First of all, this guide requires that you have a few labs enabled.  To manage your Gmail labs, click here and read along with my guide.

These are the labs that I have turned on, in the order they appear on the labs page.  I recommend you turn on all the labs I have list, those bolded will be detailed below. Please don’t be alarmed at the size of this list. Everything on it is quite useful.

1. YouTube previews in mail
2. Picasa previews in mail
3. Flickr previews in mail
4. Yelp previews in mail
5. Google Voice player in mail
6. Google Docs previews in mail
7. Message translation
8. Quick Links
9. Superstars
10. Pictures in chat
11. Fixed width font
12. Custom keyboard shortcuts
13. Advanced IMAP Controls
14. Default ‘Reply to all’
15. Quote selected text
16. Navbar drag and drop
17. Forgotten Attachment Detector
18. Mark as Read Button
19. Go to label
20. Inbox preview
21. Multiple Inboxes
22. Google Search
23. Create a Document
24. Filter import/export
25. Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat
26. Authentication icon for verified senders
27. Send & Archive
28. Undo Send
29. Title Tweaks
30. Don’t forget Bob
31. Got the wrong Bob?
32. Green Robot!
33. Hide read labels.
34. Mark Unread From Here
35. Google Calendar gadget
36. Google Docs gadget
37. Add any gadget by URL

My favorites are the Superstars and Multiple Inboxes, the interaction of which is beautiful.  The Superstars allow you to apply different types of stars to your emails and Multiple Inboxes give you quick access to information that is likely to be referenced, such as emails you have recently starred. My favorite additional inbox is what I call the Freshbox, it simply displays my unread emails.  Also of great usage are the Quick Links, which provide easy access to saved searches.  I will explain how I’ve set up these labs, starting with the Superstars.

You can manage which stars are enabled and in which order on the General Gmail Settings page. Simply drag and drop them.  I use:

for emails with INFORMATION that I may want to refer to in the future.

for emails that I need to act on ASAP

for emails with DATES like meetings, appointments, parties

for SPECIAL emails that I want to want to save for a rainy day

for delegated emails, stuff I’ve sent out that needs to be returned to me

These stars allow me to quickly prioritize what flows through my inbox.  Not a replacement for labels whatsoever, these stars work in conjunction.  For instance, I can click on my work label and see which emails are set with a red bang.  Similarly in the work label I can quickly spot emails with important documents by the info tag.

Now, the grandaddy lab: Multiple Inboxes.  What this lab does is allow you to create additional inboxes. These inboxes can be placed on top of, which I prefer, or to the right of or below the regular inbox. These additional inboxes show the results of a search query that you specify in your Multiple Inboxes settings.  These search queries could be anything you like.  I have mine set to show the Freshbox, Superstars and Chats.  The parameters I used to set up are as follows:

Pane 0: Query: is:unread in:inbox -in:buzz Title: Freshbox

Pane 1: Query: l:^ss_cr Title: ASAP

Panel 2: Query: l:^ss_sr Title: Dates

Panel 3: Query: l:^ss_cb Title: Reference

Panel 4: Query: label:chat Title: Chatbox

Have the maximum page size set to show 10 conversations per page for the new inbox panes and have them set above the inbox.

One last important thing left to set up are the Quick Links.  Once you’ve enabled this lab a widget will appear on the left-side of your Gmail.  After performing any search in Gmail, clicking ‘Add Quick Link’ will save the current search in a handy link with a name of your choosing.  So, do a search for l:^ss_sp and create a quick link for your special, rainy-day emails.  Likewise make a search for l:^ss_co and create a quick link for the emails you’re waiting on.  Here’s a quick link to all the files you’ve emailed from:me;has:attachment.  For a complete list of the search terms for superstars, see this lifehacker article on Gmail GTD that initially inspired me.

The levels of limitation are: Friends, Friends of Friends, Friend lists, or Everyone.

I’ve organized my settings by section, which you can access by clicking on the links.

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=profile
About me -> Education {Only Friends}
Photos and videos {Dudes}
Posts {only friends}

Dudes is a friend list excluding certain family members and people from work that I’d rather not see my pictures.

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=contact
IM -> Current Address {Only Friends}
Website -> Add me as a friend {Everyone}
Send me a message {Only Friends}

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=friends_share
Status Updates, Online Presence, Website, Education and work, My birthday, My hometown {checked}

I allow anyone to search for me.  But, if you want you can turn this off and be hidden.  Lastly, to block people go here.

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Your personal operator can also serve certain people to specific phones and present custom voicemail greetings. These voicemails will be transcribed and sent to your phone as a text message and emailed to you.

The history of your phone calls and voicemails will be archived at http://google.com/voice. Having GvoiceMail is handy. This personal operator is so good at handling calls that you can switch the phone you are using in the middle of a call.  Say you walk home while on a business call: tell the person on the other end to hold, then you press press * and hang up, your home phone rings and you answer it. Sounds too good to be true.

Want in?  One doesn’t ask for an invite to google voice, he signs up.   I should also mention that this service is free and Google provides you with a free number.

Google wants to unleash this powerful tool to index all of youtube’s shenanigans, after they’ve tested it on politics. I think it will make a major impact on how we access information.

What google says about the technology:

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user.

The returned videos are ranked based — among other things — on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness.

We periodically crawl the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by our system and made available in our index for people to search.

I did some research into what they are actually using to detect the speech patterns. It is called Hidden Markov Modelling. Here is a pdf explaining some of the mathematics behind it.

I would like to share some other documents I came across that I thought were interesting:

This is a 7-part report on how to get Saudi Speech Recognition to differentiate and understand the different accents of their language.

How To: Use HTK Hidden Markov modelling toolkit with SFS

The Google Group for Google Audio Indexing

Let me show you how to import your favorite songs you haven’t heard in the last week, month, or how to aggregate your holiday music, tracks with missing tags and your most listened to tracks with the least number of skips.

iTunes organizes playlists in the left-hand column, which is a prominent location for accessing collections of your music.

The first playlist we should make is a base music playlist to build our other playlists off of, filtering out any non-music.  To create a new smart playlist go to the File menu and select New Smart Playlist.  The Mac shortcut to creating a smart playlist is option+command+N or you can hold option while pressing the new playlist button.

This ‘music only’ playlist will collect everything in iTunes except movies, podcasts, audiobooks and radio streams. I keep my audiobook playlists in a playlist folder named audiobooks and that’s what I’m signaling the playlist to avoid. Likewise, I keep my radio streams in a playlist named radio.  Adjust yours according to how you organize your music.  We will use this playlist as a variable in subsequent playlists to filter out non-music.

Let’s start aggregating some awesome music! This playlist collects good tunes that haven’t been listened to in the past week. If you are attentive to rating your music, this playlist will serve you very well.

It’s easy to tailor this to the size of your music library by selecting months, year(s)..

If you have been adding music to your library for years, this next playlist will organize your most listened-to tracks chronologically.

This ‘best of 2008′ playlist has my most played party tunes and favorite sleeping tracks. Along with those one hitters. Just make sure to adjust the playcount variable according to your listening habits.

Have a lot of holiday music? Here’s a smart playlist for you.

By filtering this holiday playlist out of other playlists, you can keep Olde St. Nick out of your everyday servings.

Next we have some really useful smart playlists for organizing your music library. The first is for music you listen to a lot but have not had the chance to rate.

Ratings are extremely handy for isolating tracks you don’t like on albums and you can avoid these tracks in the future by setting a playlist’s rating filter from 4 to 5 stars, like the second playlist above.

The second organization playlist is for missing metadata, for example track and album names. All those songs you imported without an internet connection without tags that are labeled track01, track02 etc..

From this playlist you can easily locate and fix the metadata-less tracks.

The following ‘no skippies’ playlist quickly removes tracks you usually do not want to hear.

And lastly, listen to your music! The following playlist grabs all of your neglected music.

I have experienced two of these registration systems.  I found the first system quite pleasant and intuitive; the second, not so much.  Babson College has a superior course catalog/registration system to SUNY Purchase.

Accessing and navigating the course catalog is similar at both schools. Drop-down menus versus scrolling through a list is the only difference in how to refine the search. The drop down menus on Babson’s system were also present on the catalog pages themselves, not just the index. Having to go back to the index is an unnecessary step.

The course catalog should be connected to the registration system, at least that is what I’m used to from Babson’s system. It makes sense. The methapors are all there as they have it set up as a shopping cart system. It is intuitive to ‘add courses to your cart’, ‘view your schedule’, and ‘check out’. With Purchase, on the other hand, writing down course numbers is necessary.

At Purchase the students have to carry the course information from the catalog to the registration system, the systems are completely separate. This directly results in a giant drop of usability. Another thing the students should not have to do is get an AAC. This is the access code from a student’s advisor that is required for registration. Students should be able to log in and register as long as they do not have any flags blocking registration. The IAC program works, but AAC is flawed. Too many students retell horror stories of not having a code and watching their desired classes fill up while they are helpless to do anything but cry and wait for the advisor to return the hundred messages left that morning while freaking out.

Babson did not have any advisory pre-registration requirement. It was highly recommended that students meet with their advisors to go over schedules and whatnot, but never forced. Now, I will mention one flaw with Babson’s system that caught me off-guard.

The system couldn’t handle it! By it, I mean the stress of an entire class registering at 7am. The server buckled and the site slowed to a crawl. Funny as it may sound, it was nerve wracking. I avoided this issue in subsequent registrations by filling my shopping cart up before the event, and checking out as soon as the gates were opened.

Have you survived these frightful mornings?  Let’s hear some stories!

These participants can keep track of one another through social networking enabled websites, which informs one another of interests, relationships, microblogs, and blogs. Conversations here closely resemble informal social interactions, similar to a party atmosphere. This is a pleasant contrast to the focused, educated, and moderated conversations that are ever so quickly building the infinite data pool.

Education is free on the internet. Anyone can use Google. There is no limit to the amount of data that can be sent or stored. The only limiting factor here is bandwidth.  Internet access is freely available at the worlds libraries and third world countries are beginning to integrate computers into the household. Soon, wireless broadband will be available for free and every electronic device will be connected to it as well as a smart power supply with diagnostics like Google PowerMeter.

Google has replicated and improved on three of the most important desktop applications, and offered these robust products for free, accessible with your preferences and stored files anywhere.  Gmail is the king of all email clients and Google Calendar is a robust calendar.  Google Docs is replacing Microsoft Office, and Google Reader takes the stand as the hands-down best RSS feed aggregator, organizer, and viewer.

Third-party hardware is embraced by Google as it is simply provides their clientele.  In an effort to maintain this connection with mobile computer users, Google provides a plethora of support for various clients.  The most popular, the iPhone, gets the best tools.  The Google Mobile app allows you to search with your voice, but only after you unlock this special feature in a secret menu.  The capabilities of this app are limited to search.  And rightly so, that is what Google specializes in.

That’s not all Google’s done for the iPhone.  Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and Reader are all optimized for the iPhone’s browser.  They load when there is no internet because Google is taking advantage of a new technology in browser caching available with HTML5.  They even released a Google Sync app to allow push synchronization of contacts and calendars.  This allows me to bypass mobileme, which I believe has failed.

Other mobile devices with ties to Google are the BlackBerry and, of course, G1 and Android OS phones.  Many seem these as competitors to the iPhone, but Google sees them as users.  The masses are all participants in Google’s great information experiment.  How effectively can we index information and provide easy access based off of previous human interaction.  So effectively it is scary.

So scary that it almost seems like Artificial Intelligence, but don’t worry, it definitely is not.  Google would not be anything if everyone in the world were not asking it questions all day.  That’s the thing.  Google relies on its users.  Google is only the bread, the foundation.  The users are the butter, the deliciousness, Google is obsessed with them.  This infatuation leads to an incredible amount of usability on thick, interconnected system that Google is developing.

This usability and the freedom that Google offers is popular and catching on like a wildfire.  Google has become a catalyst for freedom of information.  They are collecting everything and providing easy access.  There is essentially no limit to how many emails you can keep in Gmail.  I can search all my documents and conversations I’ve emailed the past 5 years, that is 2398 MB (32%) of the current allotment of 7315 MB.  That’s just a drop in the bucket.

With Google – Web History I can access all 9161 searches I made since I registered with Google.  That is, a complete histogram of all my hobbies, projects, interests, and research since May 2005.  A true blast from the past.  In addition, I can see trends on my Google searching.  Popular hours, days, months, terms, websites, clicks, you get the idea..

It is fascinating, in my opinion, but to others this mining of data is an invasion of privacy.  I’m not going to list their reasoning for this way of thinking, they are obvious.  I am going to simply say to these people that Google is a service, not a requirement.  If you don’t like it, don’t use it.  They might hit me back with the concept of Google taking over the internet, that being inevitably forced to use Google.  That idea could make a good plot for a studio film.

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The new facebook layout does something bold.  It could not have pulled this off without the current size of circles of friends.  The creators are saying that there is enough information being posted to display everything in real time.  That’s what the home page is now, a real time feed of everyone’s updates.  It’s like looking at your Google Reader’s ‘all items’ category, it’s just simply a plethora of incoming information.

The right-hand side column attempts to display important information, and does a fairly good job.  It has everything I used to visit the home page for: birthdays, pokes, pictures, events, and notifications for my invites and messages (although this information is now available on every page through the bottom bar).  I have noticed that the right-hand side column appears to be favoring some friends over others, namely family members and people of recent contact, including new friends.

I suppose the dunbar number applies to facebook; the most friends you should have for maximum usability is 150.  But I have way more than 150 ‘friends’ on facebook, so I have to revert to grouping methods in order to maintain some structure.

To enhance the usability of facebook, you should be utilizing friend lists.  Friend lists are managed and toggled through their widget on the left-hand side of the home page.

Simply click on the + sign on the bottom to create a new friend list.  Click on your friends and search, or use previously created friend lists to narrow your results.  Once created, a friend list can be renamed, edited, and managed by clicking the pencil icon to the right of its name.

Click on your new friend lists to show their updates.

I have found my home page to be much more enjoyable with the application of these lists.  When I want to check out what my family is up to I just click their button.  Same with my friends (at home and away), and geographic networks.  Good luck getting organized!

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Luckily for people easily distracted like myself, some javascript genius has figured out how to automatically pull the article content out of a page and display it in a customizable, easy to read overlay, toggled by a bookmarklet.

A bookmarklet is a bookmark that instead of loading a new page, runs a small application on the current page.  Readable, the bookmarklet in the spotlight, is easy to install.  Either drag it to your bookmarks bar, or right-click and save as a bookmark.  The author’s website further explains.

The way it transforms a page is entirely based on your preferences.

I prefer reading light text on a dark background, so I chose the ‘dark grey’ color.  The layout size, or width, that I prefer is 50mm.  The rest I left the defaults.

Now when I’m reading any article, the first thing I’ll do is hit my Readable bookmarklet.  What this accomplishes for me is increased readability, efficiency, and usability of the internet.

Further Reading:

Readable – The Bookmarklet

Readability – Wikipedia

Bookmarklet – Wikipedia

The recent major blackouts on the East Coast and Silicon Valley in the West Coast of the United States are examples of how this system is reaching its maximum capacity and is failing on us.

President Obama has called for an overhaul of our grid and a transition to an automated, widely distributed energy delivery system.  In this system the electricity will flow both ways.  Allow me to explain why this is important and how it works.

Normally our power system operates fine, but there are days with peak demand.  Recall those sweltering summer days when everyone and their dog is cranking up the A/C.  The way electricity in our grid works is that it has to be spent after it is produced.  Stored energy does not work with our grid.  (this will not always be the case!)  On these days with peak demand, extra power plants have to be activated, workers paid overtime, and there is no reliable way to predict when these days will pop up.

Now imagine that your neighbor has solar panels on his roof and has a hydro-electric operation running off the river bordering your properties.  Surely he will be using at least all of the power from his solar panels, but what about the water based power plant?  Your neighbor is auctioning off the extra power that is generated to current buyers.  The people receiving this power do not need to be physically located close to the power source, the electricity can be great distances at minimal cost.

On a larger level, there will likely be massive solar plants constructed as soon as the technology becomes sufficiently efficient.  These, along with wind, and hopefully nuclear plants will provide the foundation for our energy.  These will be supplemented by the independent operations on a local level.  If any source needs additional electricity it will be automatically routed.

So everyone can get electricity from one another.  What’s so great about this?  Well, these de-centralized power together make up a new power grid.  This new grid could provide the opportunity for nationwide use of plug-in vehicles by seamlessly integrating renewable energy resources.

With this smart-grid there will never be overloads or shortages, thanks to borrowed power.  This scalable system is incredibly efficient and will never fail to meet consumer demand.

What is the smart grid?  Digitizing, organizing, analyzing, and streamlinging the relay of electricity from producers to consumers.  There are many opponents of this, claiming that the new grid will open us up to a new array of terrorists on the digital front; they claim that the newer, more reliable power will be more expensive.

What are your feelings on the smart grid?  Are you afraid of the massive inter-connectedness that is eminent, or are you ecstatic like myself?

Further Reading:

The Smart Grid: An Introduction – US Department of Energy

Smart grid – Wikipedia