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.)

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.)

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

If you ask me, 3D printing is the future of small-scale and short-run manufacturing. Assuming that the technology can come down in cost and increase in speed, many of the smaller items we use will eventually be 3D printed – at least custom stuff, like these awesome 3D printed guitars by Olaf Diegel.

A professor at Auckland, New Zealand’s Massey University, Diegel created these beautiful and lightweight 3D printed electric guitars using a combination of alumide and polyamide materials with an EOS Formiga P100 selective laser sintering machine – a serious industrial 3D printer. I doubt you’d be able to do something this impressive with a Makerbot, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

His current designs, the Scarab and Spider, feature a cool open air design, and tremendous depth and detail thanks to the capabilities of the 3D printing tech. I love the tiny insects and plants on the inside of these things.

Of course, while the guitar bodies are 3D printed, the neck, pickups, frets and strings are all standard electric guitar parts. Maybe someday those can be 3D printed too.

I’m not sure if Olaf is offering these guitars for sale, but if you’re interested, he has contact information up on his University web page.

(Via Technabob.)

Raspberry Pi, an innovative $35 GNU/Linux box in a tiny package, launched yesterday — sort of. Demand was so hot that all the company’s retail partners collapsed under load. From Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul:

The product is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It’s roughly the size of a deck of playing cards and has a powerful GPU that is reportedly competitive with that of modern smartphones. Developer prototypes of the product have been shown running impressive graphics demos and decoding high-definition video…

At the time of publication, the Farnell website is still spitting errors. The RS site has been partially restored and is intermittently available, but isn’t currently allowing users to purchase the Raspberry Pi. Instead, it displays a screen where users can register to express their interest in the product. The Raspberry Pi foundation managed to withstand the traffic by temporarily replacing the contents of its official website with a static page.

Alongside the launch, the Raspberry Pi foundation also announced that the cheaper $25 model, which will be launched at an undisclosed future date, got a spec bump and will have 256MB of RAM, just like the $35 model. The $25 board was originally expected to have only 128MB of RAM. The cheaper model will still lack several of the features found in the $35 model, such as the built-in ethernet controller.

(Via Boing Boing.)

(Via Tybee Guy.)

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.)

iOS users, if you haven’t got your free 50GB from Box.net yet, hurry up and do so. A couple of weeks ago, Box.net announced that any iOS user that logs into the Box app from an iOS device will get 50GB of storage, for life. The promotion will only last 50 days, and about 14 of those have already passed, so not much time left for getting this hefty amount of free storage.

Box.net is a cloud content management platform, similar to Dropbox, which lets you store, access and share content online and across devices. The company does offer a free option, which usually includes only 5GB of storage, with a 25MB limit on file size upload.

Here is what you have to do to get a free 50GB with Box.net:

• Download the Box app for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and install it.
• Log into your Box account from the app, or register for a new one from within the app.

And that’s it. After logging in you should see a message informing you about your free 50GB. On top of the free storage, you will also get an increased file size limit for uploads: 100MB instead of 25MB.

Will you create a Box.net account just because of this promotion? Or do you prefer other solutions and will not be tempted by this?

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Here’s an overview and demo of the new iPB-10 Programmable Pedalboard – the first iPad pedal board.

Features:

• Users can drag and drop up to 10 different pedals, in any order, to each pedalboard, and can add an amp and cabinet to complete each setup.
• It offers 87 different pedals, 54 amps, and 26 cabinets to choose from.
• The iPB-10 uses multiple Audio DNA2 processors to provide no-latency signal processing with 24-bit A/D/A converters.
• The iPB-10 will work without an iPad plugged in to it. The 2 digit LED display on the unit that indicates the current preset bank, though there is also a master volume knob on the back panel of the unit. (At this time users will not be able to edit, adjust, or save presets without an iPad.)
• For those worrying about your iPad being damaged on the floor – You can connect the iPad to the DigiTech iPB-10 via an extension cable and mount the iPad on a mic stand.

The DigiTech iPB-10 is compatible with all models of iPad 2 & iPad. It’s available now for about $500.

Updated. The buzz around European music streaming service Spotify’s United States launch just keeps getting louder.

A report published Friday on the Noisecast tech blog places Spotify’s US launch date between July 5 and July 15, citing an email exchange between a Noisecast source and major record label executive. The emails also ‘suggest that Spotify may launch as an invite-only service to start with’ and that the subscription price will be $10 per month, Noisecast reports.

Whether or not it’s totally accurate, the report certainly lines up with other recent talk around Spotify’s stateside debut. Earlier this week, Om Malik reported that Spotify will be a major part of a new music dashboard feature Facebook plans to release at its f8 developer conference in August. And Spotify executive Jonathan Forster recently told Silicon Valley Watcher that Spotify’s US launch is on the way, but would not occur before July 5.

Meanwhile, Spotify has been getting its financial house in order for the US push. Last week the company closed on approximately $100 million in fresh funding to fuel its geographic expansion. The latest round came from a group that included Russian venture capital firm DST and California-based VCs Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners, all first-time Spotify investors.

Why is Spotify so hotly anticipated in the United States? For one thing, with a Spotify account, you can listen to the same library of music regardless of where you are and which of your devices you’re using. It’s the same cloud-based mentality behind some of the latest big offerings from Google (with Google Music), Apple (with iCloud) and Netflix (with Netflix streaming.) In many ways, Spotify fits right into the increasingly always-connected way many of us live now.

Update: Spotify’s US launch is indeed on track for mid-July — not July 5, as some other sources have claimed — according to a source with knowledge of the company’s plans. That confirms the rumors first published Friday morning that Spotify’s US launch will occur in July.

Spotify will be made available in the US under a three-tiered pricing model, the source said: A free ad-supported service, a $5/month subscription, and a $10/month subscription. The US pricing scheme will be very similar to the three-tiered revenue model Spotify already has in place in Europe.

The company does not have a more specific launch date nailed down at the moment, because Spotify is still sorting out a few kinks associated with the US debut, the source said.

(Via GigaOM.)

When we remarked that home automation technology was a reason we needed iPv6 technology, we weren’t kidding. If Netherlands-based NXP has it their way, we’ll all be using networked LED lightbulbs, each with their own IPv6 address. More »

(Via Gizmodo.)