Nils’ Geek Blog

Gmail is continously improving with new features. ZDNet’s Google Blog is now reporting new features will be added to the gmail accounts. One of the features is that you can now delete all spam with a single click. This is probably not groundbreaking. I however like the second feature, which is the ability to add filters to exisiting emails. Up to now it’s only been possible to add filters to incoming emails. This new features makes it a lot easier to organize your emails.

If you, like me, have multiple email accounts and receive hundreds of emails every month, this is very helpful. Earlier you had to use searching and go through pages of search hits to add labels to lots of emails. Now you can do this is in a filter.
I use labels frequently in my gmail accounts. Yes, I have two accounts. One for rss feeds and one regular. Google Operating System has a list of things you can do with this new feature.

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Problogger have listed many ways to promote your blog. I’ll list some of them here: (Read the article)

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It’s been a while since I’ve been on the search for domain names, but then today I remembered that I had an idea years ago. I was thinking that it should be possible to develop a online service that monitors the currently available domains and then sends you an email as soon as they’re available. After googling I found Domain Watcher. However, they charge “£9.99 (approx. $19 USD or EUR15) to monitor the domain of interest for 12 months.” I think this should be a free service from the domain registrar.

After googling some more I found an application called Domain Name Pro. This is indeed a very neat application. What I find interesting is that you may add a few word combinations, and the application comes up with lots of alterntives (using a thesaurus). This application could also be useful if you are looking for a suitable name for your product or company.

I still think that this service should be available online, with the possibility of subscribing to feeds and notification. If such a (free) service doesn’t exist already, I guess it soon will. It will probably take advantage of the popular AJAX development technique.

UPDATE: I found a freeware version of the application. It’s however a lot simpler, but it has no restrictions.

UPDATE 2: Domainnameshop offers a free monitoring of your domain. Subscribe for monitoring of domains and get an email notification when it’s available. Thanks to Håvard this tips.

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I’ve used Transana when transcribing the interviews for my thesis experiments. I really recommend using this application. It’s free and it has all you need. When transcribing you use CTRL-A to rewind a few seconds, CTRL-S to pause and rewind 2 seconds, CTRL-D just to pause, CTRL-F to skip forward a few seconds. The software can be used for video transcriptions as well as for recording. However, it does not support mpeg4 yet. It didn’t matter to me as I was only trascribing wav-files. Still the main argument, in my opinion, for choosing Transana instead of a Word & Winamp (using global hotkeys) solution, is the use of the timecodes. You connect the transcription to the actual recording. This is very useful.
When analyzing the data I exported the transcription to word, as I prefer this to Transana’s keyword functionality. But the exported rtf-document contains the “¤<23423>” timecodes. After googling about word and regex queries I found the pattern I needed. For those interested use this pattern: ¤\< (<[0-9]*>)\>

If you want to know more about word and regex queries check out these links:

Putting regular expressions to work in Word

Microsoft Office Assistance: Add power to Word searches with regular expressions

Finding and replacing characters using wildcards

Mastering Regular Expressions

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The best is the enemy of the good. Working toward perfection might prevent completion. Complete it first, and then perfect it. The part that needs to be perfect is usually small.

– Steve McConnell, Two time winner of the Software development magazine Jolt award.

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