You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul [...]
Category: Software
5 Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Voice
Blog from your phone, call for free or use your computer to make free phone calls. Google Voice isn’t the easiest Google service to explain to non-techies, partially because it can be used for so many different things. Find a short list of those things below.
Using only a phone to manage voicemail is old fashioned: Google Voice does a much better job. Manage your voicemail on your computer or phone, and enjoy unlimited free texting within the US and Canada. It’s a service no human should be without, but which is sadly (still) limited to humans who reside in the United States of America. Google, remedy this!
Find below just a few advanced Google Voice tricks. Know some more? Leave them in the comments below the article and share them with the world.
Blog From Your Phone
Imagine being able to blog by phone, from anywhere. It’s not farfetched: our very own Ryan devised a method of voice blogging. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great way to get in a quick blog post from the road.
Free Calls and Texts To Canada
Cell phone has no concept of long distance, provided I’m calling or texting a US number. It’s another matter when you call or text Canada: that costs extra. Good thing I have Google Voice: it allows you to call or text Canada for free.
You can do this one of two ways. The first is to call Google Voice number from my cell phone, then call Canada from that. It’s easy, but requires some extra dialing.
The second way requires some setup, but works very well: have your Canadian friend send a text message to your Google Voice number. Assuming you’ve set up Google Voice to forward texts to your phone, you will now have an American number you can use to reach your Canadian friend. Save this new number and you can call your friend as though it were a domestic call, anytime.
Free Calls From Your Browser
This isn’t exactly a secret, but many people don’t seem to realize it: you can make free phone calls from within Gmail, provided you’re calling a number inside the US or Canada.
Even cooler: if your Google Voice number is your primary phone number, you can pick up your phone calls in Gmail. You just need to turn on chat and install the Google video chat browser extension.
Another related but also lesser-known trick: you can add any phone number to a Google Plus Hangout, allowing you to include people without Internet access in your conversations.
Combine Google Voice and Skype
Skype is a very affordable way to make long distance phone calls, but there is one problem with it: unless you set up a call display number you appear as ‘unknown caller’ on the phone of the person you’re trying to reach. Many people will, assuming you’re a scam artist, and refuse to pick up.
You can buy a phone number from Skype to avoid this. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you can set up your Skype account to display your Google Voice number for call display. That way people you call will see a real phone number.
You might consider doing this even if you’ve paid Skype for an incoming number: people will call you back at your Google Voice number instead of your Skype number, meaning you’ll get the call on all of your phones instead of just Skype.
Add a Voicemail Feature To Your Blog
Want to hear from the people who read your blog? Add a voicemail button to it. This allows people to leave you a voicemail without telling the world your phone number. People who visit your site can enter their phone number and, in one click, connect their phone to your voicemail inbox.
Read the full instructions for setting up a voicemail feature on your blog here.
Other Cool Tricks
Of course, there are many more cool things you can do with Google Voice. Ryan outlined several of them in 2010, and his tricks still work very well. They are:
- Integrating Google Voice for all mobile calls
- Listening in to your voicemail in real time
- Automatic transcriptions of all voicemails
- Recording phone calls
- Custom greetings for different groups of people
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Protect Mac from Flashback Trojan attack
Magican AntiTrojan is a free antivirus app designed for protect Mac from Flashback Trojan attack. Besides helping users check the Flashback Trojan, it still could help delete the Flashback Trojan and all the infected files in your Mac. Still Magican AntiTrojan has an easy to use interface; users could only click a button to easily detect Trojan and a Delete button could helps delete all infected files.
Besides checking the complicated solutions on net, we strongly recommend to use Magican AntiTrojan easily protect your Mac.
U Grok It Helps You Find Missing Stuff Using Your Phone and RFID
I wasted half an hour yesterday morning looking for my cellphone, only to find it and spend another twenty minutes looking for my car keys, which I had in my hands while looking for the aforementioned cellphone. Needless to say, I was late, my boss gave me an earful, and I had a pretty crappy day.
If you can relate, then you’d also probably be interested in the U Grok It.
It has a weird name but a pretty neat purpose. Here’s how it works: you stick a tiny RFID tag on objects that you lose on a regular basis, add them to your list of items, and locate them using the U Grok It receiver when you need to find them.
The U Grok It has a range of about six to ten feet and signals just how close you are to finding whatever it is you’re looking for with beeping signals. The closer you are, the louder and faster the beeps will be.
U Grok It plans to conduct an initial test run with 1,000 units, with full-scale production scheduled for 2013. No prices have been announced yet, but the devices is said to be around $100(USD) while each RFID tag will be sold for $1.
(Via Technabob.)
Gas Buddy – The App That Helps You Find Cheap Gas
If you’re looking for the cheapest prices in the U.S. or Canada, this free app can help you out. The app rewards users who report gas prices with a weekly giveaway of a $250 gift card.
Also available for iOS.
Price: FREE
CCleaner Now Released For The Mac
No matter how intuitive and reportedly “trouble free” Macs are to run, believe me, several months after you add hundreds of files, applications, and download thousands of webpages, your shiny new iMac or MacBook Air is going to run slower than when you first booted it out the box. That’s because like any computer, digital junk files pile up in the hard drive; and eventually it just needs to get cleaned out.
CCleaner is one such application utility that can perform cleaning operations for you. It was recently released from its beta version for Mac users, and it can now be downloaded for free in the Mac App Store, or directly from the Piriform website. Windows PC users have been making use of CCleaner for a while, and now Mac users can finally take advantage of it. The interface is similar for both platforms, but the program is of course optimized to address the particular system clutter of OS X.
Mass Unsubscribe From Nuisance Email Newsletters With Unsubscribr
Do you get more email than you know what to do with? You’re not alone. I get multiple, daily corporate emails that I routinely delete without so much as opening. Or, at least, I did, until just now. I used Unsubscribr and stopped those messages from getting to me. You should too. This free tool lets you unsubscribe from the stuff you don’t care about without having to actually read any of the messages and look for the “Unsubscribe” link or instructions.
You know the emails I’m talking about. They’re not quite spam, but not really useful email either. Some people call it “Bacn”, and it’s an entire category of emails from companies and services you’ve used in the past. If they’ve added up to take up way too much of your mental space, it’s time to clean them out. This simple website can help.
Gmail’s priority inbox helps with this, but you still need to delete the unwanted emails every day. Not if you run Unsubscribr a couple of times though.
Stop Those Emails!
Head to Unsubscribr to get started. You’ll need to provide your email address; the service will then figure out how to access your email. If you’re using Gmail you’ll be asked for permission:
Other services provide other ways of getting at your data, so give it a shot. This is practically a brand new service, so every email scenario under the sun may not be covered. Let us know if yours is or isn’t in the comments below.
Once you get the service logged in, you’ll see your email folders. The free version of this service will scan your Inbox and your Trash.
Note that the service can only scan 30 days worth of email, but that should be more than enough to catch the worst offenders. When the service is done scanning you’ll see a list you can respond to:
Click the “Unsubscribe” button and one of two things will happen: you will be automatically unsubscribed or you will be directed to the page where you can unsubscribe yourself.
Security Concerns
Are you concerned about security? That makes sense. This is, after all, your email we’re talking about.
Be sure to check out the Unsubscribr FAQ, because this service is designed to be secure. Email access is, whenever possible, accomplished via OAuth, meaning the service never actually records your username and password. Also, all traffic between your email client and Unsubscribr is encrypted.
If you don’t use Gmail, OAuth can’t be used. Don’t worry though, your username and password will be quickly deleted from the Unsubscribr servers. Trusting the service or not is up to you, but they seem to have thought through security quite a bit.
Conclusion
I get enough email every day, so this service is awesome to me. It lets me lessen my daily email load without a lot of work on my part.
How many emails did this service manage to find for you? Did you unsubscribe? Let me know in the comments below, along with any recommended apps for cleaning out your inbox. Thanks!
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
An In-Depth Look at OS X Mountain Lion
An In-Depth Look at OS X Mountain Lion: ”
Last Thursday, Apple caught us all a bit off guard with the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, the next major version of OS X. Now that I’ve had a few days to sit down and take a look at it, I can confidently say that this is no small upgrade. Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward in the unification of iOS and OS X (Apple has officially dropped “Mac” from the name), bringing over many much-loved features including iMessages, Notification Center, AirPlay Mirror, and a whole host of new applications.
Follow along as we dive in and take a look at all of the great new features, updates and tweaks of your next operating system.
Apple releases public beta of Messages, replacing iChat
I mentioned in my first look of OS X Mountain Lion today that Apple was doing away with its messaging app iChat and replacing it with a new app called Messages.
With Messages you can chat with someone using their Apple ID or phone number, just like you can using iMessage on iOS. You can also use traditional chat services like AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Jabber, so anyone that has your old iChat handle will still be able to contact you using that information.
Here’s the great thing about Messages. It keeps the conversations synced between devices.
Messages beta is available from Apple’s Web site.
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