How to Get the Password of WiFi Network You Are Connected To

Your computer is connected to a Wi-Fi network but you do not remember the password that you had earlier used to connect to this particular WiFi network. Maybe you forgot the password or maybe the network administrator entered it directly without revealing the actual password to you.

You would now like to connect a second device, like your mobile phone, to the same WiFi network but how do you find out the password? You can either send a password request the WiFi admin or you can open the command prompt on your computer and retrieve the saved password in one easy step. The technique works on both Mac and Windows PCs.

Get the WiFi Password on Windows

Open the command prompt in administrator mode. Type “cmd” in the Run box, right-click the command prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator (see how). Now enter the following command and hit enter to see the WiFi password.

netsh wlan show profile name=labnol key=clear

Remember to replace labnol with the name of your Wireless SSID (this is the name of the Wi-Fi network that you connect your computer to). The password will show up under the Security Setting section (see screenshot).

If you do not see the password, probably you’ve not opened the command prompt window as administrator

Show the WiFi Password on Mac OS X

Your Mac OS X uses Keychain to store the configuration details of the WiFi network and we can use the BSD command “security” to query anything stored inside Keychain, including the Wi-Fi password. Here’s how:

Open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type terminal to open the Terminal window. At the command line, enter the following command (replace labnol with your WiFi name), then enter your Mac username and password to access the OS X keychain and the Wi-FI network password would be displayed on the screen in plain text.

security find-generic-password -ga labnol | grep password

Resources for further reading:

• Windows – Manage Network Profiles (microsoft.com)
• Man pages for Security Command (apple.com)

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The story, How to Get the Password of WiFi Network You Are Connected To, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/07/2015 under Apple Mac, Networking, Password, Wi-Fi, Software.

Redirect Gmail to Google Inbox

If you like Google Inbox and you're wondering why it doesn't replace Gmail, there's a setting that redirects Gmail to Inbox. Just go to Inbox, open the settings box, switch to the "Other" tab, enable "Redirect Gmail to inbox.google.com" and click "Done". The next time you type mail.google.com, gmail.com or click on a Gmail shortcut or bookmark, you'll be sent to inbox.google.com.

You can still open Gmail: just click the new "Gmail" menu item, which is placed below "Contacts" in Inbox's sidebar. The URL that temporarily disables redirects is http://ift.tt/1gwKrwv.

"If you often go to Gmail in your web browser when you really mean to go to Inbox, you can turn on a setting so that you'll automatically be taken to Inbox when you visit gmail.com or mail.google.com on a computer. You can always get back to Gmail using a simple link in Inbox," informs Google. The setting was added a few weeks ago.

A Privacy Reminder From Google

After signing in to my Google account, Google showed a new page called "a privacy reminder from Google." Here's Google's explanation: "To be consistent with data protection laws, we're asking you to take a moment to review key points of Google's Privacy Policy. This is not about a change we've made - it's just a chance to review the key points below."

The page shows a list of information processed when you use Google and a list of reasons why it's processed. Google also explains how it uses data to improve user experience and lets you adjust some privacy controls (account history, ads settings, opt out of Google Analytics data collection). "These features work because of the information you choose to store with Google. But that's up to you. The controls in your Google Account let you decide what information you want Google to put to work on your behalf," informs Google.

My Account, Added to Google App Launcher

When Google launched My Account, a new interface for Google Account Settings, it added a shortcut to the app launcher, but only users who weren't logged in and for those who haven't customized the app launcher. Unfortunately, Google didn't provide a way to add the shortcut for all the other users.

Now the "My Account" shortcut has been automatically added to the app launcher at the bottom of the "More" section, so you need to click "More" to see it. You can always customize Google's navigation menu using drag and drop.

Gmail Promotes Google Inbox

Gmail changed the text that's displayed when you don't have any message in your inbox. Now Gmail promotes Google Inbox: "No new mail! Want to hit inbox zero more often? Try our new app, Inbox by Gmail."

So why can you hit inbox zero more often if you use Google Inbox? You can snooze emails until you're ready to deal with them, you can open attachments, watch videos, open news articles and read important information extracted from a message without having to open it. For example, Google Inbox shows flight status next to flight reservation emails and package tracking links next to order updates from Amazon or other shopping sites.

{ Thanks, Ryan Goldstein. }

Old Google Drive Goes Missing

Last year, Google launched a new desktop interface for Google Drive. If you missed the old interface, the "settings" menu allowed you switch to the old interface by clicking "Leave the new Drive". The classic Google Drive also added a link to the new interface, so you could click "Experience the new Drive" and switch back to the new UI.

Now the "Leave the new Drive" option is missing and you can no longer switch to the old Google Drive. Even the URL for the old Google Drive doesn't work: http://ift.tt/1f67nCd.

Google still has a help center article about "switching between versions of Google Drive", which is now outdated. "Have you noticed that your Google Drive looks different? Or are you trying to do something in Drive and the instructions don't work? This may be because there are now two versions of Google Drive on the web – a new version and a classic version. The new Google Drive is gradually rolling out to all users, but you can switch to the new version, or back to the classic version, at any time," mentions the article.

{ Thanks, Frodo Baggins. }

Customize Gmail Themes

Gmail's theme gallery added hundreds of new high-resolution photos and many of them were taken by Google employees like Romain Guy and Greg Bullock. Click "more photos" in the "pick your theme" dialog to find all the new photos. You can still use your own photos, upload photos or paste a URL.

After you select a background image, Gmail lets you customize it using 3 features: select light or dark text background, add vignette to make borders darker or you can blur the background image.

My favorite feature is the vignette effect:

The "theme" tab from Gmail's settings page is no longer useful, now that there's a separate theme picker. All the themes used to be displayed there, but now the tab only includes a link to "set theme".

"Your inbox is home to some of your most meaningful and entertaining messages — from that acceptance letter, to those throwback photos — so we think it's important for Gmail to feel just as personal (and fun!)," says Google. To make Gmail more fun, Google also added emojis for almost every occasion.

An Improved Gmail Clipper from Evernote

Evernote, the quintessential note-taking software, has released a new web clipper add-on for Chrome, Opera and Safari browsers. While the web clipper is primarily used for saving snapshots of web pages to Evernote, the updated version is much more efficient at archiving Gmail messages.

When you clip an email thread with the new Evernote clipper, it creates a de-cluttered view and re-formats the whole thread so it is more readable. And if you are clipping a lengthy email conversation in Gmail, you now have an option to select individual messages in the thread that should be saved into Evernote.

Save Gmail Messages without the clutter

The Gmail Clipper for Evernote can also save the inline images and file attachments found in your email messages. For instance, if there’s a PDF document or an Excel sheet attached to a Gmail message, the files will be directly saved to Evernote in their native format along with the email message.

You can get the clipper at http://ift.tt/Mbon6x – you would need an Evernote account to activate the clipper in your browser.

In my testing, the clipper worked as advertised for Gmail. It could easily handle large threads with 20+ email messages, the file attachments were successfully saved and the rich-text formatting of HTML messages was well preserved in Evernote. If you are to share an email thread with someone, it may be a good idea to save it as a note in Evernote and then share the link.

Also see: The Best Evernote Tips & Tricks

One more thing. The web clipper helps you manually save your emails to Evernote. If you are looking for an automated way to archive multiple emails from Gmail into Evernote, you can use a Google Sheet.

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The story, An Improved Gmail Clipper from Evernote, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/07/2015 under Evernote, GMail, Internet.

See all your Google Contacts on a Google Map

Want to know where you friends and colleagues are? The all-new Map My Contacts app will help you quickly visualize the location of your Google contacts on a world map. It reads the postal addresses of people from your Google Contacts and puts them all in a Google Map using a simple Google script.

Create a Google Map with your Google Contacts

Publish a Map of Google Contacts

It takes one easy step to turn your address book into a Google Map. If you are Google Chrome user, you can install an add-on or you can click here to directly access the “Map My Contacts” web app in any other browser.

The app will require authorization because it needs to read the addresses of your Google Contacts and it needs access to Google Drive for saving the generated map. It is an open-source Google Script and you get find the entire source code on ctrlq.org published under the MIT License.

Once you have authorized and granted access, the app will run for a few minutes, depending on how big your address book is, and generates a Google Map embedded in an HTML file. A KML file is also created in your Google Drive with markers (or placemarks) for every contact and you can double-click to open this file inside Google Earth.

Also, if you are not using Google Contacts as your primary address book, you can still use the apps to map your contacts. Just export the contacts data from your existing address book (like Outlook or Yahoo Mail) as a CSV file, import the file into Google Contacts and run the app again.

Internally, the Google Apps Script reads the home and work postal addresses of your Google Contacts and then uses the geocoding service of Google Maps to transform these human-readable addresses into latitudes and longitude values. These points are then put in a KML file (see sample KML file) that can viewed inside Google Earth or Google Maps.

See some of our other useful Google Scripts.

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The story, See all your Google Contacts on a Google Map, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 30/06/2015 under Google Contacts, Google Maps, Internet.

Earth View Update

Google has a cool Chrome extension called Earth View, which replaces the new tab page with a random stunning satellite image from Google Earth. The latest release brings a lot of new features: there are 500 new images, you can see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened, there's a download feature in the menu and a sharing button. You can share images on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or copy the URL and paste it somewhere else.

If you don't want to install the extension or you use a different browser, there's a web gallery that shows all the 1500 images. Click the arrow button or use the left/right keyboard shortcuts to navigate between images. There's also a slideshow feature called "leanback mode".

"Earth View is a collection of the most striking and enigmatic landscapes available in Google Earth. The colors, shapes, textures and patterns all contribute to the strange beauty of our planet, reminding us of nature’s uncanny geometry and bewildering simplicity. Each of the 1500 images featured in this collection was hand curated and available for download as wallpaper for your desktop or mobile," informs Google.

Find LinkedIn Profiles with Google Search

LinkedIn, the largest network of professionals in the world, is also the favorite hunting ground for recruiters and staffing agencies. Whether you are looking for a list of college students who are currently interning at Facebook or a head hunter building a pool of presumptive candidates, LinkedIn will not disappoint.

LinkedIn has a useful search function to help you find potential candidates but do you know that Google search can also help to find people on LinkedIn. Google indexes every public profile of LinkedIn and if you perform people search on LinkedIn via Google, you get a few additional features:

• While LinkedIn will only show 10 results per search query in one page, Google can return up to 100 results in one search results page.
• You can perform date-limited searches in Google and this is helpful when you are only looking for profiles that have been created or updated in a particular date range.
• You can automatically easily save your LinkedIn search results in a spreadsheet using the Google search Scraper for further analysis.

LinkedIn Scraper with Google Search

OK, let’s take a look at how we can search LinkedIn profiles with the help of Google. Say you are trying to find people for senior position who are based in New York area. Here’s how we’ll construct the Google search query.

1. Show LinkedIn profiles but exclude internal LinkedIn search pages:

site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

2. Find LinkedIn profiles of people who have senior positions:

"head | vp | vice-president | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

3. Find matching LinkedIn profiles who are based in NY (wild card search)

"Location * New York" "head | vp | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir

You can further refine search results by adding the domain (like Sales & Marketing) or even the company name to limit your search to executives of a particular organization.

Find LinkedIn Profiles by Post Code

Google search supports number ranges meaning you can search pages that contain numbers within a specific range. For instance, if you say “apples 1900..2000″ on Google, it will show matching pages that contain any number before 1900 and 2000.

We can extend the same trick to perform LinkedIn people search on Google. To give you an example, the pin code of Delhi is something like 110049. So if you are looking for web developers in the Delhi area on LinkedIn, you search query would be something like:

"web developer" 110001..110099 site:linkedin.com/in

One more thing. A search query like site:linkedin.com will perform a global search. However, you can use country specific sub-domains in LinkedIn to only show candidates from a particular country. For instance, site:uk.linkedin.com/in web-developer will find LinkedIn profiles from UK while site:ca.linkedin.com/in will only look for candidates that have set thir region as Canada.

Also see: Stop broadcasting your LinkedIn profile updates

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The story, Find LinkedIn Profiles with Google Search, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 29/06/2015 under Google, LinkedIn, Internet.

How to Update Files in Google Drive without Changing the Link

John uploaded a PDF file in Google Drive and shared it with Peter. A week later, John updated the PDF file and uploaded the new version to Google Drive. Peter however still has the link to the old version and John will have to send him another email informing of the new version. Confusing, right?

You’ve probably gone through this situation where you have multiple copies of the same file residing in your Google Drive and, while you would like everyone to use the latest version, they are either not aware that the file has been updated or it takes too much work to locate it in the Drive.

When you have multiple copies of the same file in Drive, it not only creates confusion but the files also take up precious storage space in your Drive. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could simply replace an existing file in Google Drive with the new version instead of uploading it as a separate file? Well, there’s a solution:

Replace Files in Google Drive

1. Go to your Google Drive and select any file that you would like to update. This is applicable for files that are not in that native Google Docs format like PDF, images, text files or even videos.
2. Right-click the file, choose Manage Versions from the menu and then click the Upload new version button to upload the updated file to your Google Drive.
3. That’s it. The file name and the file’s URL won’t change and thus all the old shared links will now automatically point to the new version of your file.

You can use the same method to replace a file in one format with another format. For instance, if you have a video file in Drive that you would like to replace with a GIF animation of smaller file size, the Manage Versions option will do the trick. And the shared link won’t change either.

Also see: Create Download Links for files in Google Drive

Things are a bit easier for Dropbox users. If you would like to update a shared file in Dropbox but without changing the link, simply upload the new version of the file in the same Dropbox folder.

When you upload a file in Dropbox and another file with a similar name already exists, Dropbox will simply replace the old file with the new one while the shared link will continue to work. In the case of Google Drive, you can can have multiple file with the same name in one folder and hence the confusion.

Also see: Add Files to Multiple Folders in Drive

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The story, How to Update Files in Google Drive without Changing the Link, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 29/06/2015 under Dropbox, Google Drive, Internet.

Wikipedia Available as a Printed Book

The English edition of Wikipedia Encyclopedia contains around 5 million articles and if someone were to print the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia into a book, the size of the printed book would roughly be equivalent to 2000+ volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica (source).

Rob Matthews, a graphics design student from UK, converted 5000 pages of Wikipedia into a printed book in 2012. He downloaded few hundred featured articles from Wikipedia and bound them together in a physical book that was almost 1’7″ thick. Rob’s website (rob-matthews.com) has been taken over by domain squatters but the pictures of the printed Wikipedia book have survived.

While Rob limited his printed book to the featured articles, Michael Mandiberg’s team has a more ambitious plan. They’re working on making the entire English-language Wikipedia in print format. The work has about 7500 volumes, each made up of 700 pages, and you’ll soon be order individual volumes from Lulu.

The project launched at the Denny Gallery this month and visitors to the exhibition can see the process in real time as Wikipedia pages are converted in digital books and uploaded to Lulu. A Twitter bot, @PrintedWikipedia updates when new volumes are added to the book library.

Here are pictures of the Printed Wikipedia project courtesy Wikimedia.

Print your own Wikipedia Book

Wikipedia does include a built-in book creator that would let anyone, include anonymous non-logged users, create ebooks from Wikipedia articles. You can download these ebooks as PDF files or send them to a print-on-demand service like Lulu or PediaPress and have a custom printed book made of your favorite Wikipedia pages.

See more Wikipedia tools.

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The story, Wikipedia Available as a Printed Book, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 27/06/2015 under Wikipedia, Internet.

How to Schedule Gmail Messages with a Google Sheet

Have you ever wanted to write an email message in Gmail now but send it a later date and time? Maybe you are sending birthday greetings and would like the email message to be delivered on the exact day. Or you have written an email now but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.

Microsoft Outlook has a built-in scheduler to help you delay the delivery of email messages. After you are finished writing an email message and hit the Send button, the message isn’t delivered immediately – it stays in your outbox and is sent at the specified date and time automatically.

Gmail doesn’t let you schedule a later delivery of email messages but there are browser extensions – like Boomerang, Sidekick and Right Inbox – that let you specify a future send date for your outgoing email messages. These are however subscription based services that allow you to send only a limited number of scheduled email messages for free per month. The other concern is privacy – you will have to grant read and write access to your entire Gmail account to a third-party to enable scheduling inside Gmail.

Schedule & Send Gmail Messages Later

If you are reluctant to provide access to your entire Gmail account to another service, there’s a good alternative – Google Sheets.

What you can do is compose all the emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail, let them stay as drafts and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in the Google sheet. The messages would be delivered automatically at the time chosen by you with Google Scripts.

The Gmail Scheduler is available in free and premium editions. The premium edition lets you schedule more emails, you can schedule recurring emails that are sent daily, weekly or monthly, it allows you to send mails from another alias associated with your Gmail account and you can also opt for one-on-one support.

Features	Free	Premium
Supports Gmail & Google Apps	Yes	Yes
Number of emails that you can schedule	~20	No limit
Schedule Recurring Emails	No	Yes
Change the sender’s email address (Gmail alias)	No	Yes
Logs scheduling activity for troubleshooting	No	Yes
Installation Manual (PDF) included	No	Yes
Support options	None	Email
Choose Edition	Forever Free	Premium You can buy the Premium version using your credit card or PayPal. It is a flat one-time fee (not a subscription) and you can use the program for life. You also get free technical support over email for 6 months. The Platinum version has all the features of premium and includes one-on-one support over phone, Skype or Google Hangouts for 12 months. Refunds can be requested within 6 hours of purchase. Should you have any questions, or require customization, send an email at amit@labnol.org or visit our services page. Premium Platinum ×

How to Setup Gmail Scheduler

Scheduling Gmail messages with Google sheets is easy. Here’s a detailed video tutorial (download) that will walk you through the steps for using Gmail scheduler.

Go to your Gmail mailbox and compose a few email messages that you would like to send later. Do not hit the Send button, just let these draft messages stay in the Drafts folder on your Gmail account.

Your draft messages can have rich formatting, you can add attachments, signatures and even inline images. Make sure that you have included the recipient’s email address in the TO field of the draft emails.

1. Click here to make a copy of the Gmail Scheduler sheet in your Google Drive.
2. Go to File – Spreadsheet Settings and select your current timezone from the dropdown. The emails will be scheduled in this timezone.
3. Go to the Gmail Scheduler menu, select Authorize and grant the necessary permissions.
4. Choose the Gmail Scheduler menu again and select Fetch Messages to import all the draft messages from your Gmail account into the Google Sheet.
5. Set the scheduled date and time for individual messages in column D of the sheet. You can double-click a cell and use the date picker or you can manually enter the date and time as mm/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss in 24 hour format.
6. Go to Gmail Scheduler -> Schedule Messages and run the scheduler. You can close the spreadsheet and it will send messages at the specified time automatically.

Please do note that once an email message has been scheduled, you should not edit the corresponding Gmail draft message else it will be removed from the queue. If you wish to edit the draft or need to change the delivery time once the messages have been scheduled, you can fetch the drafts again and reinitialize the queue.

The free edition of Gmail scheduler lets you schedule 10-20 email messages in one go. If you wish to schedule more messages, or if you are trying the schedule recurring email with Gmail, please get the premium edition.

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The story, How to Schedule Gmail Messages with a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 25/06/2015 under GMail, Internet.