Here lies Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip and news site launched in 2006 by Gawker Media and decommissioned in 2015. Its editors and writers over the years included Nick Douglas, Nick Denton, Owen Thomas, Ryan Tate, Nitasha Tiku, and Sam Biddle. The site’s archives are maintained here, but no new posts will be published at this page. You can find incisive news and commentary on the personalities and institutions that govern the technology world at Gizmodo.
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What do you do when your mobile phone has limited storage and there’s no option to add an external SD card? How do you carry all your videos and documents where there’s not an iota of space left on the device? Yes, you do have cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive that add virtually unlimited storage to your phone but you’ve to be connected to the Internet to access your files.
This week I’ve been testing a wireless USB stick from Sandisk that adds storage to your phones and tablets much like a regular USB drive. To get started, you plug the USB device into your laptop or desktop computer and let it charge for about an hour or two. You can also transfer the files to the stick from the computer through Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac.
Once the device is charged, you tap the little power button on the stick to turn it on. Now install the Sandisk Connect app on your mobile phone, go to WiFi settings on your phone and connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot created by the USB stick. That’s it.
The content of the USB drive can now be accessed from your mobile phone. You can stream audio and video files stored on the stick, you can browse photos, open PDF files and other documents in associated mobile apps and you can easily transfer files between the phone and the wireless drive. It is much like plugging a USB stick into your mobile phone but without the wires.
The Wi-Fi network has no security by default but you do have an option to add a password to prevent other nearby devices from connecting to the USB stick.
Unlike using cloud storage, Sandisk’s Connect USB stick requires no Internet connection (it will create a hotspot that your mobile device will connect to) and multiple devices can connect to the same USB drive over Wi-Fi. So if you are carrying an iPad and an Android phone, not only can the two devices connect to the stick simultaneously but it can be used as a temporary medium to transfer files between the iOS and Android device.
The USB stick itself is solidly built with a transparent protective casing though it is obviously heavier and looks bigger than regular USB sticks. The Sandisk mobile app does have some issues but none of them are a deal breaker. In my testing, the iPad app frequently crashed especially when reading big PDF files. The Android app would not allow me to browse the web using cellular connection while the phone was connected to USB drive over Wifi.
Sandisk Connect (Amazon, Flipkart) is compatible with both Android and iOS devices and is available in various capacities from 16GB to 128GB. If you are running out of storage space on your mobile phone and upgrading is not an option, the Connect stick is probably the easiest way to expand your phone’s existing storage.
SanDisk India is giving away 5 units of the SanDisk Connect Wireless USB stick to @labnol readers in India. All you have to do is fill this short form to participate in the giveaway. SanDisk will announce the winners on November 30 (Monday). Good luck!
The story, A Wireless USB Stick that Expands your Phone’s Storage (And a Giveaway), was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 24/11/2015 under Android, IPhone, Usb, Gadgets.
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You are reading a web page, say a longform article published in The New York Times, and would like to share it with your friend. The article is lengthy and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the parts that you really want him to read. How do you thus focus his attention to the most interesting stuff on the page?
Genius and TLDRify are useful web apps that that let you annotate web pages much like the yellow highlighter pens that you would use on the printed page. The services let you highlight any paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click the shared link, they see the original page but with the annotated text.
Genius is a music lyrics website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and commentary on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you don’t need to install any bookmarklets or browser extensions to use the annotator. Go to the browser’s address bar and add genius.it/ before the page URL.
Next sign-in with your Twitter, Facebook or Google Account and you’ll be able to add annotations to the current page. To get started, highlight a sentence on the page and click the Genius button that pops-up to add your own comment. Genius will then provide you with a unique hyperlink that will directly open the page with the annotation highlighted.
The next useful app in the category is TLDRify. Here you need a bookmarklet or a browser extension but there’s no need to sign-up for an account to annotate web pages. Also, unlike Genius which may show annotations left by other users on the same page, TLDRify links will only show your own highlights.
While you are on a web page page, select any sentence or paragraph, click the TLDRify bookmarklet and it will create a deep link to the highlighted text. When people click the link, the browser will automatically scroll to the annotated text.
Internally, these services create an exact copy of the web pages on their own servers so even if the original page goes down or has changed, your old citations may still work.
Also see: How to Archive Web Pages Forever
The story, How to Link to a Specific Part of a Web Page, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/11/2015 under Bookmarklets, Internet.
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You are probably aware of contextual advertising where ads are served based on the content of the current web page. For instance, if you are on the ESPN website, the ads on the page could be for sports related products. If you are reading a review of a mobile phone, you may see ads for mobile accessories or other brands of phones.
The buzz is however around interest-based or behavioral advertising where ads are displayed according to your past online activity and interests. To give you an example, if you search for ‘hotels in singapore’ on a travel website, you’ll see that almost every website you visit later will have ads arounds Singapore hotels. Whether you are reading news on CNN, checking out cooking videos on YouTube or reading your Facebook newsfeed, the ads are likely to be around the same them – Singapore hotels.
In other words, the ads follow you on the Internet even after you have switched to a different website. Online advertisers, with the help of browser cookies, are able to track you across the web and serve relevant advertising. The following video explains behavioral or interest-based advertising in slightly more detail.
If you would not like web companies to use your past online behavior to target ads on your computer, you do have an option to easily opt-out. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and other web advertising networks offer simple ways to help you opt-out of targeted advertising.
1. Google – Go to http://ift.tt/zixXyp and ensure that the “Ads based on your interests” setting is turned off.
2. Microsoft – Go to choice.microsoft.com and turn off the “Personalized ads in this browser” setting to only allow generic ads. Windows users can click the “Start” button, click Settings – Privacy and then turn off “Let apps use my advertising ID for experiences across apps” to disable personalized ads that appear inside apps.
3. Amazon – Like Google, Amazon too delivers interest-based ads on its own websites as well as external websites. Go to http://ift.tt/1IafMMy and enable the setting that says “Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser.” This is a cookies based setting, not linked to your Amazon account, and thus if you clear the cookies, your setting will be erased too.
4. Yahoo – Yahoo offers an Ad Interest Manager (AIM) allowing you to opt-out of interest-based ads with one click. Go to http://ift.tt/1Nn18cA and click the blue ‘Opt Out’ button to register your preference.
5. iOS – On your iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising and turn on Limit Ad Track to opt-out of interest based ads from iAd, Apple’s advertising network.
6. Android – Open the Google Settings app on your Android phone, tap Ads and enable Opt out of interest based ads.
7. Twitter – Go to Twitter Settings on the web and uncheck “Tailor ads based on information shared by ad partners” to disable interest based ads. Similarly, on the Twitter app, go to Settings > Select Privacy > Select Advertising > Enable the “Limit Ad Tracking” setting.
8. Facebook – Go to Facebook Settings, click Edit against the setting ‘Ads based on my use of websites and apps’ and select ‘Off’ for Show online interest-based ads.
What we have here are links to disable online interest-based ads from the most popular advertising networks on the Internet. If you would like to completely stop interest-based ads from all companies on any website or device, you should use web-based tools like aboutads.info and networkadvertising.org. These offer a single window to help you opt-out of Interest-based advertising from all member networks.
These tools also use cookies and therefore you need to use them on every browser and device where you wish to opt-out. The downside is that you preferences will be lost if you clear your browser cache.
The story, How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising and Stop the Ads from Following You, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/11/2015 under Advertising, Privacy, Internet.
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Leslie Miley was “the only African-American in [engineering] leadership” at Twitter, a company that employs thousands, and owes much of its success to adoption by non-white users. Then he quit, as he explains in a new blog post, because the company is absolutely brain-dead on race.
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How do you get SMS notifications on your mobile phone for important emails in your Gmail? Google doesn’t support text notifications for their email service but Twitter does. If we can figure out a way to connect our Twitter and Gmail accounts, the Gmail notifications can arrive as text on our mobile via Twitter. Let me explain:
Twitter allows you to follow any @user via a simple SMS. They provide short codes for all countries (see list) and if you text FOLLOW to this shortcode following by the username, any tweets from that user will arrive in your phone as text notifications. For instance, if you are in the US, you can tweet FOLLOW labnol to 40404 to get my tweets as text messages. Similarly, users in India can text FOLLOW labnol to 9248948837 to get the tweets via SMS.
The short code service of Twitter can act as a Gmail SMS notifier. You create a new Twitter account, set the privacy to private and this account will send a tweet when you get a new email in Gmail. Follow this account via SMS from you main Twitter account and the SMS notifications will start pouring in.
Here’s a step by step guide on how you can use Twitter to get SMS notification for important email in your Gmail account. It will take a minute to setup and, internally, there’s a Google Apps Script that’s doing all the magic. It monitors your Gmail mailbox in the background and as soon as a new message arrives in your account, the script sends out a tweet.
That’s it. The Gmail notifier is running and it will tweet when a matching email is found. It runs every 10-15 minutes and will only work on incoming email, not the old message. The messages will also be logged in the Google Sheet so you know what’s happening behind the scene.
Open a new browser session in Incognito mode, log in to your old Twitter account and send a follow request to your new Gmail account on Twitter. Approve the new follower request and you should now see tweets for new Gmail messages, as they arrive, in your main Twitter timeline.
Should you wish to receive SMS alerts on your mobile phone for new Gmail messages, just open the Twitter profile page of your Gmail bot and turn on Mobile Notifications. This will obviously work only if you have connected (and verified) your mobile phone with your main Twitter account.
Also see: How to Write a Twitter Bot
The story, How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under GMail, Sms, Twitter, Internet.
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My work involves prioritizing, organizing and managing tasks, information and ideas. I have tried hundreds of todo lists and project management tools to get the job done but finally settled on using Trello. It is now my swiss knife where I do everything from collaborating with my wife on shopping lists to building products for my company to teaching students to writing a book.
Trello provides a very flexible way to do this all and it has a whole ecosystem of apps and extensions to make your life simpler. If you are new to Trello, here’s a getting started guide that will help you understand the basics of Trello and how you can use the service to manage work and get things done.
Trello is like a todo list on steroids. At the core of it is a card which is the fundamental unit of information and it can be around lists. Here is a simple Trello card. It has a title with something I plan to do in the near future.
What follows is more complex Trello card containing a title, description (optional), file attachments (you can even pull files from Dropbox or Google Drive), comments from other people and a variety of things including checklists and tags. Each card as a unique email address and you can add comments to the card by simply sending a message to that address.
You can make a card as simple or as complex as you want. The cards are then organized into flexible lists. The lists show a preview of various cards and you can click on them to view details. The list stores all related cards.
In this example, each card in the Trello list corresponds to a feature I was building for a product. The lists are then grouped into boards. The board is effectively a project. If you take a look at my product board below, you’ll see lists like Backlog, In Implementation, QA, Questions and Finished.
I see this as an assembly line to make products. I create a Trello Card for each feature or idea and add to the Backlog list. The team would discuss and add further details to each card. Then the developers would drag individual cards to the In Implementation list and once the task is complete, it is shifted to the QA list. The testers would then move it to Finished once it has passed all the necessary checks.
Each of my projects would have a board like this and you can do a lot of cool things with that. For instance, I use the Pomello extension to pick up a task from Trello and start working on it. It will calculate the time taken and prompt me to take a break every, say, 25 minutes.
The cards work great in team settings and help the whole team to understand who is working on what and they can also keep a track of the status of tasks. Of course, there are more powerful project management tools out there, but none as simple and as extensible as Trello.
I’m a fan of the Getting Things Done method and here’s how I manage my time with Trello using GTD approach. You can download my Trello template for the GTD board here.
Whenever an email arrives, or there’s a task I need to complete or when an idea pops up in my mind, I create a new card in the “Inbox” list of my Trello board. Once a day, I “triage” them (decide the priority) to move into one of the 4 buckets.
Every morning, I take the most important cards from the “Need to do” list and move it to the “Today” list. These are the things I plan to get done today. If the “Need to do” list is clear, then I move a couple of pending cards from the “Someday/Maybe” list at the end of the day and handle those cards. Any unfinished task at the end of the day must be moved back to the respective lists.
If you can dump your mind into the “Inbox” list, you can have much better clarity in what you do.
Here is a partial view of my Trello board of my book on Indian history – “From Tryst to Tendulkar”. I use the board to organize my chapters, ideas, references and everything else.
I teach classes for entrepreneurs, product managers, business school aspirants and civil participants on various methods to study. Here is a screenshot of my Trello board for a class for business school aspirants.
My wife and I share a Trello card with all the things to buy. Either one of us puts stuff there and when one of us goes shopping, the card becomes our shopping list. As I pick up stuff in the supermarket, I also check the item in the Trello card. When my wife needs that stuff again, she simply unchecks the checked item. Thus, we don’t need to keep adding existing stuff to the card.
Balaji Viswanathan is a product manager by profession, he writes a blog, created Be Limitless (a popular Chrome add-on), wrote a book on Indian history and is considered a rockstar on Quora. His favorite GTD tool is Trello.
The story, How to Get Things Done with Trello, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under Productivity, Internet.
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Google Alerts, you probably know this, offer an easy way for you to create RSS feeds from the Google search results of any query. This is a good option if you are looking to monitor when new web pages are indexed by Google that match your search query.
If you have never created feeds with Google Alerts earlier, here’s a quick primer. Type your search keyword, expand options, choose “Automatic” for sources, choose “All Results” for “How Many” and set “RSS Feed” as the Delivery Method. Google will create an RSS feed of web search results that you can subscribe in Feedly or another RSS Reader.
Please see the Google Alerts tutorial to write more advanced search queries.
A big limitation with feeds created using the “Google Alerts” approach is that you’ve limited control over the feed and it won’t include search results from all over the web. In fact, the first time you create a feed, it is likely to be empty and results would be added as Google discovers and indexes new content for that search query.
There’s an alternate method for creating RSS feeds for Google Search results and, though the initial setup takes few extra steps, you’ve enough options to fine tune the search query and have more meaniningful search results in the feed. You can even have RSS feeds for Google Images.
Now we have all the ingredients required to create our RSS feed for Google Search. The basic feed URL will be something like this:
http://ift.tt/1N7Lf7Wxxx:yyy&key=abc&q=query
Replace xxx:yy with the Search Engine ID, abc with the API key and query with the actual search query. If your query has multiple words, separate them with a + symbol (like Digital+Inspiration). There are tons of other search parameters to the Feed URL. For instance:
To give you an example, the following feed URL will fetch family safe pages from Google India, published in the last 2 weeks for a query “Make In India”
http://ift.tt/1KFnez6;cx=xxx:yyy&key=abc&q=Make+In+India&dateRestrict=w2&googlehost=google.in&safe=high
Advanced users can create simple web apps that use the Custom Search API to monitor search results by email or they can scrape Google search in a spreadsheet. The only limitation is that the Search API has a daily quota (100 requests per day) so you should not share the feed or the API key with other users. However, if you enable billing inside the Google API Console, the free limit will be upgraded to 200 search queries per day.
The story, How to Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under Google, RSS, Internet.
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Your WordPress website has a public login page, often found at http://ift.tt/1FGSnly, and it is possible for someone to gain access to your site by guessing your password through repeated trial and error method. To harden your WordPress security, it is therefore recommended that you password-protect the WordPress admin folder and also use 2-factor authentication.
WordPress Single Sign On offers an even more secure option for protecting your website from brute force attacks as you ‘outsource’ the authentication part to WordPress.com. Once enabled, the login screen on your WordPress website is disabled and you are required to sign in to your WordPress.com account in order to access the admin dashboard of your own self-hosted WordPress blog.
There are several advantages here:
Here is a step-by-step guide that explains how you can enable Single Sign On for your WordPress website:
Step 1: Create an account on WordPress.com using this link. Skip this step if you already have an account. You may be required to create a dummy blog on wordpress.com as part of the registration process.
Step 2: Once your account is created, click here to enable two-factor authentication. Specify your phone number, WordPress will send a verification code via SMS and you need to type the same code to verify your number.
Step 3: Go to your WordPress blog, install the Jetpack plugin, activate the plugin and then click the green button that says “Connect to WordPress.com” to link your blog to your WordPress account.
Step 4: Once the connection is established, go to Jetpack settings and activate the “Single Sign On” module.
Step 5: Go to your WordPress installation folder via FTP or SSH, switch to the current theme folder (wp-content/themes/theme-name) and edit the functions.php file. Here copy-paste the following line of code after the first line:
add_filter( 'jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcom', '__return_true' );
Step 6: Go to Users – Your Profile and, at the bottom of the page, click the button that says “Log in with WordPress.com” – this will essentially link your WordPress.com account to the username that you’ve used to log into the site.
This will completely disable the login form of your WordPress site and instead forwards the user to the login screen on WordPress.com. Once you login through WordPress, you are immediately redirected to the admin dashboard of your self-hosted WordPress blog.
Also see: How to Improve WordPress Security
The story, Make your WordPress Website More Secure with Single Sign On, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 28/10/2015 under WordPress, Internet.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for a trending #hashtag, or an old tweet, or your brand name, and all the matching tweets get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And this archive would just update itself in the background as new tweets arrive.
Meet Twitter Archiver, the simplest tool for saving tweets, forever It is a Google add-on that takes 5-minutes to setup (watch video tutorial) and will easily capture all tweets that match particular search terms in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any conference hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms, save tweets from any geographic location and more.
Save all kinds of tweets with the Twitter Archiver
To get started, install the Twitter Archiver and it will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-on menu, choose Twitter Archiver and select the Authorize menu. Allow the Google Sheet to access Twitter on your behalf – the app needs this permission to only fetch tweets and will never post anything to your Twitter account.
Once your Twitter account is authorized, go to the Twitter Archiver menu again and create a new Search Rule. If you have every used the advanced search page on Twitter, this search rule screen will be very familiar. You can create rules that mention certain search terms, look for exact phrases, find tweets by #hashtags, tweets that @mention particular Twitter users and so on.
Now that you have created your Twitter search query, click “Start Tracking” button to initialize the Twitter Archiver. Internally, the sheet will connect to Twitter and pull in the historic tweets that match your search term(s). It writes these tweets in a separate sheet inside the Google Spreadsheet. After the initial set is pulled, the archiver will poll Twitter every hour and pull in the matching tweets that have been posted since the last run.
In addition to tweets, the Twitter Archiver app will also import other data including the tweet’s retweet & favorite count, the tweeter’s friend & followers count and whether they are verified or not. This data will help you filter out the spam Twitter users or easily surface tweets from the most influential users.
If you would like to stop archiving tweets for a particular search term, go to the Twitter Archiver menu, choose Saved Searches menu and you’ll see a list of your exisitng saved searches. Select the one you wish to delete from the dropdown and hit the Delete button.
Isn’t that simple? There’s no need to create any Twitter apps nor do you have to fiddle with Google Scripts.
How can I create complex search queries?
The archiver supports all Twitter search operators. For instance, you can put min_retweets:5 in the Advanced Rule box to surface the best tweets for a search term.
Why does Twitter Archiver access to various services?
The Archiver add-on connects to an external service (Twitter API) and saves the tweets to Google Spreadsheet. Also, should a problem arise, you can email the debug logs to the developer and hence it needs permissions to send mail.
What is your Privacy Policy?
The add-on runs inside your Google Account and directly connects to Twitter. It does not share even a single byte of data with anyone, including the developer.
My Twitter Archiver is not pulling all the old tweets. Why?
The Twitter API does not provide all the historical tweets via the API. It will only return tweets that have been posted in the previous 5-7 days or last 1000 tweets. The archiver will however fetch future tweets for any terms that it is tracking.
Do I have to keep the sheet open to save the tweets?
The archiver runs on Google servers and will therefore work even while the Google Sheet is closed. You can close the sheet, turn off your computer and the archiver will continue to work.
What is the difference between free and premium editions?
The free edition of the Twitter add-on lets you track up to 2 search queries. You can track more queries in the same Google Sheet with premium. The free edition polls Twitter every hour while the premium edition pulls tweets every 15 minutes so it is more suitable for tracking terms that are generating lot of tweets (like a conference #hashtag or a live sports event).
How do I upgrade to the Premium Edition of Twitter Archiver
You can use this PayPal link to upgrade to premium. It is $39.99 one-time flat fee and you can use premium for life.
I need help. Who do I contact?
Support is only available with the premium edition. If you have gone premium, use the contact form at ctrlq.org or email amit@labnol.org with your request.
Why user Twitter Archiver when IFTTT or Zapier can also save tweets?
The Twitter Archiver save complete meta-data of the tweets in the spreadsheet, it fetches tweets at a much faster rate and you can visually create and manage search queries from inside a Google Sheet.
I am getting a message from Google saying “The service is using too much computer time for one day”
You can only make a limited number of connections to the Twitter API from your Google Account. If you are tracking too many search terms in the Google Sheet, you might get that error. However, Google will reset the limit every 24 hours so it will resume itself the next day.
How do I save my tweets in other formats like PDF?
Since the tweets are saved in a Google spreadsheet, you can easily export the search results in various formats including PDF, CSV or even publish your data set as an HTML web page (choose File -> Publish to Web inside Google Sheets). Advanced users may try this technique to create JSON or RSS Feeds from Twitter.
The story, How to Save Tweets for any Twitter Hashtag in a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/10/2015 under Twitter, Internet.
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You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?
Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help.
No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.
#1. Find the sender’s location
Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.
Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the approximate location of the email sender.
#2. Reverse email search with Facebook
Facebook has a billion users and the likelihood is therefore high that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.
Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the person into the search box and Facebook will instantly tell you if a profile exists with that email address or not.
If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download the profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.
#3. Check all the other Social Networks
You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.
If the email address of the sender is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probability that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.
Gmail users can install the Rapportive add-on and find the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles associated with an email address, if any of them exist. For details, see this tutorial on how to guess someone’s email address.
#4. People Search
Finally, if none of the above tricks work, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.
Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.
Also see: How to check if an Email address is valid & exists
The story, Find the Person Behind an Email Address, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 16/10/2015 under Email, Internet.
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