Reality Upgrade

Given the incredibly ubiquitous use of Google Maps nowadays, you would think everyone would already know how to use it.

Au Contraire.

Check out this article from my Very Favorite Website, Lifehacker, to learn ten great tips and tricks for getting Google Maps up to its full potential.

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I opened a Yahoo email account. I quickly used it to sign up for every imaginable website, and it quickly go to the point where I would receive several hundred emails a day, most of which blasted right through the wimpy spam filter Yahoo had back then.

When I got one of the first Gmail accounts, I vowed that I would only give out that account name to my close friends, and would therefor avoid spam.

Fast forward to today, and even in that nice pristine Gmail account, I get easily 10-20 emails a day, all of which are to some degree important. For instance, I can’t very well block all emails from Amazon, or I might not get the confirmation email when I buy something.

My email box was quickly filling up, and I was not sure what to do about it. I tried using filters to sort mail into individual folders, but became excessive quickly.

It was then that I found this great article about email organization from Lifehacker. I put it into place, and my email box is once again a pristine space where the only emails are ones I haven’t read yet.

So check it out, maybe it will help you as much as it did me.

Gmail recently added a feature called “Undo Send”, which actually holds your email for 5 seconds before it sends it. In the mean time, you can press the “Undo” button, and potentially save yourself some embarassment.

As it turns out, 5 seconds is just long enough for most people to realize that they made a mistake, and hit the Undo button.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a Undo Send button in real life?

Well, maybe we do. All you have to do is wait five seconds to respond to something, especially if you are upset. In the typical conversation, a five second pause is just that, a pause. It won’t seem strange to the person you’re talking to, and it might just prevent you from telling your boss where to shove it.

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Back in the day, when the internet was first becoming popular, I used to call looking something up “asking the Magic Oracle”.

Well, now the real Magic Oracle is Google. Unfortunately, like most oracles, sometimes Google’s answers can be a little criptic.

It is still the best and brightest of the search engines, of course, and if you can learn some of the more sneaky and less known things that Google can do, more power to ya.

Here is a list of 10 not so common things that Google can do:

Become a Google Ninja

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Google and I, well, we’re involved. 

Ok, not so much, but having everything I need in one place, for free, is pretty awesome, and now that Google Calendar has integrated a task feature, I may well never use outlook again.

Learn all about it on this article by Google Operating System.

Yes, email filters can take a little time to set up, but by god is that time worth it in the long run.

This list of tips from Lifehacker can be used as a checklist of sorts to buff up your email filtering.

So take a look, spend some time setting up good filters, and give your Blackberry a break.

Google Voice is a new service by Google that seems like it could save a lot of time and effort.  The service gives you a phone number, and then lets you add phone numbers to your account and set up different caller settings, so that different callers ring through to different phones.  You can also have some callers rings straight through to voice mail. And, get this, it converts the voice mail to text, and emails it to you.  

This is great for someone like me.  I hate to be interrupted by phone spam, but then I miss calls from my bank.  And then I have to listen to intermitably long voice mails with someone rambling for five minutes before mumbling their phone number faster than I can write.  This seems much easier.

One update to this service that just came out is integration with Android.  So if you have a G1, and all your contacts are already integrated with Google, this can be an especially useful service.  With the Android plugin, you can actually use your Android phone to place calls where the caller ID will show your Google Voice number. 

As an added bonus, this service lets you give out your phone number with impunity, and not worry about it.  This can be especially useful for anyone who has a tendancy to give out a lot of buisiness cards to random people (ahem).

The service is not open to the general public yet, but it should be soon.  When it does, I’ll try it out and report back.