Text Any Phone (FREE) Without A Mobile Phone

A valuable if unheralded feature of Google Voice is its ability to send and receive sms text messages through a webpage (though not MMS picture/video messages at this time) or even using email.

This can be especially valuable for:

• Family members (grandma?) who email & want to stay connected with the family, but do not want/like hassle of texting on a cell phone. This can be great for keeping someone in the loop when group-texting or using a group texting app like GroupMe or Beluga or kik or others.
• If you go overseas and want to keep a/your "home" mobile number for people to text you without incurring international charges.
• Anyone who does not have/want the additional charges of a cell phone plan/hardware.
• Anyone who would rather send/receive texts using a real keyboard, not your thumbs.
• If you run a small business or some other function where texting would be valuable, but you don’t want to give out your cell phone number.
• If you don’t have unlimited texting (or don’t want to spend money for texting) on your cell phone.

How to Set Up:

1. Get a Google Voice number. You can easily sign up at http://google.com/voice. If you already have a Google account, just enter your password and accept the terms. If you don’t have a Google account (what rock do you live under?), set one up.
2. Google Voice will walk you through selecting a number. Easy-peasy.
3. OPTIONAL: If you want to port your existing mobile number to Google Voice, its $20 clams, but then you’re set.
4. You will have to validate at least ONE real-life phone before you can activate your Google Voice account.  This is simple, and Google will walk you through it.
5. In options, choose to have Google Voice forward SMS messages to your email address.
   
6. Test by sending a text message to your Google Voice number, and then checking your email account.

How to Use:

There are three ways to texting with Google Voice:

• First, have Google Voice forward SMS messages to your mobile phone (if you have one). Then simply reply to the texts you receive and you’re in the conversation!
• Second, send and reply to texts online at http://voice.google.com. This works similar to an email inbox. Just click on the text message you want to reply to, type in the box, and send!
• Third, if you enabled "forward SMS messages to my email" in your Google Voice settings, then SMS messages will show up in your email box.  To reply to them, simply REPLY to the email and send! *

Quick Tips:

• Going overseas? You may be blocked from creating a Google Voice account if you’re already away from the US. Create your account before you go!
• Save the specially-crafted email address you get from your friends’ texts in your address book for quick messaging!
• Google Voice does NOT currently support sending or receiving MMS/media or picture/video messages. There is no error message to the sender if they try to send you one either… they just get dropped like yesterday’s newspaper.
• Remember, text messages are normally only 160 characters long. In your email program, you can get a little carried away.  Don’t type a book… if you need to communicate THAT much information, send them an ACTUAL email!
• Get the APP: If you have an android-based phone, jump to the marketplace and grab the Google Voice app. This operates wholly over WIFI/cellular connection wherever you are and sends texts using data (not "texts" or minutes).
• Get the mobile web: If your mobile device (iphone, ipad, PalmOS, blackberry, etc) does not happen to have access to Google Voice apps, jump to voice.google.com in your mobile browser, and be pleased to discover a full-featured web environment ready for your data-friendly consumption. Again, this uses DATA (wifi or cellular, etc) and not texts/minutes from your carrier.

What are Bookmarklets?

Web browsers use "Bookmarks" (or "Favorites" in the Internet Explorer world) to store and save pages you frequent for quick access in the future.  A bookmark is no more than a reference to a web page’s specific Uniform Resource Locator, or URL… the long string of text starting with, for example, this website: http://www.connectedwell.com

a BookmarkLET is a bit of intelligent "code" (normally javascript) which performs some kind of custom function for you when you click it. It is similar to a spreadsheet macro for the Internet—it helps quickly automate something for you so you don’t have to do it yourself.

More about Bookmarklets:

• Search ConnectedWell for Bookmarklets.
• Wikipedia definition of Bookmarklet.
• The original resource, Bookmarklets.com
• Bookmarklets – power browser

What is your favorite bookmarklet? Please enter it in the comments!

Wishlist: 'Save As…' Google Documents Into a Folder

Google Docs has come a long way. Now, with folders and folder-sharing and other great collaboration techniques, the experience has dramatically improved over last while.

But one thing really hurts my productivity, and I have (sadly) learned to work around it.  Unfortunately, would-be converts to Google Docs get tripped up enough by this problem that they have abandoned the tool when they likely would have begun using it much more frequently:

Allow me to SAVE documents, spreadsheets drawings and presentations (etc) into a certain Google Docs folder from within the document I am working on!

This is logical, as it is the interface we are familiar with for EVERY OTHER DOCUMENT CREATION system out there:

• Create the item/document
• "Save As…" the document into a folder.

In Google Docs’ universe, I have to either:

• Create the folder first, browse to the folder and click "New…"
• Create the document, browse back to the Google Docs home page, find the file and drag/drop it to the folder I want it to be in.

Clearly, I am not the only one who noticed this and wants the interface different. Google, help!

Google Instant Adds Site Previews

You can now see instant flyout previews of sites you’re considering viewing on Google Instant.  In my personal testing, the thumbnails of sites I want to see haven’t shown up, but maybe the service is too new.

This is more about getting the user to have the ability to tweak their settings to ensure they are getting the site they want before they click. Hmmm. SEO implications?

Here’s a video:

Oh, and if you’re using keyboard shortcuts in Google Instant, use the right-arrow key to flyout the preview on the result you’re inspecting!

Awesomely, Google Instant is also now in beta for mobile, but only for Android 2.2 or iOS 4 users.

Wishlist: AutoText in Android like BlackBerry

If you’ve never had a BlackBerry, you don’t know some of the things you’re missing (and you’re definitely missing certain things to make productivity much easier).

One of the best things RIM has embedded in the BlackBerry OS is the AutoText feature, similar to Autocorrect in your favorite word-processing program that spots a certain misspelled word and corrects it just-like-that while you type away.

This feature–which comes pre-loaded as a way for you to correct common-errors–can be hacked to either remove annoying entries that you don’t use or add things that you spend your time repeating often.

For example, turn "brb" into "be right back" or "omw" into "on my way".

Simply go into your Blackberry Options screen, choose Autotext, then type in the letters you’d like to use as a shortcut and then the text you’d like to replace it with when composing an email. (via and)

The AutoText feature in BlackBerry works in SMS and email, or you can disable it for the l33t.

One "advanced" use of this that I loved when I had my bb was adding complex items such as my work or home address, additional contact information or other things to the AutoText database I could easily send along.  BBGeeks did a good write up on this:

The easiest way to accomplish this is to go find the “sig” entry. Edit the replace with field to reflect the signature you want to appear. The next time you type “sig” at the end of an SMS or email, your custom signature will appear. You can create multiple signatures by adding new entries to AutoText. For example, the letters K and T rarely appear adjacently. So you could create a new entry for “kt” and have it automatically change to a different signature. You can do this for anything, really — if you’re a literary type, perhaps you want a macro for “onomatopoeia.” Just set up a string of infrequently-used letters and bam, there’s your long string reduced to a short one.

For me, I would give these entries a prefix like "info". For example, I would use "info-blog" to magically insert my blog’s url, "info-twitter" to give my twitter handle and more.

GoogleDocs Rolls Out OCR Upload

Several months ago, Google allowed people to mass-upload all their files to Google Docs (also check out this Firefox mass-upload plugin) for storage and/or conversion.  (Help and Hints on how to do this)

Uploading and converting Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or RTF documents to Google Docs is a great way to archive and be able to search your document library. But, if a document was a PDF or otherwise not actually text, it didn’t convert, and you were left with a whole, large file that bit into your Google Docs file storage.

Now, GoogleDocs rolls out OCR – Optical Character Recognition for PDF files to be uploaded.

From Google’s Help Files:

Files suitable for OCR can come from a number of sources:

• Image or PDF files obtained using flatbed scanners
• Images captured using digital cameras or mobile phones

Uploaded images or PDF files are used to extract text parts, which are converted into a Google document. 

For best extraction results, the image or PDF files need to meet certain requirements: 

• Resolution: High-resolution files work best. As a rule of thumb, we recommend each line of text in the documents to be of at least 10 pixels height.
• Orientation: Only documents with horizontal left-to-right text are recognized. If you have accidentally scanned or captured a document in a different orientation, please use an image manipulation program to rotate the images before uploading to Google docs.
• Languages, fonts and character sets: Our OCR engine supports only Latin character sets at this stage, so for example Japanese text, Arabic text, or hand written text will not be detected. Common fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman will yield in best results.
• Image quality: Sharp images with even lighting and clear contrasts will work best. Motion blur or bad camera focus will decrease the quality of the detected text.

By the way, this could be a great "poor-man’s" ATS… a way for storing/searching/retrieving resumes, if you are a recruiter.

Choosing a Primary Monitor on Dell Latitude D620

Every once in a while, I undock my Dell Latitude D620 and when I come back to the docking station the monitor configuration I have goes haywire. 

I can’t ever remember how to go back in and force my external monitor to be the Primary Monitor while my Laptop monitor gets forced to ride in the sidecar.  The normal right-click on the desktop and choose properties doesn’t seem to work with the monitor control panel built into Windows.

Thanks to a mutha-long Google search query, which revealed this blog post by Rick Strahl and this forum post on SpiceWorks, I thought I should check if I have the nVidia control panel or other additional monitor control tools.

I don’t have nVidia, but I did find a "Graphics Properties" option when right-clicking on open space on the desktop which brought me the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for mobile control panel.

In the Display Devices area, I can choose which monitor is "Primary" and which is secondary, putting all my taskbars and shortcuts and everything right where I want it to be, on my gloriously-large widescreen monitor, not my teeny-tiny laptop screen.

I post this because maybe it can help someone else (or myself, next time I dash off to a meeting and undock my computer!)

Copy Google Spreadsheet to another Sheet

I just noticed that in the new UI of Google Spreadsheets, you can not only copy a page (or sheet) to a copy of itself within the same workbook (collection of ‘pages’ in one ‘file’) but you can now copy a sheet all the way into an entirely different notebook.

This was apparently announced 5 days ago on the Google Docs blog, and you can find more information from the Google Docs Help guide.

Click the menu arrow in the sheet you want to copy and click "Copy to…"

Then a pop-up appears allowing you to browse where you want to drop the copy:

Really. This is pretty killer.

QR Code Generating Bookmarklet

Sometimes, it would be easy to get something from your computer over to your mobile. QR Codes are a simple way to do that, but often web-pages you’re viewing don’t have QR Codes readily available.

A bookmarklet I found on Google Code helps alleviate this problem. Simply copy the Javascript code into a bookmark on your browser and when you’re on a page you’d like the QR Code for, just click the link and it will pop up in a lightbox-like popup for your scanning pleasure.

I just used it to help me subscribe to a podcast on my Droid Eris without having to fat-finger the long URL into my Google Listen app. I just browsed to the subscribe page on the web, QR-scanned that page into my Droid, which browsed to the page. I clicked the "RSS FEED" link which Google Listen recognized and a subscription was born!

Get the Bookmarklet by right-clicking (on mac, long-press) the link, below, and choosing "add to bookmarks" or "add to favorites" or similar command:

> Get QRCode <

Simply click the link, above, to see how it works (it will generate a QR code for this page). Click the image of the code when you are done and it will disappear.

Moving to Google Chrome

Firefox has been my good, hackable friend for quite a long time.  However, I am trying a week with Google Chrome to see how it goes. There’s a few reasons for this including:

• Speed seems to be a feature, not an afterthought.  Pages are loading quicker.  Maybe this is due to pre-fetching or the javascript juicyness, but daddy likes.
• The UI (er, chrome) is simple and tight. I have hacked my firefox with theme after theme to try and come up with something this simple. Chrome does it out of the box.
• Default Theme is better on a netbook, giving me more screen and less toolbar, etc. etc. etc. bcause screen real-estate is wicked valuable on that 400px tall screen (or whatever it really is, but it’s tiny)
• Bookmark Synching with Google Docs is cool. I have no idea why, but I like this. <– G33K.
• Chrome loads processes in windows as separate threads, hopefully allowing some tabs to crash without killing the whole thing. Again,  = G33k.

An example of Chrome:

Some things I am yearning for already:

• Roboform finally has an add-on, though its functionality is a bit limited. I would like to see it in a toolbar, not floating along the bottom.
• Delicious has an add-on out that looks to bring my bookmarks over to Chrome but I also miss the firefox-awesomeness to fill a toolbar with my Delicious links.  This could be solved, by the way, if Chrome would allow me to
• Bookmark RSS feeds and auto-display their content as links. This is known as “live bookmarks” over on ffx, and I’m not the only one who wants.