Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/A_kyuqvjpdY/turn-a-scanner-into-a-camera
For other potential uses for your scanner check out how to use your scanner to "photograph" small objects and turning a broken scanner into a super bright lamp. If you cobble together a spook-tacular picture taking scanner-turned-camera make sure to share the results in the comments below!
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/eHfk89FY-eg/liberate-yourself-from-old-email-addresses
In other words, you are a slave to an e-mail address that you don't want or which makes you use an interface that sucks. You can't give it up because thousands of your close personal friends only know you as ClassOf92@aol.com or ILoveNKOTB@hotmail.com. A blind switch to a new e-mail address is out of the question — you probably don't even know everyone who has the old one, and grandma wouldn't understand anyway.
The guide details how to set up a new email service, they use the robust GMail, and properly configure it to take in email from the old addresses and notify the people still using them of your current address. Taking a page from Gina's Future Proofing Your Email playbook, they suggest registering a domain name to keep a permanent address even as the services you use change over time. For more tips on wrangling multiple email accounts with GMail, check out how to consolidate multiple email addresses with GMail.
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/-bkbcLCrzv8/dimdim-hosts-your-webinars-for-free
If you work in a corporate culture that's fond of meetings, or an industry that involves lots of long-distance collaboration, you've no doubt heard an increasing amount about "webinars" lately. The web-based meetings, usually involving collaborative editing, whiteboard brainstorming, slideshow presentations, and/or live desktop sharing, are helpful when teaching a computer concept or technique, providing a one-way presentation a la PowerPoint, or presenting ideas and getting feedback from clients. Lots of providers compete for the largely corporate market, but at least one site, DimDim, provides free web conference hosting for groups of 20 or less. We gave one of them a try and took a few screenshots, so read on to see what you can get for free in the webinar world.
DimDim not only offers free sign-ups for those wanting to host seminars for up to 20 participants, but offers up its hosting platform for free as an open source package, for those with the server space to do something with it. DimDim doesn't ask much more than a username, email, and password, and only from the host—those you invite to join only need to hit a connection link in the email that gets sent out when your webinars are scheduled and then starting.
Each sign-up also gets a u! nique ac cess key for conference calling—the old style of tele-conferencing. I tried calling in while hosting a meeting, but ended up being alone in a conference call, waiting for others to join. So either DimDim is offering this functionality as a separate enticement for lower-tech users, or I'm not quite doing it right (equally likely).
I tested DimDim out with my (very patient) wife sitting in the same room and a friend connecting from across the city. Two were on residential cable connections and the third on DSL. The whiteboard, chat, and audio functions were surprisingly snappy and responsive, though I found out that using my laptop's built-in microphone and speakers was a bad idea on many levels—everybody could hear the pounding of my typing, and there were a number of looping echos. The desktop view sharing from my system was a bit laggy, however, and occasionally required my asking the guests to manually hit "refresh" in the main window. That's using residential upload speeds, though, and dependent on what else was uploading at the time.
Here's a full shot of DimDim in action, scaled just a bit to fit on this page. (Note: I lack a decent webcam, so we used another participant's camera to try out video conferencing, not shown in this shot):
In all, I found DimDim to give its free users a surprising amount of flexibility and functionality for the price, and would be interested to find out what options set apart the other webinar-hosting companies in the field.
Got any tips or experiences to share in hosting web conferences? Wish you weren't invited to so many? Tell us your take on webinars in the comments. (Thanks to mostlybob</> for the inspiration!)
Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/tip-your-email-wherever-you-are-on-web.html
Monday, November 03, 2008 4:15 PM
Are you addicted to email? Do you keep Gmail open on your browser, constantly hitting refresh to get your latest messages?
If you're using Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer (or Toolbar's Firefox version), you can add the Gmail custom button to make your life easier. With the Gmail button, you can get new message alerts, see previews of your mail and use Toolbar's search box to find any message no matter what page you're on.
Google Toolbar also has a "Send to" feature: when you click on the "Send to" icon, a Gmail compose window opens that automatically includes a link to the page you're currently on and any text you have highlighted on that page. This makes it easy to email your friends interesting pages you come across as you browse the web.
Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/say-hello-to-gmail-voice-and-video-chat.html
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 12:18 PM
I'm a big user of Gmail chat. Being able to switch from email to chat as needed, all within the same app, is really great for productivity. But people can only type so fast, and even with ournew emoticons, there are still some things that just can't be expressed in a chat message.
That's why today we're launching voice and video chat -- right inside Gmail. We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video -- all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.
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