Tech Prone

Firefox 3 introduces a few new features to bookmarks that I think make them much, much easier to use, more useful in general, and much more useful in particular for catastrophically disorganized folk like me. The three main features being introduced are: Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders.
I’ve never been a huge fan of traditional bookmarks — I tend to bookmark lots of things and my bookmarking system always degraded to the point of uselessness pretty quickly. Bookmarks became a bit of a junk drawer for me — I’d throw things in there and they’d end up forgotten, or lost, or just never pulled out and looked at again. I never had the patience to create a nice clean folder hierarchy and file things neatly away. I am clearly not a student of the “everything has a place, and everything in its place” school of thought.

Besides the face-lift, one of Firefox 3’s less flashy, but incredibly useful features, is the new bookmarking system. Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites you’re actually visiting to help weed out what’s unneeded.

Master the quickie

It’s easy now to bookmark your favourite sites just hit the new star button in the address bar,and simply get edge from keyboard shortcutIt’ll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does.

If you click the star again, it opens the Bookmark dialog, where you can edit the bookmark title, add tags to the bookmark, file the bookmark in a folder, or delete the bookmark. Naturally, you can still open the Bookmark dialog with cmd-D (or ctrl-D if you’re not using a Mac).

The Bookmark dialog has other surprises, too. The drop arrows beside the Folder and Tags fields expand the dialog so you can add new folders, browse through your existing folder tree, or select pre-existing tags with a checklist.

Bookmark Tags

Tags are a way to add flexible “extra” information to a bookmark. Where Folders let you organize bookmarks in a way, they’re limited in that you can only put each bookmark in a single folder. Not so with tags — you can add as many tags to a bookmark as you want.To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you’ve typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.

For example, I could put my “Photoshop image” into a “Design” folder (or even a “Web” subfolder under “Images”), but I couldn’t put that bookmark into both the “Design” and “web” subfolders at the same time. On the other hand, I can tag that single bookmark with “images”, “design”, “photoshop” and anything else I want.So how is this flexible information useful?

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Google remains king of search.Google, at least, provides its products free to the consumer.
Often, free software requires paid upgrades to get the “full” version, or there is a time limit on how long you can use it without buying.
Here are five totally free Google products that will help you a lot.

iGoogle

iGoogle is Google’s own customizable home page much like MySurfPad, Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo! and Windows Live Personalized Experience.You can add a Google gadget for virtually everything: news, tools, games, shopping, affiliate accounts, and, of course, all of your Google stuff: Gmail, Google docs, Google notebook, Google reader, etc. For you internet moguls, you can access your adsense account right on your homepage. And, if there isn’t a gadget for it, you can create one.You can set up iGoogle as your homepage on any brower, and you can add an almost infinite amount of information accessible immediately from your home page. If that’s not enough, you can add tabs for more stuff.

Google Docs

Admittedly, Google Docs is not as robust as its competitors, yet. For most of my legal stuff, I still use WordPerfect, but Google Docs is more than sufficient for the average user.Where Google Docs is better is that it is, or can be, completely interactive and is accessible from anywhere you have internet access. You can allow multiple users and editors, and you can publish your documents in a variety of formats, online, hard copy and otherwise. You can upload most document formats to Google Docs and you can save Google Docs documents in multiple formats. This service really is remarkable for the price.

Actually, the fact that it is less rubust is probably beneficial to users who do not need all of the bells and whistles. Although, Google is continuing to add stuff, and Google is much more nimble at it because it is online and not out of a box.

read more about google docs>>

Google Calendar

If you are willing to be unfaithful to yours, or if you need to coordinate multiple calendars, or if you need to publicize a calendar, Google Calendar is worth checking out.I realize everyone is particularly loyal to their calendaring program, especially if you use a PDA or smartphone.With Google Calendar, you can see your friends’ and family’s schedules right next to your own; quickly add events mentioned in Gmail conversations or saved in other calendar applications; and add other interesting events that you find online.

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Prevent Gmail from Marking your Important Emails as Spam
Gmail has included a new Never Send it to Spam option in Gmail search filter that allows you to set rules for messages that should never be marked as spam. False positives in Gmail are rare but not non-zero and there’s always a possibility that an important email may miss your Inbox because Gmail filters have marked that message as spam.
So why are you waiting now Get Rid of the Unread Spam Message Count in Gmail and Your IMAP Client
If you are a Gmail user, you’ve probably noticed the annoying unread message count for the Spam folder. It’s even worse when you use an IMAP client to access your email, and then try and use a search folder for unread mail… which gives you nothing but spam.What we’ll do is use Gmail’s filter capabilities to create a filter that automatically marks spam messages as read, preventing the unread count from appearing anywhere.This method should work for both Gmail as well as any IMAP client that you use. (Note: This only works if you are using the new gmail interface.)
Mark All Spam as Read Automatically
Open up Gmail and then click the link to create a new filter. In the “Has the words” box, enter “in:spam” (without the quotes) as you can see in the image below. You can use the Test Search button to make sure it shows just spam emails.

Now click the Next Step button, and ignore the error message you get. Select the checkbox for “Mark as read”, and then click the Create Filter button. Note that you could auto-delete all spam using this same filter, although I’m not recommending that.
At this point, all incoming spam will be automatically marked as read. (You’d want to clear out the current spam, of course)

All Gmail Users Are Given Two Separate Email Addresses automatically>

All Gmail users are provided with two distinct e-mail addresses when they join. If you have xyz@gmail.com as an e-mail address, then Google also provides you with xyz@googlemail.com

This feature apparently has been there for a long time in Gmail, for some reason Google didn’t announce this. But tech bloggers were able to dig this detail out.

With Gmail, you can create multiple e-mail addresses (or aliases) with the same account and you can do this with the following three ways.
1. With a plus sign: Once you log on to G-mail, go to Settings –> Accounts –> Add another e-mail address –> then enter “xyz+xyz1@gmail.com” or “xyz+xyz2@gmail.com”, so on.
2. By adding a dot sign: I have explained this procedure here. Gmail’s program code is set in a way it doesn’t recognize dots or periods in e-mail address. So you can add dots in between the e-mail address as follows:x.yz@gmail.com or xy.z@gmail.com and so on by going to Settings –> Accounts –> Add another e-mail address –> then enter 
x.yz@gmail.com or ,xy.z@gmail.comso on. 3. Two e-mails in One: No setup necessary for this third method, when you register your account xyz@gmail.com, Google automatically registers an additional e-mail account as xyz@googlemail.com. Both addresses will receive the e-mails at the same account. To separate them you have to use filters. For example, you can pass one of the e-mail addresses to your close friends and filter them to a separate folder, and can give the other e-mail addresses for shopping or websites. Thus you can create literally 100s of e-mail addresses from one Gmail account.
Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft can match this feature.
Some more useful tricks
While Web-based email is nothing new, Gmail introduces some new and unique concepts. Managing email has become very easy while at the same time having powerful tools to find and review information. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s one almighty reason to have a Wi-Fi network: freedom to roam where you want, laptop or handheld in hand. Everything else—not having to punch holes in your walls for Ethernet cables or hide the cables, for example—is icing. Wi-Fi is not perfect out of the box, however. We’ll reveal how to maximize the network range from your access point, troubleshoot problems, and prevent strangers from usurping your bandwidth—or share it with all comers while keeping your data and computers safe.
As there are lot of questions arises in user’s mind to improve the performance of Wi-Fi network.Get answers to your questions about boosting the speed and range of your wireless network.

• How can I extend the range of my home Wi-Fi network?

First, make sure you are getting the most out of your current Wi-Fi router: Mount it in a central location in your house, preferably high on a wall; make sure that other 2.4-GHz Read the rest of this entry »