Gmail speed-up tips

Occasionally Gmail can trip itself up while interpreting all that behind the scenes javascript and this can lead to delays when serving up your emails. If you're as important and popular as I am you'll know 0.7 milliseconds isn't acceptable - you want your information now! Below you'll find some steps you can take to squeeze that last drop of juice out of your Google web mail:-

1. Disable the chat feature by clicking on the "standard without chat" text link in your inbox's footer.

2. If half measures aren't for you try switching to "basic HTML" mode.

3. Not quite bare-bones enough? For the Amish Gmailers among you there's always Mobile Gmail. You could even make it pop out of your browser in its own incy-wincy, ickle phone sized window. This is handy if you want to stay in the loop at work without drawing too much attention to yourself. You can keep your pseudo phone pinned on top of all your other applications using PowerMenu / reSizer (Windows) or Afloat (Mac).

4. Visit your 'settings' menu and on the 'general' page select 'No snippets - Show subject only' to disable inline previewing of email content. Chances are you'll know if you want to open up an email judging by who it's from and what's in the title. There's no need for information overload.

5. If you don't use your Gmail account for chatting, disable the chat history feature located under the 'chat' tab of your settings menu.

6. Move a tab to your right and opt not to 'show my web clips above the Inbox' to exterminate distracting sponsored link fluff. Even when customised, this is a poor substitute for RSSFwd if you ask me.

7. Activate keyboard shortcuts under the 'general' settings tab to eliminate all that incessant flitting back and forth between keyboard and mouse when performing common tasks such as archiving mail or composing a new message. The only thing missing from this time-saver is a quickie delete key combo. Considering Google's history of playing hide and seek with the delete button in the actual GUI this doesn't surprise me.

8. If you already know you're using a Gmail compatible browser you can skip the automatic browser check in future by accessing your inbox via this URL.

9. Pages will render faster if your inbox isn't clogged up with excess mail so make sure you archive anything you want to keep and chuck out the rest. Otherwise reduce the number of 'conversations' shown on each page by tweaking the 'maximum page size' option under the 'general' settings tab.

10. Spring-cleaning your inbox will increase the relevance of your search results, but putting it in the microwave probably isn't advisable.

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Pick 'n' mix RSS feeds

If you subscribe to a high traffic blog or news web site through an RSS to email service such as R-Mail or RSSFwd, you won't be a stranger to a bulging inbox.

No matter how much you love a particular site you're unlikely to want to read absolutely every article posted to its RSS feed. Some sites will give you a range of tweaked feeds to choose from (one for each tag or a 'best of' round up for example) allowing you to selectively filter the information you receive, while with others it's a case of 'one size fits all'. This tip explains how to whittle down the updates you receive from the latter using Gmail's automated email filtering feature.

The idea is to instruct Gmail to instantly delete any emails from a specified sender containing keywords which describe topics you aren't remotely interested in.

To get started visit gmail.com, click on 'settings', 'filters' and then 'create new filter'. Enter the email address of your RSS-to-email provider in the 'from' box. If the name of the site you have chosen to receive RSS updates from appears in the subject line of each email you can enter this in the 'subject' box. If not, put it in the 'has the words' field instead along with any keywords you wish to blacklist.
Let's look at an example where you want to sieve email which uses only the title of the article or blog post to identify it within the subject line. Let's say you subscribe to 'Evangelism Online' and 'Godsquad' and you want to vanquish certain emails dealing with scary topics you can't face.


Here's what you might like to enter into the 'has the words' box: ("evangelism online"|godsquad) (darwin|"other religions"|"atheism on the rise"|"common sense"|dawkins|allegory|langenort|sweden|"the da vinci code"|evolution|southpark|durex|"brokeback mountain"|"separation of church and state"|logic|science|scepticism|"oblique spheroid"|"spongebob squarepants"|"walt disney"|"faith no more"|"john lennon"|reality|"elton john"|diversity)

This string identifies all content originating from 'Evangelism Online' OR 'Godsquad', AND which contains ANY of the keywords/phrases listed between the second set of brackets.

When you're happy with your operator string, press the 'next' button, put a tick in the "delete it" checkbox and jab the 'update filter' button. If you already have some rogue emails festering in your inbox, you might want to tick the 'also apply filter to x conversations below' checkbox.

From time to time you can check how effective your filter is proving to be by casting an eye over your deleted items folder. The messages that have skipped the inbox will be easy to pick out because they will still be bold (as is the case with unread email).

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Taking out the G-Trash

It's funny how you can put up with niggling annoyances and learn to muddle through, and then as soon as you throw a tantrum a solution presents itself entirely out of the blue.

Today I stumbled upon what is known as Gumbmug, phonetically speaking. No idea where the name comes from, but being down with the latest web trends I'd guess it stems from the tendency to drop the vowels from words so you've got more chance of bagging a unique trademark. Well whatever, what it does is gives you back your Google by blacklisting notorious e-drool such as Shopbot, Dooyoo and so on, thereby tipping the spam-to-genuine-content ratio in your favour.

Seasoned Googlers will know you can achieve the same thing with Google Classic all on your lonesome, but then who wants to append "-inurl:(kelkoo | bizrate | pixmania | dealtime | pricerunner | dooyoo | pricegrabber | pricewatch | resellerratings | ebay | shopbot | comparestoreprices | ciao | unbeatable | shopping | epinions | nextag | buy)" to every single search query? This by the way is advanced Google operator shorthand for 'don't link me to any sites which contain these words in the web address'. Even keeping this string close at hand for copy/paste purposes is no substitute for Gumbmug seeing as a static list wouldn't take into account the emergence of new webscurge upstarts, or remove banished sites if they one day decided to provide information that anyone cared about.

Let's have a tinker then shall we. A search for "wireless mp3 player" returns 91,300 results in plain old Google, while the same search generates only 25,400 hits via Gumbmug. Eureka, that's what I call progress! I have a new home page. In the rare event of actually wanting to run a price comparison check, I'll pick one 'screen scraper' and visit it directly. They're extremely useful in the right context of course.

I'm not usually one to lose myself in a tirade of strong language, but gosh darn it, sometimes a webapp gets me so excited I just can't help it. My apologies for the four letter words.

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MiggyTrack

When it comes to offering personalised search tools, Rollyo are no longer the only game in town. Google are hungry for a slice of the pie and aim to claim a sizeable portion by way of their newly uncorked Co-Op web app.

With Co-Op you get pretty much the same deal, except under the bonnet (or 'hood' I suppose :p) you'll find Google's own search engine rather than Yahoo's, you're supplied with a wacky, instantly forgettable URL to link to your widgets and you're given more scope to categorise your web-foraging offspring.

To check out the hue of the grass on the other side of the fence I've thrown together a custom search widget which queries eleven of the top-ranking Amiga game database web sites. Not that I'm obsessed or anything silly like that.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it's a nice shiny emerald green. The start pages are distinctly uncluttered as you'd expect from a Google Gooey, you can opt to eradicate all adverts (as long as you're not operating as a commercial organisation) and there are plenty of advanced options to keep the most demanding tweakers happy. For now the race is too close to call. Do the front-runners have any competition?

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My First Search Engine. Porn and spam sold separately.

Statistics show that 98.54% of the content on the internet is worthless dross, yet we still have to wade our way through it to get to the good stuff. Perfect example: whenever you search Google to locate a trustworthy review of a piece of tech gear you're considering purchasing, it spews out wads of irrelevant shopping spam sites which - purely by chance of course - contain the word 'review', even though no opinions, positive or negative, are imparted within their pages. Typically this fluff populates the first few pages of Google's output, pushing the genuine content deep into obscurity.

One workaround would be to identify a handful of reliable sources for each kind of information you require, bookmark and search them individually. Better still is Rollyo; a newish, startup web gizmo which provides the means to tailor your search results to suit your personal preferences. It does this by allowing you to 'Roll Your Own' categorised search filters. For instance, you could create a health 'Searchroll' by entering the URLs of up to 25 top-rated health-focused web sites, which when queried would only return content produced by these previously vetted sources.

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Convert owt to owt (ish)

You can't have failed to notice the current web 2.0 trend of taking commonplace computing tasks online. Everything from virus scanning and making backups to writing documents can now be performed from within your web browser; the advantage being that you can take your 'applications' with you wherever you go and never have to worry about updating them (or paying for them in most cases for that matter).

One of the latest tasks to be given the online treatment is file conversion. What stands out about web services like Zamzar is that they'll have a stab at converting pretty much any kind of file to an appropriate, alternative format. This is ideal for those of us who only convert a file once in a while and can never remember the name of the application you need to process one thing or the other when the need arises.

The downside is obviously that whatever you want to convert, first has to be uploaded, and then downloaded in its altered state, so how useful these services are to you will ultimately be determined by the speed of your internet connection.

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Postal movie distribution; a solution looking for a problem?

So I don't get any smart alecks pointing at me and laughing at my utter stupidity, I'll start this post by saying, I've got to be missing something here. These services must exist for a perfectly logical reason, I'm just too dumb to see what's staring me in the face, dancing a jig and singing, "here I am, look at me" at the top of its anthropomorphic voice.

Right, with that disclaimer firmly in place I've given myself free reign to be as simple-minded as I like and get clean away with it.

You've all seen these companies that specialise in sending you x number of DVD movies through the post for a fixed monthly fee. You compile an online list of must-watch-before-I-die movies, hand over your credit card details and wait for the first one to drop through your letter box. When you've seen it, you pop it into the prepaid envelope, bung it in the post box and they send you the next one in your queue. No more visits to Blockbuster, no more late fees, no hassle and lots of cheap movies. Great stuff, hallelujah!

So why is this considered revolutionary? People have been beaming movies straight to their TVs via Sky and cable for years now... all without the aid of Postman Pat. I'm not talking about setting up a subscription to Sky Movies either. I mean the 'Box Office' movies where you get to pick and mix what you want to watch by tapping a few buttons on your remote - the charge appears on your phone bill and the movies are 'delivered' instantaneously as if by Jedi mind trick.

Only recently did the music industry get its act together by adopting - rather than fighting - the Napster distribution model. So far their 'gamble' has paid off. Piracy is still rampant of course, but lots more people are choosing to purchase their music instead of stealing it. Any previously untapped revenue generated through this channel, above and beyond £0.00, I'd say is a bonus.

The movie industry has timidly followed suit in a limited way because movies are so much more cumbersome to punt around cyberspace. Imagine how fat your 'toobs' would have to be to stream, or otherwise disperse, video data via traditional, non-swarming mechanisms. Nevertheless, it strikes me as odd that Tinseltownians and movie distributors are expending so much energy debating the issue at all when Sky and cable make bandwidth issues irrelevant.

All Warner Brothers, Sony, Miramax et al need to do is grant the TV networks permission to close up the time frame between a movie appearing at the cinema and it being available to buy or screen in people's homes. Either way the studios would be employing an intermediary so that can't be the issue. Presumably the consumers who are in the habit of renting movies aren't concerned that they don't get to keep the physical discs so this is surely a moot point.
I just don't get it.

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Scannerless scans R go

If you occasionally need to digitise paper copies of documents and own a digital camera, but not a scanner, scanR might appeal to you. It takes a snapshot of a document or whiteboard, cleans it up, re-aligns it and generally makes it more legible for screen reading. To this end it does an admirable job.

As I was more interested in scanR's ability to decipher and transform the characters found within an image to make them more accessible I decided I'd test the service using a pre-scanned article from a magazine rather than a photograph. The results were less than impressive. Highlighting specific parts of text within the generated PDF was very hit and miss, and the chunks I attempted to copy and paste in no way corresponded to my original selection. It is possible to extract all the text from a document and paste that into an editor, but a lot of painstaking massage would be required before you could do anything useful with it.

To be fair to them, nowhere on the scanR web site do they rave about their software's ability to perform optical character recognition beyond the functional level required to index documents by keywords. Nevertheless you'd expect this technology to go with the territory. It would be like buying a kettle only to discover that boiling water isn't an option with your chosen model.

It may not do proper OCR (or boil water for that matter), but you can't fault it for box-ticking, Web 2.0 zeitgeist. With its abbreviated/missing vowel chic scanR can't fail to be a hit with the hip txt-speak generation.

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Cracking RSS feeds with a sledgehammer

The way we stay up to date with our favourite web sites has evolved over the years. First there was spontaneous surfing, then came email newsletters, while today we have much more versatile RSS feeds. Whether you fall into the 'Rich Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' camp, RSS stands for super-efficient information delivery, when, where and how you want it.

Ironically software developers have taken this nimble content filtering system and made it overly complicated and cumbersome by urging people to engage it through specialised news aggregation clients. What on earth were they thinking? You wouldn't fire up web browser X expressly to perform Google searches and then switch to web browser Y solely to check out eBay, so why book yourself in for a logic bypass before embracing RSS feeds?

Installing an extra piece of clunky software to access readily available, web-based information is commensurate with loading your fully-functional car onto a transport carrier and driving the hulking menagerie to the corner shop to pick up a bottle of milk.

Thankfully the whole world hasn't gone insane. Rmail takes this beautifully simple information-gathering technique and keeps it simple by allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds and receive the updates via email. You don't even need to register to take advantage of the service; enter your email address and the web feed of the site you wish to track and you're good to go. No bloat, no fuss and it's 100% free.

I've been using Rmail for several months now and couldn't imagine going back to trawling my regular online haunts for changes. It's had the most marked impact on the way I monitor Digg for new tech stories. Whereas I used to load up the Digg home page and open all the stories I was interested in reading in a new tab until I'd caught up with my previous session, I now let the geekery come to my doorstep.

The title and description of each story to hit the front page is emailed to me as an individual message. Gmail tags them with the 'Digg' label and they are immediately archived to keep them separate from my more personal correspondence. When I've got time to catch up, I click on the 'Digg' text link in the sidebar and read the stories sequentially. I always know where I left off because I delete the email associated with each story after I've read it - perfect for those occasions when you can only spare 10 minutes at one sitting.

It makes a heck of a lot more sense than lining up 40 tabbed articles and hoping that Firefox doesn't crash before you have chance to absorb them all (something it's been doing a lot since I 'upgraded' to version 1.5). You'd think Session Saver would help, but on many occasions it seems to develop an impromptu case of goldfish memory syndrome leaving you high and dry.

If you've got your own blog, it's also possible - by inserting a short snippet of HTML code - to offer visitors the means to track your latest ramblings via Rmail without leaving your site. Seeing as you aren't required to know anything about RSS feeds to subscribe to them in this way, even the technically challenged will be able to keep up to speed.

Don't roll your doe eyes at me Yet Another RSS Aggregator/Client/Reader/Grabber/Organiser/Widget; your days are numbered.

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Mind-reading, spontaneously generated radio stations

Every time the internet goes through a stale period where I start to wonder if all the really ground-breaking ideas have already been implemented, a web service comes along to blow away the cobwebs, taking my breath away in the process.

Last.fm epitomises this cycle. It's a social 'music-marking' community web site for curious audiophiles. You begin by creating a profile and introducing your favourite audio player to the 'Audioscrobbler' plug-in. From then on, the artist names and track titles of whatever you listen to are transmitted to the Last.fm web site and stored under your profile.

The site's clever, back-end scripty stuff (sorry if the science behind this is going over your head) then compiles this data to establish a representative snapshot of your musical tastes. The algorithm doofer looks at other people's snapshots too and tries to identify correlations between their favourite artists and bands. For instance it has been demonstrated that many people who are fans of Ben Folds also enjoy listening to Belle and Sebastian, Radiohead and Weezer.

Yes, Amazon also has a "if you like this band you may also like blah de da" system, yet what Amazon can't do is introduce you to new music by streaming an around-the-clock, ad-free, chatter-free, bespoke radio station to your computer. That's precisely what the Last.fm Player does! All you are required to do to kick-start your personal playlist is type in the name of a band or artist you appreciate and poke the 'go' button. The player responds by generating a continuous stream of genre-related or 'taste-linked' media. There's no annoying DJ to tune out between tracks, each of which is identified as it plays - the artist, track and album names are displayed at all times.

Any tracks you'd rather not listen to can be skipped, and there are even options to give the thumbs up or down signal to tracks you either love or loathe. I assume the player reacts by 'spooling' more of the bands you give the nod of approval to, and banishes those you can't stand so you never have to suffer them again.

Last.fm don't keep an all-embracing database of music on their own servers. Instead, the music is streamed from member to member, radically reducing the bandwidth costs levied by the service operators. Unlike file-sharing, this is perfectly legal because the music is not being exchanged in the traditional sense, rather it is 'aired' and then it perishes. The player has no built-in facilities for storing the tracks it plays, though there's nothing to stop you recording the stream for delayed playback or replays. This of course would be totally immoral and surely buy you a one-way ticket to hell, once the RIAA had confiscated everything you own, your life's savings and the right to sell your family and pets into slavery.

The threat of eternal damnation aside, Last.fm easily gets my vote for web service of the year, if not the decade! I'm fortunate enough to work in a super-chilled out office where we're allowed to listen to music so I predict the Last.fm Player and I will soon become inseparable.

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Salvage Slashdotted or erm... Diggdotted (?) articles

Post a link to a web page on an immensely popular tech news site such as www.slashdot.org or www.digg.com and you may as well start digging (see what I did there? Ho ho, hmm) its grave. Most servers aren't robust enough to cope with such an unexpected spike in bandwidth and so soon become inaccessible. As a result you don't get to read the article, and the author doesn't get to revel in their five minutes of fame.

You can ward off their premature demise by appending '.nyud.net:8090' to their web address before posting them. This ensures they are indexed by the Coral Content Distribution Network, which then bears the brunt of the traffic surge. As long as one person has done this before the site croaks, it will remain operational via the 'Coralised' link.

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Google launches bootleg search engine

Three and a half seconds ago (if you could arrange for your jaw to drop in awe of my finger-on-the-pulseness it would be much appreciated, thanks) search engine monolith, Google, unveiled the latest widget in their web-taming repertoire.

Google Swag Bag (TM) allows users to locate no-nonsense index listings of illegal booty such as MP3 music files and movies. The service operates by tapping into Google's traditional search engine technology while excluding common web site documents with the extensions html, htm, php, asp and so on to return results consisting only of binary content, aka just the juicy stuff.

To those of you apt to perusing Google's search modifier cheat sheet, this is old news; this feat has previously been accomplished by entering little known combinations of operator strings into the standard Google search box. What's new is the user-friendly, streamlined interface which takes the hassle out of digging for multimedia content.

By default Swag Bag forages for MP3 files while filtering out distracting text documents of various formats and keyword red herrings. To re-focus its search beam you can click on the 'toggle advanced settings' link and check/uncheck the boxes adjacent to the media type(s) you would like Google to ferret out.

Disclaimer: Kookosity does not endorse piratey shenanigans. If, as a direct consequence of reading this post, your soul is irreparably corrupted leading to eternal damnation (and singed eyebrows), it's not my fault. God made me do it. Hey, if it's good enough for George W., it's good enough for me.

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Personal Password Policies

With phishing, social engineering scams and hacking on the rise, it has never been more important to give serious thought to how you generate and manage passwords for your online accounts.

The system I use involves using an online gibberish generator to create lengthy alphanumeric character strings and saving these in an Excel spreadsheet, which is subsequently password protected. I've memorised the ludicrously long password for my Gmail account so I can check it from work, but wouldn't dare attempting to commit the rest to memory - there are simply too many of them, and they're all entirely random and therefore difficult to turn into mnemonics. So not an ideal solution by a long stretch then.

Passwords that are easy to recall are also easy for others to guess or hack, while highly secure ones can be so secure you can end up locking yourself out of your own accounts. Using the 'one password to rule them all' technique isn't the solution - if someone managed to get hold of it they'd have the master key to your kingdom and you'd be up the Dry Creek Quarry without your invisibility ring, bank balance and identity.

Security expert Steve Gibson believes the answer could be to devise your own algorithm, which, when applied to web site domain names, can be used to generate unique, easily retrieved passwords.
Don't run away just yet; this sounds more geeky than it really is, trust me. For example, you could take the URL ebay.com, turn the letters into numeric values (using the formula a = 1, b = 2 and so on), shift 3 places up the scale and convert the numbers back to letters. The result is a seemingly random string of letters. You don't have to remember what they are in each case, just make sure you know how they were generated so they can be reproduced at will.

To ramp up the security rating of your passwords you could employ a second algorithm to generate a series of numbers or punctuation marks and intersperse these with your letters.
For a more thorough illustration of the way in which personal password policies can be implemented, listen to episodes 4 and 5 of Steve's Security Now podcast.

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Dyslexic eBayers bag the best bargains

Pudgy digited sellers are rife on eBay. They hammer out their listings' titles and descriptions faster than the speed of light and submit the resulting gibberish without proof reading it first. Unless you're as stupid as the sellers * you aren't going to find these auctions, and they will predictably end with no bids.

Fat Fingers has the solution; type in a smattering of keywords and the site will scour eBay for any auctions containing their mistyped variants. Because so few people will think of searching for 'praystayshon' (unless they're Chinese that is - oops, there I go again) when they're seeking a Sony Playstation, you may find you're the only bidder and win the auction for a rock-bottom price.
It really works. Only last week I managed to pick up a 'jundred lound bote' for a fiver!

* not that I want to equate stupidity with dyslexia you understand - some of the most brilliant thinkers throughout history were dyslexic. Phew, that ought to keep the baying PC mob from clawing at my throat.

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Google fills in the blanks

I couldn't tell you if this search refining feature is new, or just new to me, but it's one well worth adding to your info mining arsenal.

If you want Google to forage for a particular phrase, though can't bring it to mind in its entirety, you can replace the tip-of-the-tongue, missing words with stars and let Google fill in the blanks. This might be a useful way to look up song lyrics, amongst other things. Note that you aren't required to enclose the words in speech marks to instruct Google to search for them in the order they were entered.

Stars are useful for finding quick answers to concise questions too: try entering the text the capital of paraguay is * and you'll be told in no uncertain terms - two million times no less - that the answer you seek is 'Asuncion'. Great for pub quizzes then... if you happen to have a laptop with you, and your local boozer is equipped with WAP, and the other participants are too drunk to notice you furiously bashing away at your keyboard, coincidentally right after each question has been posed.

You could also use stars to quickly assess the general consensus of opinion on any given topic. For instance, if you submitted the text george bush is an * you might be given the impression that Darth Bush isn't exactly dynamite in the popularity stakes - in fact you'd have to click through to page five before you struck upon a positive adjective... and even these ones look conspicuously sarcastic/ironic.

Other Google search modifiers to have escaped my notice until now include:-

filetype: (or ext:) - extremely useful for tracking down PDF journal articles or technical manuals e.g. ipod user manual filetype:pdf

allintitle: - limits search results to those containing your specified keywords in the title of the pages e.g. allintitle:charlie and the chocolate factory

allinurl: - limits search results to those containing your specified keywords in the web address e.g. allinurl:extras ricky gervais

Still thirsty for more? Try Google Guide's advanced operators reference page.

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Gmail gets even more bettererer

With every newspaper and mainstream media outlet covering the story, you can't have failed to notice that today Google unveiled their shiny new instant messenger software. While this is great news, there's not a lot more I can say on the subject which you haven't already heard, so instead I will focus on a lesser known improvement to have sneaked in Gmail's backdoor minus the fanfare.
'Send mail as' allows you to send email from any of your assorted accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or whatever) via a single Gmail web interface.

Picture the scene: you're logged into your 'hot4u.xxx@gmail.com' account, pumping out lewd messages to complete strangers based on the other side of the globe. Out of the blue it dawns on you that you need to submit an important, and probably overdue, report to your boss. Traditionally you would have to end your current session and log back into Gmail using your 'firstname.surname@gmail.com' username before sending your attachment, and groveling apology.
Not with the 'send mail as' gizmo! You would simply compose a new message in the usual way, and using the drop-down 'from' menu, select your business/formal correspondence username from the list. Your real name and formal address is appended to the message as though you'd sent it directly from that account.

To enable the feature, log into your account and click on the 'settings' link followed by the 'accounts' tab. Make the 'add another email address' page your next port of call and enter one of your alternative email addresses and the name you would like to be associated with it. To verify that you are the genuine owner of the address entered, an activation email will be sent to it. Click on the link contained in this message and you're ready to rumble.

I have two Gmail accounts; one for my blog, message boards and other online subscriptions, and another one I use when I want people to think I'm a real, reasonably normal human being. The 'send mail as' feature was ready and waiting for action under my 'please take me seriously' account, but absent from my ever-so-slightly older nickname account, so if you can't find the 'accounts' tab in your settings menu you're (probably) not blind, stupid or both; your account may be one of the ones awaiting an upgrade.

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Use your Gmail account as a backup drive

With the storage space available to Gmail users currently approaching 2.5 gigabytes, you wouldn't be alone if you've begun wondering what purposes (other than email warehousing) you can put your account to. My inbox is relentlessly inundated with exciting job offers and marriage proposals from beautiful women, and even I can't utilise such a generous allocation of web space.

You may be accused of being a cheapskate for using your Gmail account to backup your treasured, irreplaceable documents and whatnot, but I think that's unwarranted unless this is your only backup solution. I use a mini, external, USB, Lacie hard drive and a USB thumb drive to stash away my preciouseses, though stupidly leave them lying right next to my computer, usually permanently connected.

This is stupid because if someone broke into your house they'd swipe the lot, or if your house went up in smoke, similarly, your original files and backups would be lost. It makes perfect sense to take your backup drives with you whenever you leave the house, or at least keep them somewhere other than on your computer desk, but how many of us make a habit of this? It's just so much hassle to have to keep disconnecting, reconnecting and hiding your fail-safe devices.

Gmail provides the ideal second backup solution because their servers don't live in your house... unless maybe you're a down on your luck Google employee sleeping under the desk in your office. Gmail accepts attachments up to 10mb in size, so what you can do to safeguard your important documents is zip them up, attach the compressed archive to an email and send it to yourself.

I did this recently with all my HTML document blog entries. The file arrived safely and I archived it for future reference (Gmail cunningly established that the message was from 'me', and so excluded it from the mail available to be downloaded by my email client, which I thought was quite nifty).
When I tried to do this with a batch of Word and Excel documents, the zip file was rejected by the Gmail server. With a bit of investigation I discovered that this was because Gmail automatically scan inside zip files to check if they contain anything which could be construed as malicious. Office documents can contain macro viruses and so Gmail wrinkles up its nose and looks at them as though they're something squidgy you might step in on the pavement.

One way to avoid Gmail's scrutiny is to compress your documents using a lesser known format. Being primarily a Mac user at home, the first one that sprung to my mind was Apple's disk image format. I downloaded FreeDMG and used it to create an archive of my documents and tried again to send it as an attachment. This time Gmail lapped it up without protest. Hoorah!

When you've found a file format Gmail can't look inside, you might like to make some changes to your account so as to better manage your backups. You can do this using the 'create a filter' page, linked from your inbox. Filters are designed to allow Gmail to recognise and process emails bearing predefined characteristics. For instance, if you ticked the 'has attachment' checkbox and typed 'backup' into the 'subject' box, you could arrange for any emails carrying an attachment and containing the keyword 'backup' in the subject field to be assigned a helpful label and automatically archived - the latter two options are available from the page you are taken to when you press the 'next step' button.

Gmail labels operate much like folders in that they allow you to group together collections of emails making them easier to retrieve at a later date. The main advantage they offer over traditional folders is that emails can be assigned with multiple labels without having to duplicate them. Any labels you create are displayed below the links to your inbox, drafts, trash etc. folders for easy access. Whenever you click on one of these labels you are presented with a list of all the emails previously allocated to that category.

If you want to reduce the chance of emails being wrongly assigned to your new backup area, you could beef-up the precision of your filter using 'plus addresses'. Plus addresses can be created 'on the fly' by appending a + symbol and a series of numbers or characters to your username, like so: tom.cruise+backup@gmail.com.

Whenever you send yourself a backup, use this address and remember to edit your filter so the 'to' address matches your +backup address and it will be labelled and archived accordingly. Of course, if disaster struck and you needed to recover your files, you'd have to contact the kooky Scientologist and ask him to hand them over. ;)

Plus addresses have many more practical applications besides. You can use them to split invitation replies into 'accept' and 'decline' categories, trash spam or monitor how your email address is used by the companies you submit it to.

Windows users might like to skip all this emailing yourself malarkey and instead use their Gmail accounts as they would any other drive from within Explorer. If this appeals you'll want to check out the Viksoe Gmail Drive shell extension.

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Customise your Google home page

You've already set Google as your home page (just call me Mystic Meg), so why not personalise it to suit your preferences? Once you've registered a Google Account (you will already have one if you've used one of Google's better known services such as Gmail) you can get started by visiting www.google.com/ig.

'ig' ushers in a radical, new epoch for the eponymous info-foraging giant - like the 'i' in iMac, the 'i' in 'ig' stands for 'internet' seeing as Google is, for the first time, now available online. ;)

Whatever an 'ig' may be, the technology allows you to tart up your vanilla Google start page to include news headlines, the subject lines of your most recent Gmail emails, local weather reports, quote of the day, word of the day, bookmarks, and best of all, your own custom RSS feeds!

RSS - or really simple syndication - provides the means to grab the latest updates from your favourite web sites and inject them into a single interface so that you no longer have to visit each one to find out what's new. This is ideal for low traffic sites because the news is dumped in your lap as it breaks, even if you've long since forgotten about the originating site you subscribed to. Every time you visit Google to perform a web search, a new nugget of information could be there waiting for you to digest.

It seems that Google (peace be upon her) can't put a foot wrong at the moment.

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Get paid to surf (at work)

Aside from not having to show up at all, it's every office worker's dream to be able to loaf around all day surfing the web, sending personal emails, managing online accounts and so on. Based on entirely unreasonable grounds (something to do with productivity I imagine) most bosses object to this. That's the end of that guilty pleasure then, or is it?

Ghostzilla provides one possible work (ha ha) around. It's a web browser with a difference - an 'invisible' web browser - invisible in that it operates covertly within more business-like applications such as Word, Excel and Outlook without initiating a task bar or task tray presence of any kind. The Mozilla-inspired application takes any web page and strips it of its garish, attention-grabbing images, tones down the text and presents it in the least conspicuous application of your choice. Performing a couple of sweeping mouse gestures brings the forbidden web page into view, while moving your cursor away from the page makes it vanish again.

More interesting than the time-wasting potential Ghostzilla exerts is the anonymous author's admonition of its use. Apparently one day he was struck by a sudden epiphany after reading Michael Crichton's novel, Prey, and decided that switching jobs - rather than meandering aimlessly throughout the web - was the road to salvation.

If you do choose to use it - which you certainly shouldn't for your own sake - keep in mind that Ghostzilla cannot conceal the addresses of the sites you visit from your company's network administrator, and you could be publicly flogged if caught. So feel free to read about it - but don't download it. Look at the screen shots - but don't install it. If you do, don't, because it's wrong. In fact if you wouldn't mind un-reading this post entirely, it would be much appreciated.

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Google Maps Pedometer launched

You've all heard of, and a great many of you probably use Google Maps on a regular basis, but have you checked out some of the indie hacks? My current favourite, without a shadow of a doubt, has to be Gmaps Pedometer.

While Google Maps allows you to zoom into your neighbourhood and get directions, it doesn't let you plot customised way points and tot up the distances between them. Gmaps Pedometer does, making it ideal for joggers and walkers who like to know precisely how much ground they're covering on their daily pavement-pounding excursions.

Not only that - your favourite circuits can be bookmarked for future reference, or shared with friends. You have the advantage of local knowledge, and so your tailor-made routes are likely to be more efficient than those an automated route-finder could construct. Moreover, an automated journey plotter won't take into account the 'Kodak moments' you may pass along the way. An emailed link is worth a thousand words!

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