From the category archives:

Productivity

How to use Google’s calculator: convert to hexadecimal, binary, and decimal

by on February 10, 2008

in Google/SEO,How to,Productivity

One of Google’s goals is that you should be able to throw just about anything into a search box (package tracking numbers, airline flight numbers, etc.) and Google will try to do something reasonable, such as return the status of a flight. Recently I was trying to reverse engineer a USB protocol and needed to convert some numbers between base 16 (hexadecimal) and base 10 (decimal). On a hunch, I threw the conversion into a Google search box. Sure enough, it worked fine.

Converting hexadecimal to decimal with a search query like [0x607a in decimal]:

Convert hex to base10

Convert decimal to hexadecimal with a Google query like [1854 in hex]:

Convert decimal to base 16

You can even convert hexadecimal to binary with a query like [0x770 in binary]:

Convert base16 to base2

Of course, you can also use alternate queries like [convert 0x770 to base 2]. Pretty handy.

Bonus tip: did you know that you can do currency conversion too? Just type something like [one dollar in yuan]:

Convert my currency

If you have favorite tips for searches, leave them in the comments.

{ 57 comments }

11 Power Tips for Gmail

by on January 28, 2008

in Google/SEO,How to,Productivity

Update: Here’s one more bonus tip. Use the ‘m’ key to mute a conversation. Suppose you’re on a mailing list and you don’t care about what’s being discussed. The ‘m’ key will mute/murder that entire thread so that you never see that email or any follow-ups. The only way you’ll see the conversation again is if someone adds you to the “To:” or “Cc:” line of an email in the conversation. Read more if you’re interested.

Wow, I can’t believe how many people commented on my late-Friday night post about desired features for Gmail. If you want to suggest something for Gmail, that thread is the better place to do it. But looking through the comments, I saw a few requests that can already be done today. Considering that real Gmail users didn’t know about these options, I’m going to call them power tips.

Stylized Gmail logo

  1. Wayne Schulz said “I want to be able to paste images into the email.” Wayne, it’s not quite the same as pasting images into emails, but one thing that makes image attachments easier is the dragdropupload Firefox extension. You know how you can click “Attach a file” and then you’ll see the familiar “enter a file location or Browse..” form appear? With dragdropupload, you can drag any file (e.g. from your Desktop) and drop it in that text box. It’s a fantastic extension that makes it much faster to include attachments or upload files, and I use it all the time.
  2. Jason Bartholme asked about “A sort that would allow for my unread messages to be at the top.” Jason, trying doing a search for label:unread label:inbox . That should show only unread messages that are currently in your inbox. By the way, did you like how I shared a search with you? That was a tip from the Gmail blog. There are other cool labels you can use as well.
  3. Julian says

    I would like to have a feature for inserting prepared text blocks, so I dont have to write some things over and over again.

    Julian, if you use Firefox, check out the Signature firefox extension to insert text macros. That might work for you.

  4. Daniel asked

    Crazy feature: I’d like to be able to have an easy way to migrate my entire Google account to a different gmail address, because I can’t find a step-by-step guide or anything to help me switch emails without losing various things.

    According to this post you can enable POP on your old account (look under Settings, then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”), then import the emails (also using POP) into the new account. I think you could use Gmail’s Mail Fetcher utility to do this. To configure Mail Fetcher on the newer account, click on Gmail’s Settings link, then “Accounts” and then “Add another mail account.” Google Operating System (an unofficial blog that discusses Google often) has a couple relevant posts with a walkthough of using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher and a write-up on how to back up your Google account.

  5. Sankarananad asked a related question:

    I would love to integrate my google apps account with my default gmail account. Although right now google allows to associate email address there is no way to integrate or link two google accounts (say one @gmail.com and another yourdomain.com powered by google apps).

    Right now the only solution is to forward mails from one box to another! If google makes integration possible we can use a single inbox to check mails from all those email address

    I’m not as familiar with the interaction of regular Gmail versus Gmail on Google Apps. This post described a scary-looking way that might work. If there’s a better way, maybe someone will stop by and let me know?

  6. Search Engines Web asked:

    The ability to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF without going to another page and using another software

    S.E.W, this post from Lifehacker mentions that Gmail can offer HTML view or Google Doc options for Word and Excel.

  7. Easton Ellsworth mentioned

    I’d love to be able to resize the email composition box on the default page – so instead of having to click the icon to open the whole draft in a new resizable window, I’d be able to click and drag to make the draft box bigger (especially vertically).

    Easton, check out the Resizeable text area extension for Firefox. It lets you click on the border of any form textarea and drag the border so the textarea expands. I haven’t checked how it works on the latest version of Gmail though.

  8. 1001 noisy cameras said “I think the ability to open emails in new windows would be great – it would help those users who are always multi-tasking.” If you’re looking at an email look at the top-right of the page and click on “New window” to open that email in a separate email.
  9. Diego asked

    I don’t know if this would be possible, but how about, when clicking on the compose link (or reply etc) if I hold some key as I click on Compose, it opens the new email in its own window? Same thing could go for Replies etc.

    Diego, instead of using ‘c’ to compose a new email, type ‘C’ and you’ll open a new window to compose your email. It looks like using ‘R’ instead of ‘r’ to reply will open a new email for replies too.

  10. jonathon asked “Is it me or does the pop3 server sometimes stop working when downloading email from gmail?” I’ve been using getmail to back up my Gmail, and I’ve noticed that Google will only let you download a few hundred emails in one batch. If you fetch again, you’ll often catch up. So usually it’s just a matter of being patient.

I heard a lot of great suggestions that I wouldn’t even have thought of. For example, I liked the idea of a “bounce” option for unwanted emails to make it look as if your email address didn’t exist. Oh, and since so many people asked for cool features, let me add one more feature I want: let me set a different vacation message for co-workers compared to people outside Google. Maybe in Google Apps for Gmail, if you are managing example.com, let people on example.com set a different vacation message for people on example.com vs. other domains?

By the way, what was the funniest suggestion I saw? Jeff Hall won with “A USB breathalyzer kit for a friend who forgets how embarrassing her e-mails are when she gets drunk. The e-mails could be delayed until she provides a negative sample.” :)

And here’s your bonus tip. If you’re a Gmail power user, three links to check out are the Gmail tag on Lifehacker, the official Gmail blog, and Google Operating System. Lifehacker does so many posts per day that limiting to the Gmail tag will narrow down the posts you see. The Gmail blog is the best place to get official Gmail news first. And Google OS seems to have Gmail-related posts pretty often.

{ 110 comments }

What Gmail feature do you want the most?

by on January 25, 2008

in Google/SEO,Productivity

I really like Gmail because it makes email much less annoying. But I’ve been thinking about a feature that I really want in Gmail: I want the ability to delay sending replies/emails until a certain time or date. As a computer science person, here’s how I’d turn that one feature into three features:

  • The “Oops” filter. Have you ever hit send on an email at the exact same time that you noticed a typo? Or did you ever get “emailer’s regret” because you sent a snarky or angry email instead of polite one? The “oops” filter would let you delay sending email for a short while (two minutes if you suffer from typo-itis, longer if you tend to flame in emails) until you’re sure you want to send that email.
  • Slow down a conversation. If you’re like me, you treat your inbox as a to-do list. And if I can deal with an email in a minute or two, I often do. Then the other person writes back quickly. Then I write back quickly. Before you know it, you’ve traded several emails that you didn’t need to. If someone emails me a non-critical email, sometimes it would be nice to write a reply immediately, but set the email to wait for a few hours before heading to the other person.
  • Periodic events. If I know that I’m going to need to collect data from someone at the end of the week or quarter, why can’t I write the email now and set it to ping them when the time is up? If someone says “this bug will be fixed in three weeks,” it would be great to write a “Hey, how’s that bug going?” email and set it to tickle or ping them in three weeks.

Part of me wonders whether the Greasemonkey API for Gmail could do something like this, maybe by storing the date to send an email as some sort of special tag. Part of me wonders whether someone has already created something like this for Gmail.

And part of me wonders: what feature would you like to see in Gmail? Now that Gmail has free POP, IMAP, and an iPhone version, what do you want to see next from Gmail?

{ 318 comments }

Changing how I handle emails

by on July 23, 2007

in Personal,Productivity

This past week was pretty hectic:
- On Monday, I flew up to Kirkland and back to catch up with the Webmaster Central team.
- On Tuesday, I drove up into San Francisco for a Web 2.0 dinner
- On Thursday, I hosted a visitor from Italy.
- On Friday, I ate Buck’s in Woodside for the first time.
- On Saturday, I spoke at WordCamp. I’ll check with Google PR to make sure they’re okay if I put up the PowerPoint. In the mean time, Stephanie Booth live-blogged it.

I also managed to talk to folks on my team and get work done, but I didn’t have a lot of spare time (e.g. to blog about some of the stuff above). When I looked back over the week, my biggest time sink was email. Handling email is getting to be the largest fraction of my time.

I’ve tried all kinds of tricks to reduce the email load:
- I archive any mailing list that I don’t really need in my inbox.
- I try to check email fewer times during the day.
- I write replies to emails, then save them as drafts for a while before replying, so I don’t get stuck in a cycle of replying, getting a response, and quickly emailing again.

This week (with a little prodding from a friend), I realized that it’s still not working. I’m barely keeping my head above water, email-wise. I need a different approach. I can see a couple options:

1. Go “lossy.” Let a few emails drop on the floor. I’m already doing this from time to time, like when someone emails out of the blue asking for an interview or something that would take too long.
2. For emails from outside Google, shard the workload and ask for help.

I’ll probably do both, to some degree. If you’re emailing me from outside Google and expect a personal reply, you might want to lower your expectations going forward. If I can reclaim some of the time that I spend on email, that will let me spend more time with my webspam team, my wife, and blogging about random stuff. :)

{ 47 comments }

A quick tutorial on screen

by on July 10, 2007

in How to,Productivity

Suppose you want to run a program persistently (even if a terminal window closes, for example). For that, you might use the nohup command. But what if you want to start a command-line session on one computer and then go home and resume that session? For something like that, you’ll want to use screen. Screen is also really handy because you can have multiple shells running in one terminal window.

Here’s the basics of how to use screen on a Linux/Ubuntu machine. First, create a session:

screen -S sessionname

It’s good to choose a descriptive session name. For example, before I switched to using Gmail I used mutt. So I would often start a session with the command “screen -S mutt” in one terminal window. If I went home, I could attach to that session from home, so I never needed to start-up or shutdown mutt.

You can easily have 10 interactive shells (numbered from 0 to 9) open in one terminal window. When you start a new session, you’ll be in shell 0. To create a new shell, hold down the “Control” key, press and release the ‘a’ key, and then type the letter ‘c’. I’ll write this as:

To create a new interactive shell, press Control-a c

Switching between shells is easy too.

To switch between shells, press Control-a # where # is the number of the shell. For example, to switch to shell number 1, press Control-a 1

Voilà! Now you can easily run 10 different shells in one terminal window! But what about if you want to go home and attach to a session from home? Use something like ssh to get on your work machine. Then here’s the command:

screen -d -R sessionname will resume a session that you started in a different location.

Technically this command is doing some special things. If you started the session somewhere else, the “-d” option will “detach” it at the other location, and “-R” will reattach your current terminal window to the session. If sessionname hasn’t been created, it will create the session for you. So the command above will migrate a session to your current window and disable the session at other locations. That’s usually what you want.

To exit a session, it’s easiest to exit all the shells in the session. If you want some more info on screen:

Control-a ? will give help inside of screen.
Typing “man screen” at a Linux command-line will show more help on screen.
There are web pages with more info on screen.

Update: If you want to know more about screen, see my post about .screenrc.

{ 24 comments }

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