Greasemonkey Script

grRand bookmarklet

If you don’t know what it is, Google it.

There are plenty of awesome features, but two in particular stood out:

• the ability to email OR embed both voicemails AND phone calls (google voice lets you record a conversation while it’s in progress)
• the ability to have those recordings transcribed.

Sure, you could do this before with some external recording device and some fancy software…but now it can be done with ease.

Should this become widely adopted, it’ll threaten one of the things I like most about phone communication which is also one of the things I hate the most: the words drift off into the ether…

I’ve been on a call many times and thought, “Damn it. All this information won’t be indexed and searchable later. I should ask this person to get on instant messaging.” Google voice, with its transcription feature, solves this problem.

But…I’ve also been composing an email many times and thought, “I wish I could be less careful with my words. Why, oh why, do I feel the need to rewrite the same sentence 5 times?” Knowing that a voicemail I leave (or a phone call that’s being recorded) could easily be embedded on a website and shared across the world will drive me insane. You’ve seen what this does to weather men, right?

I have no concluding thoughts.

Oh, below is an embedded voicemail I left for myself. Google transcribed it as,

“hi greg this is yourself and you’re testing google voice right now i wanna they can do a good job transcribing this message if they don’t it’s okay that most awesome company in the world i love you google “

I was playing around in Settings->Tags and noticed that you can make any tag a Public Page, which also has a feed. So, create a tag for a friend you share posts with often, make the tag public, and tell them to add the feed to their reader. Now whenever you want to share a post with a specific person, just tag it with their name (keyboard shortcut: ‘T’). No more clogged inboxes…and you can look at what you’ve shared with them by looking at the tag.

btw, i don’t like that when i send email from non-gmail google services that it is not in my sent mail.

Anyhow, I use Google Docs to take notes on projects/subjects I’m working on / learning about and thus tend to have a lot of tabs open. To prevent firefox from getting bogged down, I’ve started running Google Docs with Mozilla’s Prism. I’m not sure if Prism supports Addons (better gmail2), or else I’d probably use it for Gmail, too.

Many times I’ve thought, “I wish there were keyboard shortcuts for reader.” I’ve even looked for firefox addons for reader. Today I found that Google Reader has its own native shortcuts.

To get started using them, you only need to learn one: ? , the question mark will show the others. Plowing through feeds will be fun and faster.

There are other ways of sharing your music listening (last.fm audioscrobbling, for example), but nothing is more ‘available’ to my friends than my google talk status.

The Google Talk desktop application supports iTunes, Windows Media Player, Yahoo Music Engine, and Winamp. I’ve used winamp since I was a kid, and many people are having trouble getting GTalk to work with it, so here’s how to fix it.

FIX:
In the winamp install directory (C:\Program Files\Winamp ) create a new, blank .txt file, rename it to winamp.m3u, and that’s it. I found this solution on Google Groups. I hope it works for you.