Frustrated by size limitations when uploading images to Google+, photographer Trey Ratcliff discovered a way to get around the limitations, and upload original full-resolution photos. In a blog post, he has put together a step-by-step guide on how to do it, which involves using Google Drive – Google’s cloud storage service – and sharing images directly from there to Google+. Click through to read about how – and why – he did it. (via Reddit)
You already know Gmail integrated with Google Voice for free phone calls (and cheap international calls) from your inbox. But apart from using it to a friend, Gmail’s new phone calling capabilities introduce a lot of cool capabilities to your inbox.
Get Caller ID from Your Computer
Let’s say you’ve got a landline set up with Google Voice and you don’t want to pay for caller ID. Or you just spend a lot of time staring at your computer. If you’re logged into Gmail, and someone rings up your Google Voice number, you can see who’s calling on your computer without digging your phone out of your pocket.
Transfer Calls to (and from) Your Computer to Save Cellphone Minutes
Assuming you’ve already added your Gmail Chat account as a number that can be reached through Google Voice (which also assumes you’ve signed up for Google Voice), you can transfer calls from your phone to your computer to save cellphone minutes. Here’s how it works:
1) If you’re logged into your Google account, go to the Google Voice phone settings page. At the bottom, you should see a new option for Google Chat (like in the image). Make sure it’s checked.
2) Now, when you’re in the midst of a call on your cellphone—let’s say you were talking to someone in the car, and now you’re home—just hit the * (asterisk) on your phone’s number pad to send the call to another Google Voice phone. If your Gmail account is open, your inbox should start ringing. Pick up in Gmail and hangup your cellphone.
The opposite works, as well—i.e., transferring calls out from Gmail to your cellphone. Oh, and remember: If you’ve got a decent Bluetooth headset, you should also be able to stay relatively mobile, even if you’re talking from your computer.
Find Your Misplaced Phone
Misplace your cellphone under a pile of clothes or deep in your couch cushions? If you left your ringer on but don’t have another phone on hand, just log into Gmail, dial your cellphone number, and follow the faint sound of ringing.
Use It for a Quick-and-Dirty Speakerphone for Group Calls
Google Voice is already pretty good at setting up conference calls (demonstrated in the video above). Now that you can call from your computer, you’ve also got a quick-and-dirty speakerphone perfect for the group of people sitting around a table on your coast.
Make a Quick Followup Call in Response to an Email
This is less of an “amazing new thing” than a nice, practical side effect of having one more thing integrated with your inbox. Say you get an email from a colleague. You want to send a quick followup, but it’s going to be a lot more appropriate talking than typing a reply. Dial the person up in Gmail and talk it out without disrupting your workflow.
Secretly Record Calls
Google Voice has handy recording function, but whenever you enable it (hit 4 to start and finish recording), Google Voice announces “This call is now being recorded.” Prefer to record a conversation surreptitiously? Calling from Gmail puts the audio on your computer, where you can use any number of tools to record your system audio on-the-sly. (For example, despite what I thought at the time, Whitson later told me he wasn’t aware I was recording the call in the video above.) File this under the know-your-state-laws category.
Prank Time
Speaking of neat things you can do now that your computer hardware is accessible for both inputs and outputs, consider this: If you set your onboard system audio as your default input device rather than a microphone, you can, say, play the caller a little song. That’s maybe a little boring. On the other hand, it’s even easier to navigate to your favorite prank call soundboard and have a little fun.
Make Free Calls Anywhere You’ve Got Free Wi-Fi
Your mileage may vary on this one, but anywhere you’ve got your laptop and free Wi-Fi—like, say, any Starbucks in the U.S.—you can fire up a free phone call to anyone in the U.S. or Canada and chat away. There’s a good chance that many free Wi-Fi hotspots don’t provide you with enough bandwidth to make high enough quality calls, but if you’re desperate to save on minutes (or just don’t have a phone handy), it’s worth a try.
Got a great use for phone calls in Gmail that we missed? Let’s hear it in the comments.
Big thanks to my pal Jason Chen for help brainstorming and testing.
Every year, today’s greatest thinkers gather at various TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conferences around the world. Their talks, which you can find on TED’s website, are often insightful, educational, and fascinating.
As a TED junkie, I decided to compile 20 of the best business talks in the conference’s history. Each talk offers insights either into a business leader’s mind, or into concepts that will change the way you think about business and the economy. (If you have any favorites not included on this list, please mention them in the comments below.)
20. Chip Conley: Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile
Hotel owner Chip Conley talks about adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to a business model based on happiness. He shares what he learned on the way.
19. Jeff Bezos on the Next Web Innovation
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offers a fun, visual lesson on how people behaved during the gold rush, and how the dot-com story almost exactly reflected that behavior. He uses excellent stories, clips, and pictures to make his case, which puts a chapter of our economic behavior in historical context.
18. Chris Anderson: The 4 Key Stages of Technology
Author and WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson talks about the four stages that a technology needs to go through to become viable. It’s a valuable look at what a thought leader has to say about technology trends. The talk, while more intellectual than entertaining, is full of useful tips, including how to think about technology and how to time an innovation.
17. Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice
Too many products and services in our society lead to too much choice, according to psychologist Barry Schwartz. Even our identity is a matter of choice: We invent and reinvent ourselves whenever we want. He goes over positive and negative effects of this choice in people, including the levels of satisfaction people experience with products, how products affect them, and how regret plays into the equation. It’s a unique look into today’s consumer society.
16. Sergey Brin and Larry Page on Google
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page talk about their company, search patterns, and Google.org. A fascinating talk if you’re interested in inner workings of Google.
15. Richard Branson’s Life at 30,000 feet
Virgin emperor Richard Branson shares interesting parts of his life story, including making it big with Virgin and selling Virgin Records to start an airline. This talk, with TED curator Chris Anderson, gives you a rare peek inside Branson’s head.
14. Jan Chipchase on Our Mobile Phones
Head Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase explores engaging questions on mobile technology. What do mobile phones really mean to us? How would someone who can’t read use a mobile phone? How would impoverished people in developing countries use one? Chipchase gets you thinking about mobile technology in a completely new way.
13. John Doerr: Salvation and Profit in Greentech
Legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr gives a serious talk on climate change. Claiming “we’ve reached the time…when panic is the appropriate result,” Doerr talks about how to fight climate change, eminent VC-style. This fascinating talk shares Doerr’s valuable perspective on battling a big problem, not to mention a number of interesting company stories.
12. Cameron Herold: Let’s raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneur Cameron Herold shares his own stories of school to help us revisit the way we see success in children—and in ourselves.
11. Ray Anderson on the Business Logic of Sustainability
Ray Anderson, head of the Flor carpet company, says business can lead us out of our sustainability mess. Anderson, whom Fortune has called “America’s greenest CEO,” calls himself a recovering blunderer. His talks about alternatives to businesses that are “stealing our children’s future,” using the greening of his carpet company as an example.
10. Yochai Benkler: The New Open-Source Economics
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, communications, computation capacity, and other building blocks of the economy are in the hands of the crowds. 70% of critical Web applications are produced open-source, in direct competition with big corporations, notably Microsoft. Thought leader Yochai Benkler explains what this means for jobs, corporations and the economy at large.
9. Charles Leadbeater on Innovation
What is creativity, and where does it come from? Think tank researcher Charles Leadbeater explains why you don’t need an organization to innovate. Innovation, rather, has always been interactive and collaborative. Today, consumers are often ahead of producers in terms of ideas. Leadbeater shares why this is, and how our world of innovation actually works today.
8. Dean Kamen: The Emotion Behind Invention
Prolific inventor Dean Kamen, best know for creating the Segway, describes his work designing a new kind of prosthetic arm for soldiers who lost limbs while serving. He describes not only his own thought process, but the people who motivated him to make it work. This is an excellent look inside the mind of one of today’s greatest inventors, not to mention the stories of the vets who inspired him.
7. Bill Gates on Energy: Innovating to Zero!
Uber-philanthropist Bill Gates shares where he’s putting his money in order to help lower carbon emissions to zero by 2050. An interesting talk by one of today’s leading philanthropists and ex-CEOs.
6. John Gerzema: The Post-Crisis Consumer
Trend expert John Gerzema talks about how consumers are behaving now, and the four cultural shifts that drove them to their current habits. He provides a thought-provoking model of where consumers are. Importantly, he also describes how businesses can connect with today’s consumers.
5. Dan Ariely: Are We In Control of Our Own Decisions?
We make many mistakes, but don’t have an easy way to see them, thanks to cognitive illusion. This excellent talk by Predictably Irrational author and behavioral economist Dan Ariely gives us insight into how we make decisions.
4. Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die
This is a recording of Steve Jobs’ 2005 speech at a Stanford commencement. He talks about his health, his dreams, his attitude on life, and, naturally, Apple.
3. Seth Godin: Not Business as Usual
Author and blogger extraordinaire Seth Godin delivers a compelling talk on the merits of bad or bizarre ideas in marketing. In characteristic contrarian fashion, he emphasizes that normal will not get you noticed. He uses fascinating examples to make his points on ideas and marketing.
2. Malcom Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce
Author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell makes points about companies’ market behavior and human nature by telling market researcher Howard Moskowitz’s story. Moskowitz, charged with figuring out how to make Campbell’s Prego pasta sauce more desirable, discovered that in general, people only liked three kinds of sauce, including one niche–chunky–that no sauce manufacturer had touched before. Gladwell’s story offers insight into product segmenting, the food industry, and how people behave in market surveys.
1. Rory Sutherland: Life Lessons from an Ad Man
Ad man and compelling speaker Rory Sutherland gets inside the consumer mind by comparing real with perceived value. This is a talk not to be missed, by one of TED’s most entertaining business speakers.
We were excited when we got our hands on an unlaunched version of Google Voice for the desktop, which let users make and receive calls via a soft phone on their computer. We hear that software is still on ice, though, and won’t be launched any time soon. But it probably doesn’t matter – today Google Voice is being integrated right into the browser via Gmail. It’s amazingly good – I know because I’ve been testing it for the last few days.
Just download the Google Talk plugin for your browser and you can then make calls to any U.S. or Canadian phone number directly from Gmail. And if you already use Google Voice you can make those calls anywhere else, too, for a very low per minute charge. The feature is fully integrated into Google Voice, which means you can set Google Voice to receive calls in Gmail, and use your Google Voice contact book. Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
This is great news if you’ve got bad cell reception in your home or workplace, because you can make and receive calls anywhere you have Wifi reception. Some other very cool features: if you’re on Google Voice and take a call from within Gmail, you switch a call over to your mobile phone and continue it on the go without having to drop the call and reconnect.
Call quality is very, very good – comparable to Skype. See video below of test calls we performed. (Play fullscreen for best viewing, and make sure to check out the screenshots below).
Pricing:
Calls to US and Canada for free at least through the end of the year. Google PM Real Time Communications Craig Walker says they hope to keep these calls free indefinitely, provided the margins on international calls can cover the free US/Canada calls.
2 cents/minute landline rates to dozens of countries, with no connection fee on calls.
Mobile rates are often less expensive than competitors.
Although technological advances have made uploading photos easier over the years, it’s still impossible to have pictures you take with your DSLR transmitted immediately and automatically to the internet. Or is it? More »
We’ve already explained why harassment against photographers is illegal and intolerable—but now resistance might be easier. PetaPixel is now selling a set of portable cards that clearly state your legal rights as a camera-carrying citizen. More »
And who doesn’t like a shooter? A word of warning, though. Zombie Balloon Heads uses the old-fashioned mouse-and-WASD layout. If you’re like us, and playing on a laptop with a trackpad, it’s a harsh kick in the head about how useful a real mouse can be. But, you know what? At the end of the day, which is coming up quickly right now a web-based shooter is still a web-based shooter.
In Zombie Balloon Heads, you’re a stick figure, fighting to save your notebook paper home from the hand-drawn zombies coming for you. Could you both have the same creator? Is this some sort of cosmic test? See, these are the questions that a complex game like Zombie Balloon Heads will force you to think about. And also, there are helicopters.
It’s not going to be genre changing, but nobody wants to deal with a subtle nine part generational saga when they’re in between meetings. Zombie Balloon Heads is a time-waster, plain and simple. Head over and have some early midweek fun.
Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: Polaroid Magento Theme, a professional design skin for the shops powered by the popular open-source ecommerce web application Magento. The theme was designed by eCommerce-Themes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use in private and commerical projects.
Download the theme for free!
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.
The Polaroid theme includes the following features:
the Polaroid effect is made with CSS3. The product grid displays products in random orientations.
Product zoom: the category page was spiced up by adding a zoom functionality to the product grid. When you mouse over a product, it zooms in to show the product in more details.
The .zip-package also contains additional modules “Best Sellers”, “Features Products”, “New Products”, and “Multi Shipping”.
As always, here are some insights from the designers:
We wanted to go beyond the boundaries of Magento and break the usual design patterns. We really wanted to try something new, add rich CSS3 features to the Magento theme and experiment a bit with its different features. We are very pleased to share this theme with the community, especially with Smashing Magazine readers.
Thank you, guys. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
Onslaught is a fairly simple “defence” style game, but it’s very fast-paced and lots of fun. You’re a blocky Viking-looking dude in a dungeon. Waves of enemies enter, and you have to kill them all with a variety of weapons.
You use the arrows to move, and Space to shoot. You can just keep Space pressed down permanently, too. You can use Z and X to switch weapons, and you don’t have to stop firing to make the switch. That’s pretty neat.
As your enemies die, they leave all sorts of fun bonuses. My favorite weapon so far is the “fireballs.” You get a whole bunch of fireballs that provide 360 degree fire all around you; they provide perfect coverage.
Some of the levels have “bosses” that fire at you. (The other enemies only come at you; they don’t have any projectile weapons.) One of those bosses is what killed me and ended the game that you see in the screenshot. It’s quite a neat little distraction!
You already know 
Let’s say you’ve got a landline set up with Google Voice and you don’t want to pay for caller ID. Or you just spend a lot of time staring at your computer. If you’re logged into Gmail, and someone rings up your Google Voice number, you can see who’s calling on your computer without digging your phone out of your pocket.
Assuming you’ve already added your Gmail Chat account as a number that can be reached through Google Voice (which also assumes you’ve signed up for Google Voice), you can transfer calls from your phone to your computer to save cellphone minutes. Here’s how it works:
Google Voice is already pretty good at setting up conference calls (demonstrated in the video above). Now that you can call from your computer, you’ve also got a quick-and-dirty speakerphone perfect for the group of people sitting around a table on your coast.
Google Voice has handy recording function, but whenever you enable it (hit 4 to start and finish recording), Google Voice announces “This call is now being recorded.” Prefer to record a conversation surreptitiously? Calling from Gmail puts the audio on your computer, where you can use any number of tools to record your system audio on-the-sly. (For example, despite what I thought at the time, Whitson later told me he wasn’t aware I was recording the call in the video above.) File this under the know-your-state-laws category.
