Archive for February, 2010

Chrome: We love Gina’s Better Gmail Firefox extension, a bundle of user scripts that improves the Gmail experience. Now that Google’s beefed up support for Chrome extensions, reader Dimitar Gruev has taken a shot at bringing an unofficial Better Gmail to Chrome.

Almost a year ago our own How-To Geek put together a version of Better Gmail for Chrome, but that was way back when Chrome didn’t even have extensions (his were all bundled into a single user script). This new Chrome extension is an unofficial Better Gmail for Chrome that was inspired by Gina’s Firefox extension and our earlier Better Gmail for Chrome bag o’scripts.

Once installed, access Better Gmail's options by clicking the wrench -> Extensions -> Better Gmail Options. Tick the boxes of the features you want activated and you're good to go. You can choose to hide little used fields like "Invite Friends," remove ads, show the number of unread emails in the favicon, and more.

Gruev says future versions of Better Gmail will hide spam count, move to next message on delete or archive, and include support for POP3 email. A big round of applause goes to Gruev for putting this together. What kinds of features do you hope for in future versions of Better Gmail? Share your ideas in the comments.

Better Gmail for Chrome [Chrome Extensions Gallery]


Tags: firefox, gmail, google, ideas

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So you're fed up with Google, and you've got a litany of reasons. You don't even have to explain—I'm just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step.

You don’t have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google’s servers, and hand it off to someone else: You’ve got Google’s CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"—and hesitating on a drawback; you've got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you've got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google’s clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you’ve got reasons, and you’re ready for change.

The decision to close your Google account has to be carefully considered—after all, this is the place that stores your email, your documents, your contacts, your photos, your news, and even your health records. But this level of investment to one service is as good a reason to leave as it is to stay: If looking at your Google Dashboard, which lists all the services you use, and the amount and type of information you store on them, doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, then hell, what would?

Anyway, I'm not here to make the case for you to drop Google altogether—it's not something I'm prepared to do, for a start—I'm just here to tell you how to do it. Here’s everything you need to know about life after Google.

Search

It’s easy to forget that there are other search engines in the world, because Google has been so plainly dominant over the last few years. But they’re there, and they’re actually pretty good.

The best alternative to Google, by a long shot, is Microsoft’s Bing. It’s an evolution of the Live search engine, and it’s offers a distinctly different experience than Google: it’s far from minimalist, with a colorful interface, content-tailored results pages, and and emphasis on reducing clicks, rather than reducing clutter. Coming from Google it can be visually jarring, and the fact that the results for common searches are different—if not better or worse—means that at first, you'll get the feeling that it isn't working right.

Give it some time and some patience, and you'll realize that it's pretty damn good. And even if search isn't perceived as the biggest threat to your privacy, it's important to make the switch anyway—after all, it was Google search that was the gateway to all the other Google services, which you're now trying untangle yourself from.

Honorable Mentions:

Yahoo
Wolfram Alpha
Collecta
Mahalo

Email


Back when it launched in 2005, Gmail lured users with insane amounts of free storage space: One gigabyte. Impossible. This caught the dominant services of the day completely off guard, and made their free webmail seem utterly ancient.

Today, that one gigabyte has grown to nearly seven, and on the surface not much has changed about ol’ Gmail. Meanwhile, the companies that were blindsided back in 2005 have had plenty of time to catch up to, and in some cases, exceed Google’s offering. Here’s how to make the full switch:

Backing up your Gmail: There are a number of ways to do this, but one stands out as the easiest: The email client method.

1.) Download Thunderbird, a free email client from the same people who make Firefox (Download for Windows, OS X)
2.) Enable IMAP access on your Gmail account, by clicking the Setting link in the top right of your inbox, navigating to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, and selecting the “Enable IMAP” radio button

3.) File > New Mail Account
4.) Enter your name and Gmail address, after which Thunderbird should find your mail settings automatically, and set itself up as an IMAP client: (If this doesn’t happen, consult Google’s guide for a manual setup.
5.) Once the account is set up, open Thunderbird’s Account Settings panel, and navigate to the Synchronization and Storage tab. Make sure “Keep messages for this account on this computer” and “Synchronize all messages regardless of age” are both selected.
6.) Wait for your messages to sync to your computer—this could take hours, especially if you're near your Gmail storage limit.

What you've done here is imported all of your Gmail messages into a local client—Thunderbird—which lets you browse them, search them, or back them up to an external hard drive for posterity. And if you switch to another IMAP-based service, you can import these old messages into your new account simply by dragging them from your Gmail inbox folder in Thunderbird to your new account's inbox folder.

Contacts are a trickier question, but at the very least you can use Gmail’s contact exporting tool (under your Gmail inbox folder list) to create a CSV file or or VCard, for importing into a client like Thunderbird.

The best alternative service: As long as it's been since Gmail showed up on the scene, the webmail scene hasn't seen many exciting new players—Google has a knack of preempting new competition when it moves into a product category. So, for the best remaining alternative is a veritable oldie: Yahoo mail. Consider the facts:

• It’s still free
• It offers unlimited storage
• POP access is available in the free version, and with a little fiddling, so is IMAP access
• Free text messages in certain countries
• The interface doesn’t look like it was designed in 1999, like certain other webmail clients.

The matter of Buzz: Now, when you ditch Gmail, you’ll also be losing Google Buzz, which is a sort of location-aware status update system that nobody has really had the time to get into yet. Don’t worry: Buzz was a response to other services, not a trailblazer, so you’ll be served just fine sticking with Twitter (which lets you update you status with geolocation), FourSquare (which lets you alert your friends as to which particular establishments you visit, and see what other people think of said establishments), and Facebook (for posting media and accepting comments on it). Buzz didn’t have time to become vital, so switching away from it should be easy.

Calendar


Exporting your Google calendars: This one’s easy. Just:

1.) Navigate to your GCal settings page, and click on the Calendars tag.
2.) Export calendars to an ICS file, like so:
3.) That’s it!

The best alternative: Yahoo calendar is fine, but in the spirit of spreading your vital info around, let’s go with Windows Live Calendar. One you've created a Live ID—you pretty much need one of these nowadays—you're automatically given a Live Calendar account. To import your Google Calendars, just do the following:

1.) Open Live Calendar
2.) Click “Subscribe”
3.) Import the ICS file you exported from Gmail, like this:

Photos

Not that many people use Picasa, so this one should be easy. Plus, there are some obviously superior alternatives.

Flickr doesn’t stop at being a great photo sharing site, it’s also an amazing resource for photographers, both expert and amateur. Storage is limited with a monthly upload cap.
Photobucket is a simple gallery service, with an emphasis on sharing over archiving. Storage is limited to 1GB.
Shutterfly is another super-simple service, with unlimited storage (Google doesn’t even offer that for free)
Facebook shouldn't be counted out—its photo compression may be aggressive, but it does allow you to upload and tag a virtually unlimited number of photos.

Documents

A lot of people find themselves using Google Docs because it's just so damn convenient—you receive a document in your Gmail account, and suddenly, hey, it's in the Google Docs service! That’s how they get you. And interestingly enough, despite Google’s acquisition of Writely and subsequent improvements on in the Docs service, there’s still an objectively superior online document editing service out there.

ZoHo Docs is a full online office suit (among other things) which does virtually everything Google Docs can do, and often more. It offers deep document editing, offline editing (!), and collaborative editing. Document compatibility on ZoHo is absolutely tops, and the formatting and editing options far exceed Google Docs. There’s a text editor, a spreadsheet editor and a presentation editor, to name a few.

Pulling the Plug

So, you’ve migrated what you can, and settled into you new services nicely. Now, it’s time to close your Google account out, once and for all? Are you ready? Are you sure? Ok.

For any grievances you may have about Google’s privacy practices, you have to give them credit for making the process stupidly easy.

1.) From any Google page, click the Settings link in the top right, then Account Settings from the submenu.
2.) Next to “My Products”, click the “Edit” link
3.) From here, choose to delete individual services, or close your Google Account altogether.

4.) Confirm that you want all of your data deleted.
5.) DO IT.

Feels strange, doesn’t it? For anyone with enough spite and motivation to follow this guide, though, I suspect “strange” could be replaced with any number of more gracious adjectives. So, ex-Googlers: Do you feel better now?

We couldn’t cover every last Google service and piece of software, so if you have more tips and alternatives to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy diversifying, folks!


Tags: facebook, firefox, gmail, google, interesting, linux, search engines, twitter

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Web clipboard for Google Docs
As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don’t have to spend time reformatting.


New saving buttons in Google Docs
One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we’ve heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven’t been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the “Save now” button is clickable.


Google Buzz
Last week we launched Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we’re committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.

Google Apps Script for Google Sites
Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.

Who’s gone Google?
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they’ll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University and Davenport University are just a couple of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Hope you’re enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you’re using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Update Feb 22: Corrected “gone Google” list.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Tags: family, gmail, google, interesting, twitter

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Long time readers of our blog will note that we occasionally throw in links to crazy, interesting, and fun items in our posts. You may be wondering, “How can I find such interesting content to share?” Today we’re launching two new features that are designed to help you do just that:

  • Recommended items get personal – When we launched Popular items many of you wanted to see even more personalized recommendations. With the latest round of improvements, we’ve started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section. This is great if you’ve got interests that are less mainstream. If you love Lego robots, for example, then you should start to notice more of them in your Recommended items.

    Recommended items

  • Even more related feeds – If you’ve ever discovered a cool blog on, say, underwater basket-weaving and wanted to find more on the same topic, we’ve added a few easy ways to find related feeds. Hover over any of your subscriptions, click the menu and check out “More like this…” to see related feeds.

    Related feeds menu

    We’ll also show you related feeds when looking at the preview of any feed.

    Related feeds in preview mode

We hope these new features will help you find more content that interests you, whether that’s LOLcats or cooking.

As always, feel free to come visit our help forums or Twitter to leave us some feedback.

Tags: google, interesting, twitter

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Ed. note: We love a good media center almost as much as we love automation, so self-confessed media geek Alex Ward’s fully automated media center caught our eye. It’s all the benefits of an awesome media center without all the hassle.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to use EventGhost to begin to automate your PC. Now we are going to take things a step forward and use EventGhost alongside a few other free programs to set up an amazing and fully automated Home Theatre PC.

If you have not read my previous EventGhost article I advise you go and read it now as I am going to skip past the basics here.

Step One: Getting all the applications

To truly get this working properly you are going to need a few programs, they are all free and fairly straightforward to use (but I’m going to show you how anyway), so get to work on the list below and let me know when you have it all downloaded and installed.

  • XBMC – The excellent free to use media centre application
  • Torrent Episode Downloader – This does a similar thing to uTorrent’s RSS downloader but I personally feel it does a better job and is easier to use.
  • uTorrent – You can actually use any torrent application provided it has the ability to move files to a separate location when finished.
  • EventGhost – Of course you already have this as you have hopefully gone through the previous tutorial.
  • The Renamer – A superb and easily automated tool for finding and renaming your TV shows, it can also be made to work with movies but there is a better tool for that.
  • Ember Media Manager – Automatically finds and download information for your movies.

Step Two:  Getting ready for XBMC

The biggest difficulty a lot of people seem to face when they first set XBMC up is getting the library mode to work; this is because XBMC needs to have a specific file structure in order to scrape (download information about) your media files.

Note: I’m going to work on the assumption that you have a hard drive set up just for your media, if you do not then create a folder on one of your drives and do all this in the root of that folder.

Firstly create the following folders:

TV Shows, Music, Photos, Movies, Unsorted Media

There are some things that XBMC does not scrape all that well or simply things you would like to be able to access in XBMC but don’t really want it to be categorised as a TV show or movie, in this instance you should also create a folder for that (E.g., Documentaries, Children’s TV shows, etc…)

Prepare your movies

The Movies folder should not directly contain any files; each movie should be in a folder which has the movies name and year as its title. The movie file itself should be the movie’s title, if it is a HD movie then you can also add that information to the file name:

E.g. /Movies/The Shawshank Redemption [1994]/The.Shawshank.Redemption.720p.BluRay.mkv

Setting up your TV Shows folder

The TV Shows folder follows a similar format, each show should have a folder with its name and year as the title and each series of a show should go inside a ‘series x' folder.  The name of each file should be the name of the show followed by the series number and episode number, if you wish you can also add the title of the episode:

E.g.  /TV Shows/Life on Mars [2008]/Series 1/Life on Mars – s01e01 – The Crash.avi

Make sure you format the series and episode numbers using the above example, this method always works for the main scrapers. The year is not essential for movies or TV shows, it just makes it simpler for the scraper to make sure its downloading the information for the correct title.

Setting up your music folder

The music folder should contain a folder for the artist and then a folder for each album inside it.:

E.g. /Music/Fleetwood Mac/Rumours/

The year should not be needed for albums as it’s rare that an artist will use the same album name more than once.

Setting up the other folders

Photos are simple to categorise as they do not get scraped therefore you can put any pictures you like in there without worrying about file structure.

The unsorted media folder should be empty.

Copying your media

At this stage you are ready to copy your media to the folders. If you have thumbnail or fanart files already you don’t need to copy them over (unless you know the scraper will have trouble finding them) as this will be taken care of later.

Step Three: Using Ember Media Manager to pre-scrape your movies

XBMC has a great scraping tool; however it is quite slow and if you re-install your media centre for any reason you will have to re-scrape all your files again from scratch. Ember Media Manager is faster and even better, it downloads all the needed files to the movies folder, so if you do need to reinstall no re-scrape is required (plus it downloads trailers – which is just awesome).

To set it up, go to ‘edit > settings', click ‘Files and Sources' then ‘add source' and browse to the root of your movies folder. (This can be done during setup as well so you may not need to do it now). I won't tell you which boxes need ticking as it is all about personal preference really.

Once that's done, return to the main menu click ‘update library' (although I think this happens automatically the first time anyway). Once your list appears select ‘Scrape Media > New Movies > Automatic > All items' and watch it find everything for you (Note: If you did not add the year to the folder names then you may get odd results on some movies using ‘automatic', use ‘ask' instead).

If you use the ‘automatic’ mode then this should be the last time you ever see this screen as we will automate it in a later step.

Step Four: Using Torrent Episode Downloader (TED) to find and download your TV shows.

Before we start this please make sure you have your torrent program set up to send all completed downloads to your ‘unsorted media’ folder. (Note: You can use your existing downloads folder if you wish, just make sure that its only updated when the download has completed)

TED is a simple Java application which automatically finds your favourite TV shows and starts downloading them. It’s fairly simple to set up but here is a little tutorial anyway.

Once the program is installed, click on ‘add show'. You will then be presented with the ‘Add show' window. Simply select the show you want to download, choose the episode you want to download from (this doesn't work that well for older episodes).  Once this is done, select the episode and click ‘Edit show'.

The default settings are ok for the most part, however I find that I get better results if I make a few tweaks. Firstly in ‘Feeds’ click on ‘+’ and add IsoHunt, select ‘yes’ when the dialog box pops up and then click on ‘filters’, change the top number to 300mb and the maximum size to 1200mb (this means you won’t get low quality files and you might get the odd HD one (if you don’t want HD then set the max to about 750mb). Don’t bother with ‘download in HD quality’ as it’s not perfect and usually results in no torrents being found for a lot of shows.

Once you have done that just rinse and repeat until you’ve added all the shows you want.

Note: If you do not want TED to automatically open your torrent application (like if you download on a schedule) then you can change the options in Extra > Preferences.

Step Five: Use The Renamer to automatically sort and move your TV shows.

Sadly many files on BitTorrent have not been named with media centres in mind and most scrapers are rubbish unless the file names and folders follow their rules. Thankfully a fantastic application called ‘The Renamer’ exists to solve this problem.

This program is very easy to set up and even easier to use, firstly, click on ‘settings’ then change your fetch folder to your ‘unsorted media’ folder and the TV shows archive to your ‘TV Shows’ folder.

Make sure the following boxes are ticked

  • s1e01
  • add “0″ for Season (only the first time it appears)
  • include sub folders
  • Auto move after renaming,
  • Showname
  • Season
  • Episode titles
  • To TV Show Folder
  • To Season folder

And that’s it!

Ed. note: If you routinely download subtitles for your television shows or movies, make sure to grab the subtitles before renaming. Subtitles packages are timing-based—down to the millisecond specific!—and one subtitle package for a TV show is not the same as any other package.

Step Six – Tie it all together with EventGhost

Ok so far we’ve managed to get a series of systems together to download and catalogue our TV Shows and organise our movies to be imported into XBMC. Now it’s time to make it automatic using EventGhost.

Plugin Menu IconFirstly we need to install two plugins to EventGhost. ‘Directory Watcher’ and ‘XBMC’, you can find these in the ‘Plugins’ menu (see the small image to the left). To ensure that your movies are scraped automatically as well, install two copies of ‘Directory Watcher’

Set the first Directory Watcher Plugin to look in your ‘unsorted media’ folder and the second to look in your ‘Movies’ folder. Then create a new macro called ‘move new shows’

Inside this macro set it to automatically launch the renamer (System > Start Application), in the command line box type ‘–fetch' and set the window options to ‘minimised' (this never seems to work for me but you may have more luck. Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.

Now create a new macro called ‘scrape new movies', set it to open ember media manager and in the command line box enter ‘–newauto  –all' (remember this is only foolproof if you add years to your movie directories). Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.

Finally add an event called ‘DirectoryWatcher.Updated’ to the top of the first macro and one called ‘DirectoryWatcher2.Updated’ to the top of the second and save your configuration.

The last step to make sure everything is automated is to create shortcuts to uTorrent and TED in your Windows start-up folder.

Final Step – Set up XBMC

Note: This step assumes you are using at least version 9.11 of XBMC and are using the default skin

Firstly let’s add our media files. Go to ‘video’s and select Add Source, browse to your ‘Movies’ folder and press enter, the source should automatically be called ‘movies’.

Then click on ‘Set content’, under ‘This directory contains’, select ‘movies’ and set the scraper to the one of your choosing (the default themoviedb.org is pretty good as it is), under scanning options only select ‘use folder names for lookups’ Under ‘settings’ you are presented with a number of options, these are completely up to you, for the most part Ember Media Manager will have taken care of them anyway.

Once this is done, do the same things again for TV shows, obviously this time select ‘TV shows’ instead of ‘Movies’. I recommend thetvdb.org as your scraper. Don’t tick any of the boxes and once again the options in the ‘settings’ panel are up to you (although I find ‘use DVD’ order to be more chronological than the ‘Absolute order’ setting).

Note: If you created directories for video media you do not want to be catalogued, add them in the same way but under ‘this directory contains’ set it to ‘none’.

Adding sources to the music and pictures menus is a similar procedure however you do not need to specify any settings.

Now we need to tweak some settings to make sure everything works ok, so from the home screen go to ‘System’, in the system menu select ‘Video’ and check all the options under ‘Library’ then do exactly the same for ‘Music’. Then go back to the main ‘System’ page and select ‘Skin’ under the ‘home window options’ menu, the top four options should be checked and the rest are optional, just make sure to deselect the ‘hide movies’ and ‘hide tv show’ options.

Once this is done, restart XBMC it and watch all your media pour in. Your TV shows will now automatically download as soon as they are released and they will be automatically catalogued and added to your media centre. All downloaded movies will remain in your ‘Unsorted Media’ Folder but as soon as you move them to ‘Movies’ they will be found and catalogued by Ember and XBMC, You can use the ‘recently’ added box on XBMC to see what new media you have to watch.

CAVEATS

You knew that nothing this amazing was going to come without problems didn’t you. The main issue this method has is that its terrible for seeding torrents. So far the only foolproof method around this I have found is that instead of setting your torrent program to move downloaded torrents to the ‘unsorted media’ folder, its better to copy them there instead, that way you can keep your ratios up without having to wait for the torrent to reach 1:1 before watching your media. Obviously this removes some of the automation and you have copies of files on your hard drive until you delete the seeded copy so its not perfect.

The other issue is that whilst TED is brilliant, its not without its flaws, sometimes it cannot find some episodes for shows, so far the only way around this is to tell TED to skip to the next episode and download it manually, fiddling with the filters can sometimes work but often its a problem with the program and you’ll have to wait for an update to fix it.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.

Alex Ward is a Yorkshire based web developer and self-confessed ‘media geek’; he has an obsession with automation and home cinema systems and when he isn’t messing around with computer, he enjoys cooking for his friends.


Tags: movies

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