Using WhatsApp as a Private Store for your Documents and Notes

WhatsApp is a perfect messaging app for staying in touch with friends and family. It is super-fast, works on nearly all phones (including desktop computers) and Facebook has no plans to charge WhatsApp users.

You have been using WhatsApp primarily for text messaging and calling but there are a couple of other interesting uses for WhatsApp that will help boost the utility value of this app even further. Other than communicating with the external world, you can also use WhatsApp to:

1. Capture and save ideas, notes, voice memos, scanned documents and everything else in you own private storage space that is accessible from everywhere.
2. Quickly transfer web links, documents, screenshots, and other files between your computer and phone without having to sign-up for another service.

The idea is simple. You create a new virtual contact inside WhatsApp and, everything that you wish to capture privately, you can just share it with this virtual contact.

It is not possible to send WhatsApp messages to your own number but there’s a simple hack to get around this problem. Create a new WhatsApp group with just a single participant – you. Here’s how:

1. Open WhatsApp on your phone and create a new group.
2. Add any contact from your address book to this group. Give your group a name and save.
3. Now go to the group in WhatsApp, tap the subject to view the list of participants.
4. Tap and hold the lone participant in this list and remove them from the group.

That’s it. What you now have a private store in WhatsApp that is visible only to you and accessible from the web (desktop) and your mobile phone.

If you wish to transfer a document from computer to phone, open web.whatsapp.com on the computer, send the file to this group and it will instantly become available on your phone. There’s search built-in so you can easily find messages by keyword later.

Thank you Sidin Vadukut (blog, books, twitter) for this useful tip.

Google Can Remember Things for You

How do you remember important things that you think you might forget? Some rely on their brain to memorize information while others prefer  writing things down on post-it notes. There are ton of digital note-taking apps – from Evernote to Trello – that can also help you remember anything with ease.

There’s another interesting option from Google that you may wish to explore for remembering things. It’s called Google Assistant, the voice assistant app that is now available on newer Android phones. If you don’t have one, you can still use Google assistant inside the Google Allo app that is available for both iPhone and Android.

Let Google Remember Things for you

To get started, say “OK Google” to launch Google Assistant on your phone and then say “Remember ..” followed by information you would like Google to remember. For instance, you could say:

• Remember my favorite color is blue
• Remember that my registration number is Z1234
• Remember that I parked the car in the 2nd level
• Remember that my hotel room safe code is 6666

You can launch the Google Assistant anytime later and ask Google for information that was previously stored.

How to ask what Google remembers?

You could say something like “What did I say about my favorite color?” or “What’s my registration number?” If Google is unable to understand your question, you could say “What did I ask you to remember” and it will show a list of 5 most recent things you’ve asked Google to remember.

How to Clear Google’s Memory?

If the list has grown big, you can also use your voice to instruct Google to forget things it remembers. You could say “Forget what I said about my favorite color” or say “What did I ask you to remember” and tap the “Forget #” option to erase any of the listed items from Google’s memory.

 

How to Easily Switch between Multiple Google Accounts

Lots of us maintain multiple Google accounts for a variety of reasons. Maybe your day is mostly spent inside Gmail and Google Calendar associated with your work account but you prefer to store files inside Google Drive of your personal Google Account.

Google does make it easy for you to sign-in to multiple Google accounts simultaneously so you don’t have to log out of one Gmail account to check emails of the other one. Simply go to http://ift.tt/1QPMLv5 and sign-in with the other Google account inside the same browser session.

Sign-in is Easy, Switching Accounts is Difficult

One you are logged in, click your profile image in the upper right and select any Google account from the drop down to switch to that account.

The default account, the one that appears on top of that list, is the one that you signed in with first. Thus, if you type mail.google.com in your browser’s address bar, you’ll always be taken your Gmail account. If you need to set another Google account as the default one, you’d have to sign-out of all existing accounts and sign-in first with that account.

That’s obviously too many steps for users who have to constantly juggle between multiple accounts. So here’s a simple URL trick that will help you switch between Google accounts quickly.

Create Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Accounts

Go to the Gmail website and press Ctrl+D (or Cmd+D on Mac) to bookmark the Gmail website.

Click the Edit button to modify the bookmark. Here add ?authuser=email@gmail.com after the last slash(/) symbol and append the shortcut to the bookmark name as shown below. We use the short “gw” meaning Google Apps for Work Gmail.

Repeat the steps for all your other Gmail accounts.

You can now type gw in the address bar to quickly launch your work Gmail account even if that account may not be your default Google account.

If you are a keyboard ninja, shortcuts are a much faster way to do things that using your mouse to click a bunch of menu items. The trick works with all Google Apps services including Google Drive, Contacts and Calendar.

http://ift.tt/2phT8CI
http://ift.tt/2ohfxeQ
http://ift.tt/2pi6AXq

You should check out the most important Google URLs.