Election Map from Google

This year is the US Election Year. Google created this Map gadget to trace each Primary result. You could change the map by choosing different states or parties. Try it out.

Google Calendar sync with Microsoft Outlook

This past week, Google released a new software to sync the Google calendar with Microsoft Outlook. I've been waiting for this to come for a while since I am using Google calendar extensively. And the Dell Axim X30's calendar could only sync with Outlook calendar.

As you can see in the above screenshot, it supports both 1-way and 2-way sync. You could also adjust how often will it sync your calendar. However, after using the program for a while. I don't see I will use it at this moment. That's because:

1. It could only sync your primary Google calendar with your default Outlook calendar
   
2. I stop using the calendar in Outlook for a while.
   (Now I'm using the free Mozilla Thunderbird mail client with Lightning calendar add-on - the same company that creates Firefox)
   

Maybe I will wait for the next version that has more appealing features.


PS. Speaking of Thunderbird and Lightning, actually there is an add-on (add-on of add-on) called "Provider for Google Calendar". It "Allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar." Also, it could sync more than one calendar in Google calendar. You might want to check that out too.

PPS. Anyone know is that possible to sync the calendar in Windows Mobile 2003 with Lightning?

Huge "interactive" gmail

Gmail Russia team recently post a video mimicking how to use gmail. It's in Russian but you don't need to know Russian to understand the video (well, the one I embedded here has English subtitles). It tells you in gmail you could search gmail, star an email, use gchat. and use it in mobile phoone. It's interesting what will the next product they will "recreate" next time.

Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/russian-gmail-art.html

Create aliases for your gmail address

From The Official Gmail blog, there are two ways for you to "create" more gmail addresses by using your own gmail account.

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

Also you could combine those two "techniques" to create something like h.i.k.i.n.g.f.a.n+sungamagnus@gmail.com. Using this and gmail filter, you could give out "different" gmail addresses to different people/groups/mailing lists and filter them to different lable in your gmail.