Tag: Google

RIP Bloglines, wistrab Loris

So Bloglines is dead. Just as well, since it seems the owners are busy licking Twitterific balls. I’m glad I switched, even though it was a couple years late.

Feeling nostalgic, I logged in one last time and encountered a captcha – a brilliant one. Inspired by a series of captcha cartoons my brother showed me last week, I spent a whole five minutes creating my own:

…I guess I’ll be keeping my day job.

Dropbox vs. Google Docs for document backup

Hey, that rhymes, yo.

Before Dropbox came along (I actually tried 3 or 4 similar services, but Dropbox was the best), I was backing up all of my Office documents (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in Google docs, which replaced the time-honored practice of e-mailing documents to myself… As it turns out, I was better off doing just that, because I recently discovered that a lot of the formatting in the documents (particularly tables and tabs) were being corrupted by Google docs, whereas I haven’t had a problem with e-mail attachments for many years.

But all of that is moot now because Dropbox has largely replaced both e-mail backups and flash drive transfers (for “small” files) between all of my PCs. Don’t get me wrong, I still use Google docs on a regular basis and prefer it to any other Microsoft Office alternative (although not to Office itself), but for pre-existing Office document backup and fidelity, I prefer Dropbox.

Deleting Gmail Trash

Today is Mother’s Day in Thailand since it’s the Queen’s birthday, and the Queen is mother to all Thais. Nam and Max went to Khon Kaen with my mother-in-law and I spent the day watching Mina. She basically slept on me all day, only waking to feed and put everything within reach in her mouth before throwing it on the ground.

While she slept, I trashed several thousand mailing list messages in Gmail that I’ve no longer got time or interest in keeping up with, and hit the Empty Trash Now link. The following message ran across the status ticker thingy up top:

Oops… the system encountered a problem (#793) – Retrying now…

Gmail continued to suffer from Excedrin headache #793 for a few minutes, after which the beautifully empty trash page appeared with this message in the middle:

No conversations in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have over 7000 MB of storage?!

Cheeky.

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On a related note, I don’t really like the new Gmail interface (mainly, the Compose mail button sticks out like a wart), but I can live with it. If you can’t there’s a way to switch back to a much older version of the interface, albeit without Labs support.