize Bookmarks (that’s Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks) and click on the Bookmark you just created. At the bottom of the screen, click on more and type something easy and snappy in the “Keyword” field (I use “unread”).
Now, the next time you need all unread messages in your Inbox, simply click the location bar (hit Ctrl+L) and type the keyword you made for the bookmark. Undo Send
Here’s one to help avoid all those “Oops!” moments. Google, being the awesome bunch of coders that they are, allow you to call back emails which you have just sent. Just go to Settings > Labs > Undo Send > Enable to turn on the functionality. Next time you send an email accidentally, just call it back by clicking on Undo. Filter Me Crazy!
All those labels that you created are basically useless if you have to manually mark conversations. Use filters to automate the entire process. Create a filter by clicking on “Create a Filter” at the top of the page or by going to “Settings > Filters”. You could make one to automatically tag all emails from Social Networks and make them skip the inbox. Or make one to scan subject lines for words like “Fwd:”, “Fw:”, etc. and mark them as Forwards. The possibilities are endless with Filters. Add Your Calendar To Gmail
It’s a major pain in the backside to fire up a new URL just to check with your Calendar. You can use the “Google Calendar Gadget” to integrate Google Calendar with Gmail. Just go to Settings > Labs and enable it.
In case you are a Remember The Milk fan, just go to Settings > Gadgets and type the following in the “Add Gadget by URL” box (remember to enable the “Add Any Gadget by URL” labs feature first):
Filters are cool but tend to be messy. I mean, who really wants to create a custom search for specific words in their subject lines? It’s much easier to create specific email addresses. Gmail allows such functionality. In the eyes of Gmail, “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are the same. So the next time you are signing up at a website, use the “+” operator and create a filter to apply to that email address. Life will never be easier.
With Gmail, nothing is more than a few clicks away. Particular features may be obscure, but once you know about of few Gmail productivity tips, you can really put them to good use. Gmail makes sure that your email works for you (and not the other way round). Use these tips and heave a sigh of relief.
Top 12 Sites To Watch Videos That Are Better Than YouTube
YouTube was created in 2005, but much like Google, it feels like it’s been around forever. We post our videos on YouTube, look for some silly entertainment during boring afternoons and send videos along to friends much like old ladies used to spread gossip around town not very long ago.
But should you be limited to YouTube? Let’s be honest, there is a whole world of streaming video online that most people have never seen because they have settled for YouTube. Most sites have the same features, or features even better than YouTube has and some have a more specialized selection or much higher quality videos.
So here is a small sample of video sites you should check out that many people feel are better than YouTube.
Current TV is a website that is also a TV channel, but unlike all other tv sites, that post their content from tv on their sites, Current plays the content from their website on TV. People post their videos, or pods, on the site which get voted by the community and the highest ranking ones get on their television channel. Current has an enticing variety of videos, but the heart of the site is its amazing independent journalism. On Current, you can see all the reports that usually don’t get on television, or a whole new approach to the news you do see. For video producers, it’s a chance to get your video on tv and a little bit of cash to go with it. TED
TED is unique in the world of streaming video, and it is brilliant in its own way. TED’s whole concept is to spread ideas, and to accomplish that, it has enlisted some of the most brilliant minds in the world to create “talks” about topics as diverse as Eve Ensler’s “Embrace your inner child”, Murray Gell-Mann’s “Beauty and truth in physics” or Bill Gates’ “Mosquitos, malaria and education”. Better than YouTube in another way, the search on the site also works in an ingenious way, letting you search by keywords or by themes such as: inspiring, beautiful or fascinating. For those of us who are eternal students, TED is a jewel of endless facets. Big Think
Following a very similar style to TED, Big Think takes an interview approach to its video instead of a prepared talk. The result is a very interesting group of answers that make you feel like you actually got to ask a famous expert the question yourself and he had the kindness to reply. It’s not as evolved as TED is, but it is certainly biting at its heels. Atom
If you think YouTube videos are funny, you’ve never visited Atom, previously Atom Films. With an enormous array of animations, comedy shorts and sketches, Atom hasn’t lost its edge after its acquisition by MTV. Because of its huge selection of talented filmmakers who normally contribute to the site and with their own staff filmmakers, who were selected from some of the funniest sites online, Atom manages to consistently have shorts that will lighten up the most boring of days. Blip.tv
Created on May 11, 2005, the same year as YouTube, Blip.tv has mimicked what network television channels offer but using the same resource Current TV uses: independent producers. It currently has about 48,000 independently produced Web shows and approximately 22,000,000 viewers. They share the revenue of their ads with the producers, which allows them to make some income from their shows and keep producing them and in exchange, Blip.tv gets a constant supply of episodes for their site. So what can you find on Blip.tv? Mostly, the site consists of series of shows, much like television shows, with genres like dating, technology, animation and a diverse group of fiction stories. 5 Min
Did you ever want to know how to photograph a red squirrel, how to reduce poverty in developing worlds or how to go geocaching with your kids? Well, you can find all of those answers and much, much more on 5min.com, the site that will try to teach you how to do almost anything in 5 minute videos. World Wide Internet TV (WiwTV)
WwiTV is more an aggregator than a video site, since it doesn’t store the videos itself, but merely points at videos in other sites. The reason it made this list is that it points at video channels from all over the world, so if you’d like to watch a soap opera from Azerbaijan or a music video from Vietnam, you can find it all on WwiTV. The quality is generally quite poor and the site itself is quite an eye sore, but where else would you find a North Korean video as top selection of the day followed closely by the Hellenic channel in Greece? Hulu
Television channels seem to have noticed that trying to keep their shows out of streaming video sites is a lost battle. Their response seems to be finding partners who will help them deliver the content in its entirety and in higher quality than the ripped versions of the videos while sharing the ad revenue. One of such partner sites is Hulu. It carries content from many tv channels at very high streaming quality. The one catch is that it doesn’t have international streaming rights for their content outside the USA, so it’s for an American audience only. Vimeo
Since it was created by filmmakers, Vimeo shows a very holistic and welcoming approach to video sharing. Vimeo tends to attract more professional filmmakers than other sharing sites, the video tends to be higher quality and the design certainly beats YouTube’s messy look. The community projects and groups also make it easy to find videos of a particular topic or subject matter and with almost 3 million members and over 17000 videos uploaded daily, there is a lot to choose from. Stickam
The proposal of sites like Stickam is very innovative. Let the audience participate by streaming their own video live. For most part, it works in an exciting way. Some shows are scheduled and you can stream your own video as an audience member and talk to the hosts or video chat among other viewers. It’s like being part of a live audience and always carrying the mike. You can also watch pre-recorded shows and interviews.
The one issue is that for a large part of the day, the site seems to be inhabited by the people who are most at ease with webcams, young teenagers. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if you are looking for some more experienced discussions you must select your live streams carefully. UStream
The older, more mature version of Stickam, Ustream also allows people to create their own broadcasting channels and their own live shows. It does, though, carry live broadcasting from many mainstream media sites and it doesn’t allow people to join in with their video chats the way Stickam does, but it does have live text chat.
The topics tend to be more interesting than Stickam’s since it has a lot of contributions from professional journalists who decided to try the live interactive video format. Blinkx
Why bother visiting a bunch of video sites looking for viral videos when you can find it all on one site? Boasting to be world’s largest video search engine with over 35 million hours of video from all major video sites, Blinx even claims to have indexed more media searches than Google. All you have to do is type in a keyword and you get results from major sites all at once.
There are literally thousands of streaming video sites to choose from, built just to entertain or inform you. Some are very niche, some copies of what we’ve already seen.
The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts eBook. Windows 7 includes a lot of new keyboard shortcuts that are unknown to a new user. This eBook comprises of more than 200 keyboard shortcuts containing almost all the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Windows 7 and its default programs like Paint, WordPad, MS Office, Calculator, Help, Media Player, Media Center, Windows Journal, Internet Explorer, etc.
If you are using Opera Browser and want to back up all the browser data to another PC, then the free utility Opera Back up should be useful. OperaBackup is smart and easy to use application that lets you create and restore backups of all data as bookmarks, passwords, configuration, etc. of your Opera browser. Once installed, it can take a back up of all the user profile or a specific user profile.
The interface is pretty simple and it provides you with two options, Backup and Restore a back up. You can select the user profile from the list of available profiles.
F you are selecting the define user profile option, then you need to manually profile the path to the opera folder, preferences and also the email and RSS folders. Opera Backup is a pretty useful utility to back up and restore Opera profiles which includes bookmarks, configuration etc.
Check out this link for a great transfer time/speed calculator. You select the file size and the speed of your line and it will aproximate the transfer time! Sweet
For the uninitiated, GTD stands for Getting Things Done. GTDInbox is a Firefox extension (though a Chrome version is in the offing) that makes it it downright easy for you to stay on top of your email.
Here’s a Gmail productivity tip that I picked up a few days back. There are times when all you want to do is get hold of all the unread messages in your Inbox. Now you can do the same with just one word. If you are using Firefox, just search with the string “is:unread in:inbox” and bookmark the results page. Now, go to the Organize Bookmarks (that’s Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks) and click on the Bookmark you just created. At the bottom of the screen, click on more and type something easy and snappy in the “Keyword” field (I use “unread”).
Here’s one to help avoid all those “Oops!” moments. Google, being the awesome bunch of coders that they are, allow you to call back emails which you have just sent. Just go to Settings > Labs > Undo Send > Enable to turn on the functionality. Next time you send an email accidentally, just call it back by clicking on Undo.
All those labels that you created are basically useless if you have to manually mark conversations. Use filters to automate the entire process. Create a filter by clicking on “Create a Filter” at the top of the page or by going to “Settings > Filters”. You could make one to automatically tag all emails from Social Networks and make them skip the inbox. Or make one to scan subject lines for words like “Fwd:”, “Fw:”, etc. and mark them as Forwards. The possibilities are endless with Filters.
It’s a major pain in the backside to fire up a new URL just to check with your Calendar. You can use the “Google Calendar Gadget” to integrate Google Calendar with Gmail. Just go to Settings > Labs and enable it.
