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- Say, I read an email, or delete an email, or archive an email, or mark it as read — any of these actions should result in the email header not appearing in bold (or shown as unread). It happens momentarily, but on next auto-refresh a couple of emails again show as unread. Anyone else seen this happening? This has happened more often when I am checking my Gmail at work, where there may be security and firewall issues, but what should that cause this error?

- Sometimes I write an email, mostly in reply to someone, and hit “send”. The email does not get sent, and what I see in my sent mails is a blank email, with “(no subject)” and nothing in the to: field. I also lose my edits and have to start all over again. See screenshots below of what I see:

Next item I am talking about is a nice-to-have feature. Let me describe the scenario. I have 15 unread messages in your inbox, and am reading message 5 of 15. I have managed to reach the fifth message by hitting keyboard shortcut j or k, or by clicking newer or older — so I don’t have to select the message from the list. After reading message 5, I hit delete, or archive. Now I am back to the “list” on Gmail home page, and have to figure out where I was. Why can’t the deletion of the last mail take me directly to the next (or previous) mail – that is what Hotmail does!

Before hitting Publish on this post, I did look in the Google Labs, and didn’t find the above feature. If someone at Google is listening, can they look into the above?

Well, until I see a full month of above errors not appearing in my Gmail, my beta tag is going right back up.

There are more features of this auto-complete functionality that you may want to explore, e.g., whether there are attachments, what attachment type, etc. See the original post on the official Gmail blog for more details. What is good is that it worked well with multilingual addresses.

While I completely understand Twitter’s intention to keep it stupid-simple, it could do with a few changes. Here’s my small wish list:

1. The “search twitter” and “twitter home” links should be on top, prominently visible, not all the way at the bottom – so that it is easier to switch between the two. “Search” is hidden away in a bunch of small links in the footer of the main page; it just does not make sense. I use the trick of clicking on a “reply” link to quickly go from “search page” to “twitter home”, but coming back to “search” is not that easy.
2. When you @reply someone, there is no way to tell for a reader which tweet you are replying to. If the reply is terse and/or the original is a prolific twitter, how do you understand the conversation? The reply should somehow link to the original tweet — without eating into your 140 character quota. I think the only way out right now is to manually add a link to the original tweet, but that is cumbersome and leaves you with lesser characters.Sorry, I figured this out. The link to the original tweet is where it says “reply to so-and-so” below the post.
3. OK, this one is a nice to have. Multiple accounts or tabs should be possible. Many people, in fact most people I know, have multiple accounts. My top reason is multilingual microblogging. If I am twittering in Hindi, I want to keep my Hindi tweets separate. There are dozens of other reasons why people want to have multiple twitter feeds. So, even if  Twitter wants to limit one account per email address, have tabs so that.

That’s about it! Didn’t I say it was a small list? @Twitter, is somebody listening?

Overall, even with such a short age as a twitter, and not so much experience, I think it is addictive and not that much fruitful, in particular if you are as quiet a person as I am. Soon it will be time for a twitter free resolution.

Look at the following picture. Do you think you can make out anybody’s face in that crowd? Now click on the picture. It will open in a new window, then you can zoom in and out, pan in all directions, and look at the faces of millions of people, up close. The zoom and pan works similar to what you can do with Google Maps or Google Earth. Use the mouse scroll, or the on-screen zoom buttons.

Panoramic picture stitching is not new. I have seen group pictures being stitched, but this is awesome. The above picture is made by stitching together 220 images and totals 56,646 X 27,788 or 1.57 gigapixels. It is done using a robotic camera mount called the Epic, and according to the gigapan website:

Simply attach your camera to it, then the Epic directs you through the steps to capture a gigapixel image. You set the upper left and lower right corners of your panorama, then the Epic works out how many photos your camera will need to take, hundreds or even thousands, and automatically organizes them into the correct rows and columns needed to capture you panorama. The robotic arm clicks away, capturing amazing detail in a short amount of time.

The camera mount costs $379 as of today. Not bad for the results it can get you. The gigapan.org website hosts the panoramic pictures people take and post. Some awesome pictures can be seen there. See the following from Kodak Center in LA on Oscar night two weeks back? I was able to locate the Slumdog Millionaire team in this crowd. Irrfan Khan, Danny Boyle, A.R. Rahman, Madhur Mittal. Try it and let me know if you found them by posting a comment .

Look at the following picture from the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. You can zoom into the intricacies of designs made on the walls.

According to this page on NASA’s website, it is the same technology that is used by Mars rovers to image the red planet.
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इस प्रविष्टि को हिन्दी में पढ़ें।

So what was the problem? Well, this seems to be not so uncommon and the Micorsoft TechNet forums had discussed a number of solutions, some of which worked for the participants and some didn’t. Some of the solutions dealt with messing with registry entries, which everyone wouldn’t want to do. So, I talked to one of our IT guys, and this is what he did: he emptied the temporary folder that stores the images that come embedded with emails. Looks like this folder gets too full. In my case, the location of the folder was something like “C:Documents and SettingsusernameLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesOLK22″. He also added a shortcut to this folder on my desktop and asked me to empty it everytime this happens.

Anyone got an easier solution? Has Microsoft fixed this problem? Maybe adding a command like IE’s “Tools, Internet Options, Delete temporary files” would help. I will keep looking and update as I find out more.

TiSP (BETA) was simply too good to be true, and still I fell for it. It claimed that TiSP (BETA) was a free broadband service working “by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines”. If I “signed up” they would send me the installation kit free and after a lot of dirtying my hands connecting it to my commode, I would have free wireless broadband internet. I clicked the “get started” link and got to the install page, which got me nowhere, except the FAQ page. The FAQ page had links to the custom install page and list of (water) companies that support TiSP, and they all ended up at the not found page. They even set up a support group, which already has over a thousand messages. And a blog post to boot, to announce the service.

In the meantime, my wife was swooning over the new free photo-printing service from Gmail. It said it could print our emails and mail them to us, supported by advertising, and also..

Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip. MP3 and WAV files will not be printed.

Why wouldn’t they print MP3 and WAV files I wonder?

Well, it seems if you have Microsoft Outlook Express and/or Windows Messenger activated in your account, it talks to the Windows log-on screen and tells it about the number of messages in your account. People have complained that this message doesn’t go away even when you read those messages or mark them as read.

But, the good news is – there is a fix. You will need to download TweakUI “PowerToy” from this page. This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more. It lets you do tweak your user interface in a bunch of ways. Read the discussion and instructions on this page too.

>What do we have to lose………..
>THIS TOOK TWO PAGES OF THE TUESDAY USA TODAY – IT IS FOR REAL
>To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages,
>But this is from my friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is an attorney.
>If she says that this will work – It will work. After all,What have you got to lose?

After a lot more blah-blah, it goes on to say

>When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will
>track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks
>time period.
>For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay
>you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on,
>Microsoft will pay you $ 243.00 and for every third person that receives
>it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact
>you for your address and then send you a check.

What bothers me no end is the fact that people working in so-called hi-tech companies have believed this BS and forwarded it to hundreds of people. Why can’t people do just a bit of research before forwarding such hoaxes to people. All it takes to find out the truth is either to google it, or to visit a site like breakthechain.org.

This one email took up 754 KB on my mail server. On a print-preview it measured a whopping 77 pages in letter size. Some people may have grown the chain to even higher byte size.

Pleeeeeeeeease folks, do just a little bit of homework before forwarding a lie to everyone on your contact list. What do you have to lose? Well, you have to have lost your sanity to act upon such hoaxes, so smarten up.

For those who are still waiting for their check from Bill Gates in the mail, hear it from the horse’s mouth:

Well, it is hooey. There’s a lot of hooey on the Internet, and a lot that’s rude. But that doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t wonderful, that it won’t change the world or that it won’t get a lot better over time.

Amen!

Still, if you are among the majority of internet users, most likely your language of computer usage is exclusively English. Do you know if Windows supports your language or not? By the time you finish reading this post, you will, and the answer is more likely to be “yes”. Take a look at the partial list of supported languages in the screenshot below. What’s more, you can keep the default language English, enable writing in another language, or two, and switch seamlessly between them. You can write your emails, blogs, or fill up blog comments or web forms effortlessly in either or both languages. Here is a self-explanatory screenshot, followed by an easy tutorial.

Here’s the quick tutorial:

Step 1: Go to Control Panel.
Step 2: Click “Regional and Language Options”.
Step 3: Choose the “Languages” tab.
Step 4: If the input language you want to add is East Asian, Indic or among other complex scripts, etc. check the relevant box under “Supplemental Language Support”. For Indic languages check the first box. Click “Apply”. You may be prompted to insert Windows installation CD, and may have to reboot your PC. After rebooting, start from step 1.
Step 5: Click on “Details” under “Text services and input languages”.
Step 6: Under “Installed services” click “Add”.
Step 7: Choose the desired language from the drop down menu, and keep clicking “OK” to close open dialog boxes.

Now, this is how the language bar on your Windows status bar should look like.

Just choose the input language and start typing. Default keyboard shortcut to switch between the input methods is Alt+Shift. You can change this by returning to the above dialog boxes. If you have questions, ask in the comments section.