Add notes to your email in Gmail

Have you ever wondered if you could just add or annotate a note to an email?

I just came to this point in my email usage where I had an email - which had a label reference to it but I also needed a note for myself what though had come to me when I was reading the stared email and if I could have some use for that email at a future date. I just wanted to clean up my starred labelled emails...

This is what I found he he...

Gmail "does" support Notes - but with a twist and it can be used for each and every email you wish to add notes to.  These notes get added to the conversation and if you apply a label to them such as "Notes" or something then one can search the label.

1. Create a Contact called Notes and the email address yourusername+notes@gmail.com - so if you wrote Notes in the To box you will get the email address yourusername+notes@gmail.com - this message gets added to the existing email conversation.
   
2. Create a Filter - you can called anything I have used Notes as the label name. In the To: box add yourusername+notes@gmail.com -you can also select the "skip inbox (Archive it)" option.
3. Now do the testing - choose any email and hit forward - in the To box type notes and you will get the email you saved in the contacts - use this email and send. You should shortly receive an email which is part of the original email conversation - voila and it also has a label notes attached which the filter notes had applied to it.

Thats it you have a framework to allow attaching notes to any email in Gmail.

cheers

Folding the flag : The cadet!!!

Dear Sir,

It is with regret and haste that I write this letter to you.  Regret that such a small misunderstanding could lead to the following circumstances, and haste in order that you will get this report before you form your own preconceived opinions from reports in the World Press.  For I am sure that they will tend to over dramatise the affair

We had just picked up the pilot, and the Apprentice had returned from changing the 'G' flag for the 'H', this being his first trip he was having difficulty in rolling the 'G' flag up for stowing away. I therefore proceeded to show him how.

Coming to the last part I told him to 'let go'.  The lad, although willing, is not too bright. I therefore had to repeat the order in a sharper tone.  At this moment the Chief Officer appeared from the Chartroom having been plotting the vessel's progress and thinking it was the anchors that were being referred to, repeated the 'let go order to the Third Officer on the forecastle.

The Port anchor, having been cleared away but not walked out, was promptly let go.  The effect of letting the anchor drop from the 'pipe while the vessel was proceeding at full harbour speed was too much for the windlass brake and the entire length of the Port cable was pulled out by its roots. I fear that the damage to the chain locker may be extensive.

The braking effect of the Port anchor naturally caused the vessel to sheer in that direction, right toward the swing bridge that spans a tributary to the river up which we were proceeding.

The swing bridge operator showed great presence of mind by opening the bridge for my vessel. Unfortunately he did not think to stop the vehicular traffic.  The result was that the bridge partly opened and deposited a Volkswagen, two cyclists and a cattle truck on the foredeck. My ship's company is at present rounding up the contents of the latter, which, from the noise I would say is pigs.

In his efforts to stop the progress of the vessel the Third Officer dropped the Starboard anchor too late to be of any practical use for it fell on the swing bridge operator's control cabin.

After the Port anchor was let go and the vessel started to sheer I gave a double ring Full Astern on the Engine Room telegraph and personally rang the Engine Room to order maximum astern revolutions.

I was informed that the sea temperature was 53 degrees, and asked if there was a film tonight. My reply would not act constructively to this report.

Up to now I have confined my report to the activities at the forward end of my vessel. Down at the after end they were having their own problems.  At the moment the Port anchor was let go, the Second Officer was supervising the making fast of the After Tug, and was lowering the ship's towing spring down onto the tug.  The sudden braking on the Port anchor caused the tug to 'run in' under the stern of my vessel just at the moment the propeller was answering my double ring Full Astern

The prompt action of the Second Officer in securing the inboard end of the towing spring, delayed the sinking of the tug by some minutes, thereby allowing the safe abandonment of that vessel.

It is strange, but at the very moment of letting go the port anchor there was a power cut ashore. The fact that we were passing over a 'cable area' at the time may suggest that we may have touched something on the river bed. It is perhaps lucky that the high tension cables brought down by the foremast were not live; possibly having been replaced by the underwater cable, but owing to the shoreside blackout it is impossible to say where the pylon fell.

It never fails to amaze me, the actions and behavior of foreigners during moments of minor crisis. The Pilot, for instance, is at this moment huddled in a corner of my day cabin alternately crooning to himself and crying, after consuming a bottle of Gin in a time that is worthy of inclusion
in the Guinness Book of Records. The tug Captain, on the other hand, reacted violently and had to be forcibly restrained by the Chief Steward who has him handcuffed in the ship's hospital, where he is telling me to do impossible things with my ship and my person.

I enclose the names and addresses of the drivers and insurance companies of the vehicles on my foredeck, which the Third Office collected after his somewhat hurried evacuation of the forecastle. These particulars will enable you to claim for the damage that they did to the railings of number one hold.

I am closing this preliminary report for I am finding it difficult to concentrate with the sound of police sirens and their flashing lights.

It is sad to think that had the Apprentice realised that there is no need to fly Pilot
flags after dark, none of this would have happened.

For weekly Accountability Report I will assign the following Casualty Numbers T/750101 to T/750199 inclusive.

Yours truly

Making sense of your email on Gmail - Take Control!!

Many moons back I had written about using multiple emails forwarding from one to the another etc to handle spam - well that is now done very well by Gmail. So out went Thunderbird [Mozilla email client] - it is still a fantastic product so long as only you use your desktop PC.

So you use Gmail and have been doing so for a while or have just started - never mind - there is always a starting point.

You should also be using Firefox or Google Chrome web browser - it has sooo many addons for Firefox. Chrome - as it is also known as Chromium - the source from which Chrome is compiled - also has addons.

I came across this fantastic addon - ActiveInbox - it uses labels to help you manage your email.

What is missing???

Google calender integration into gmail allowing me to put dates or flow control on my email - apparently the ActiveInbox Plus - the advanced version has it - but at a cost ;-).

cheers

SixthSense - a wearable gestural interface (MIT Media Lab)

SixthSense - a wearable gestural interface (MIT Media Lab): "'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Sending email to yourself on Gmail

Normally we send emails to ourself by just using yourid @ gmail.com.

But this does not send you a copy - you just have a sent message.

I just found that if you send the mail with an email address such as youremailid+self@gmial.com - yes just add "+self" and you get an email sent you as well.

cheers

Adding an Action menu / service menu in kde4

Gnome has a much better way of handling bash scripts though once you get a hang of KDE was of doing things - it works out just fine.

We will use the last post for setting a wallpaper ans make it work in dolphin / konquerer file managers Action menu ;-)

1. Make a new folder called ServiceMenus - normaly it does not exist by default
   
   mkdir /home/user/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus
    
2. create a text file with .desktop extension
3. copy the following text into it using the text editor of your choosing - I like nano or kate.
   
   [Desktop Entry]
   Encoding=UTF-8
   ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,image/*
   TryExec=/home/user/bin/scripts/conwall.sh
   Type=Service
   Actions=chwall;
   TryExec=/home/user/bin/scripts/conwall.sh
   
   [Desktop Action chwall]
   Name=Change wallpaper
   Icon=ksplash
   Exec=/home/user/bin/scripts/conwall.sh %f
   
4. change the user with the account name of the user.
5. right click on any image in the above file managers and you should see "Change wallpaper" option in  the Action menu.

Please post comments if there are any questions...

KDE 4.5.2 changing Wallpaper / background

This is for Arch Linux but should be usable on other distributions as well..

Changing wallpaper on the latest KDE is just a right lick and choosing "Desktop Settings"... but what if you had conky running and you wanted to change the wallpaper / background using command line - like from a batch file - that is a problem.

Shall detail running conky in another post ...

Things to have installed - KDE 4.5.2, eterm

Here we create a folder "walls" in home folder and another called "gamma" in walls - as I have all my wallpapers in walls folder - you can modify as you please. The gamma folder holds the copy of the same wallpaper as the one used except we use convert [from imagemagick] to darken the image.

#!/bin/bash

fileext=`echo "$1"|awk -F . '{print $NF}'`;

filename=$(basename "$1" "$fileext");

out_file="$filename"gamma."$fileext";

rm ~/walls/gamma/*;

cd ~/walls/gamma;

convert "$1" -gamma 0.7,0.7,0.7 "$out_file";

kwriteconfig --file plasma-desktop-appletsrc --group Containments --group 1 --group Wallpaper --group image --key wallpaper "$1";

kquitapp plasma-desktop;

sleep 1;

plasma-desktop ;

~/bin/fbsetbg "$out_file";

The listed file is linked below and fbsetbg is a script file from fluxbox to set your wallpaper. 

conwall.sh

fbsetbg

Back after such a looong time

A lot has happened since 2004 and now.

Have loads of stuff to share - from technology to networking ....

Open Source - What a concept!!

FREE - Open Source - Software.[remember - open source does not mean it has to be FREE - depends on licensing]

Office Productivity
Replacement - openoffice.org - replaces MS Office suit of applications with very small foot print. - test it and you shall know. It has word, excel and powerpoint replacements. File format can be any ms office version or openoffice's own xml compressed form. 1 mb file typically saves to 80 kb in my experience.

Drawing module is very extensive - MS should be doing catch up for many years to come. Please note - MS offering is very good but Openoffice is better. Small size - 60 mb, under 200 mb full install. Best of all it is FREE. and available for nearly all operating systems. It also has a built in flash generator for presentations and pdf generator for all applications.

Free PDF Generator
You need 2 applications for this operation. Ghostscript and FreePDFXP.  I have given same link as you get the downlink for both from the freepdfxp site. this also allows you to encrypt your pdf files.

Music
Ogg Vorbis. Yes - that is the name - Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.

If you think this is bad - a FREE player "Oggplay" is also available for Symbian OS - used in mobile phones. So if you use Nokia 6600, Siemens SX-1 or any similar product - you can download it free and play fantastic Ogg files [about 1/3rd the size of a good MP3 compress + it is free]. To put it in perspective a 3 hour recording gives a digital quality compress of only 60 mb. A similar compress on MP3 would be about 180 mb, in WMA windows media about 80 to 90 mb. So a 512 mb MMC [a flash memory card used in smart phones and cameras etc] would give you 24 hours play time - though at lower bit rates you can stretch that.

Video
XviD. Does DivX ring a bell? XviD is a continuation of Project Mayo and aims to develop a high quality open-source MPEG-4 codec. As you may already know, XviD comes from the same open-source project that was the basis for DivX 4.x/5.x, but instead of going all commercial, XviD remains open-source. The quality of the codec is extremely good, and encoding speed is very fast as well, a full size hindi movie DVD encodes to about 350 mb - fantastic image display.

What ever is listed by me has actually been tested by me and used regularly.

ciao

Yahoo and Hotmail/Msn using Thunderbird

Many of us wonder how to get rid of the agony of actually going to the yahoo or hotmail website and check mail.

Yes you can use outlook express or outlook to log into hotmail/msn accounts - but what if you want to use a better and much more advanced email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, which does not support the interface required for accessing hotmail/msn via email software.

There is a FREE solution for both these accounts. Though I do not recommend hotmail/msn - simply because they offer only 2mb storage space and you need to access it at least once in 30 days or you loose all info stored in the account. Yahoo - on the other hand gives 100mb plus 6 months storage - i think - check it out.

For yahoo the program is Yahoopops.  Even though the latest version is 0.6 - I recommend version 0.5 as the newer version is unable to delete mail in your account after downloading it.

For Hotmail/msn the program is Hotmail Popper. Apparently Microsoft will soon be stopping access to outside programs such as this one from accessing msn/hotmail accounts - unless you have hotmail plus paid account. I guess it is time to trash this account anyway. No offense to the service itself - it is one of the best free email services but the small size, time bound access is not so attractive - at least not for me.

For controlling SPAM - there is also a free solution - Spampal. This does a very good job and much better than most paid solutions.your Thunderbird email client also has junk mail filters - which when activated - do a fantastic job and you most probably will not require anti spam software.

adios

All about RSS

The past week

It has quite a week - earlier in the week - had all sorts of problems with the computers and the Internet and the updates.

RSS - what does it mean for the common person

OK - I am not going to reinvent the wheel - so to speak - there is a lot of information about it on the web,
Basically RSS is "Really Simple Syndication" - what is "syndication" - well,  Syndication is the process by which a site is able to share information with other sites. In this case it is broken down using xml into small data chunks - which can be picked up by a RSS reader such as Mozilla Firefox . A good link for this info is here. It also gives you a rundown on what XML really is - as that is what RSS is based on.

So if you are using Firefox and you go to yahoo news site  and then go to one of the new pages - say top stories. At the right hand side of the status bar you will see red RSS. left click on it and it gives you a "Subscribe to RSS" link and asks you to save as a bookmark [favourite as in Internet explorer]. Here it is referred to as a Live Bookmark - as it updates as and when you ask or when you start the browser.

So finally you do not have to go to the actual web site to get the headlines. Just check the bookmark and it will update and show a list of latest headline.

This is also being used here at Blogger and many other sites. Even weather sites are using RSS to give out information. If you want to get weather info on your desk top visit Rainlender site. You get tons of information about your system plus other information.

Later I shall also be writing about improving your windows for free, changing your shell, look and feel of windows. How does Linux face up, and also about browsers and email/news readers.

Thats about it for now

buenas noches

So finally my GMX does go thru

This is going to be long story now - detailing my voyage from one ISP to another and the troubles encountered including over dose of mango peal - ha and a cold of course.

System must have a software firewall, antivirus, Mozilla Firefox browser.
The internet account in use ADSL aka DSL. Not to forget Freeproxy - all urls also coming below.

Connected the new DSL via the USB and fired up the system. To share it implemented ICS [internet connection sharing] on the DSL modem- you can do this by going to the connection properties in the network panel in the control panel.

3 systems in all including the one connected to the internet.

This same arrangement was ealier set with lan connection for internet at 64 kbps and all systems worked fine including yahoo and gmx.

With DSL - situation changed. Yahoo sites would open including the groups page but no access to the Yahoo mail - same status with msn. To access mail at yahoo I use Yahoopops and for msn I use Hotmail Popper - both free solutions. Neither of them were able to access their respective sites either.

Solution - use a proxy - but where to get one - Googled for free proxies - read about them but had used one 3 years back and found that present avatar is very good. Freeproxy. Since the OS used is Windows 2000 - have installed the freeproxy as a service - in other words - the program starts and is run behind the scenes and works even when no one is logged in.

So - the browser set to use the proxy and have still kept the ICS running - mail only yahoo and msn via the HTTP proxy.

The GMX - had to set up SMTP proxy on the freeproxy server. I am no guru - just did the RTFM [read the fu#$*&g manual] thingy - it is all there in the help.

Re - RSS and fire fox and thunderbird goodies - next post hee he he he

ciao

Blog what blog

Well I have been off the net for the past afew days.

New ISP

Well not really - have actually switched my ISP. Earlier my cable guy was offering me 64 kbps up and down for 1100/ bucks and now have switched to Airtel and have a ADSL line 128 kbps for 900 - duh. It is just great.

Then also have shifted the main internet connection from my pc to the other PC so that PC acts as the web feeder for the house.

ICS on windows

BUT running Internet Connection sharing from the lan connection and from ADSL USB dial up connection - are 2 different things.

Windows uses a sort of NAT [network address translation] which is OK as long as your internet uses your network card - a USB connection changes the dream.

Once I had USB - I could not access Yahoo and MSN neither could I use remote mail readers like Hotpop and Yahoopops.

So in comes Freeproxy. This is a free proxy server - very usefull and also installs itself as a service on win2k. So have routed all connections via this proxy. Only my mail is still going direct using using the ICS [intenet connection sharing - on the dial up connection] but the pop yahoo and msn go via the proxy - i will need to use proxy for GMX as well - i think. all my gmx mail gets bounced.

Aampapar
Eating half kg of delicious aampapar in half hour flat is not good for your stomach.

more later on rss feed and fire fox and my cold....