29 August 2013

9 IFTTT Hacks To Superpower Your Life With Google Calendar



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IFTTT is a great way to superpower and automate your life. From saving and making money, to organizing your social life and automating you Facebook Page; with your iPhone, or even with your own IFTTT recipes, there are endless ways you can use IFTTT to make your day better. Your calendar is a big part of your productivity, and managing it right can make the difference between being organized, arriving on time and remembering your tasks, and being late, forgetting to do what you’ve promised, and arriving soaking wet to the office because you didn’t know it will rain. The...


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Sites That Integrate With Google Now



There's a long list of sites that integrate with Google Now: Air Berlin, Air Canada, Emirates, Booking.com, Lastminute.com, TicketWeb, Ticketfly, Orbitz, CheapTickets, OpenTable, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Zillow and more.






There's nothing magic about integrating travel sites, hotel booking sites, event-ticketing sites with Google Now. You only need to add some markup to email notifications. "By adding schema.org markup to the emails you send your users, you can make that information available across their Google experience, and make it easy for users to take quick action. Gmail, Google Search and Google Now all already use this structured data. (...) Google Now brings users the right information at just the right time. For example, Google Now already provides updates to restaurant and hotel reservations or flight information received in Gmail. By marking up email notifications to your users, you can use Google Now to bring them similar updates about your services and products."



After an email confirming a hotel reservation, the Google Search app shows this card. Here are some examples of code that needs to be added to email notifications.






Google Now only supports schemas for event reservation, flight reservation, hotel reservation and restaurant reservation.



{ Thanks, Florian Kiersch. }

Darktable vs. Shotwell: Two Great Photo Editing Applications For Linux



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Until recently, Linux only had GIMP as an acceptable photo editing tool. That’s changed, thanks to a couple new tools that provide impressive features: Darktable and Shotwell. The great thing about these two tools is that they are specifically developed for editing photos, rather than general image manipulation. This ultimately provides a better-designed interface and a more efficient workflow. I compared the two applications based on the interface and features in order to see which is the best tool for the job. Shotwell Shotwell is a rather lightweight application found in most Gnome-based distributions. Most distributions had included F-Spot before...


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Has Someone Used Your PC? 3 Ways to Check



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The keyboard is misplaced. Someone left some food crumbs on your desk. Your monitor is tilted at an odd angle. You know someone has been using your computer, but you don’t have any evidence to nail down the culprit. Or do you? The truth is that the person who used your computer not only left behind crumbs of evidence on your desk, but they’ve also likely left crumbs of evidence on the computer itself, without even realizing it. No matter what someone might have done on your PC, the fact is that nearly everything you do leaves some kind of...


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Great Chrome Web Apps and Extensions for Musicians



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Musicians rejoice! There are several apps and extensions available for Chrome that will aid you in your life and journey of musicianship. There are apps that will let you practice the piano while sitting at your desk. Some will display guitar tabs for you. Others will help you make instrument purchases with ease. If you’re a musician and you use Chrome, you’ll want to check out these apps. The thing about musicianship is that it’s incredibly hard to be an isolated musician. Sure, you can be alone and you can self-teach a lot of the basics by using guides and...


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How To Upgrade Kaspersky 2012/2013 To Kaspersky 2014



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Kaspersky Lab recently announced the release of Kaspersky Antivirus 2014 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2014 versions. Both Kaspersky Internet Security 2014 (KIS 2014) and Kaspersky Antivirus 2014 (KAV 2014) come with several innovate antivirus technologies and also enhancements to existing security features. The ZETA shield antivirus technology is one of the newly added features to […]

New Layout for Google+ Post Pages



Google+ post pages look different: posts are now moved to the right and there's a huge box that shows the name of the page or author and the number of followers. The new layout encourages people to follow pages and Google+ users, but makes posts more difficult to read.









Here's an example of post from Gmail's Google+ page.

Better Photo Attachments in Gmail's iOS App



The latest version of the Gmail app for iOS added a better way to open photo attachments. Until now, you had to tap each photo to open it using the app's internal browser and go back to the message.






Now you can tap a photo attachment and use swipes to go to the next or previous image, just like in the built-in Photos app.






The "print" link is no longer displayed next to the thumbnail, but it's still available in the actions menu. For some reason, the filenames are no longer included.






Another new feature: "when selecting a Google Drive file or Google+ link you'll now go directly to the app if it's installed. This can be turned off using the in-app settings."



{ via +Gmail }

Inside Kickstarter #1: An Exclusive Look At Pressy — How A Project Is Born



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What if you could make any dream you have come true? Go to Kickstarter, and bam, you’re there. Kickstarter and similar crowdfunding websites want to be the fairy godmother of our childhood. Have an idea? Let us make it come true. But is it really as easy as it looks? There are endless Kickstarter projects out there, with endless dreamers whose only wish is to make their private dreams come true. We hear about them when they succeed magnificently, we hear about them when they fail miserably, but, unless we know them personally, we rarely hear about them before the...


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Use Gmail's New Compose Interface for Replies



When Gmail launched the new compose interface, I wondered why the interface for replying to other messages is different. By default, when you reply to a message or you forward a message, Gmail shows the rich-text editor below the message, just like before.



There are a few ways to make the reply box look like the compose box, so you can open other messages or use Gmail's search feature while replying to a mail.



1. Shift-click the "reply" link or the entire box that includes the message "Click here to Reply or Forward". You can also Shift+click "forward" to open the forwarded message in a pop-out box.









2. Use keyboard shortcuts: Shift+r to reply in a pop-out box, Shift+a to reply to all, Shift+f to forward in a pop-out box.



3. If you've already writing the reply, click the arrow above your reply and pick "Pop out reply".






To go back to the regular interface, minimize the compose box, find this message "You are currently editing your reply in a separate window" and click "Show your draft here."

4 Tools to Display RSS Feed Updates Directly on Your Windows Desktop



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You used to relax in the morning with a warm cup of coffee, reading your favorite blog, until your life took over and changed everything. You even had time to browse and meander through several of your favorite blogs. Then life happened. You got busy, or you got a promotion, and your mornings transformed into a busy time where you need to race through emails before the workday started. Thankfully, RSS feeds are a savior for the worker – a way to sort of auto-browse all of those headlines without the need to click and read each one. What you’re...


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