The following is a detailed explanation of how to start using it right now. It will work for Google Apps users as well.

How to set it up

Navigate to your Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar).

• Click on the Settings menu item at the right top corner of the page.
• Click on the Mobile Setup option

• Specify correct values for Country and Phone number (including country + area code)
• Click on the Send Verification Code button
• Check your phone for new incoming SMS messages (for me it took less than 5 seconds)
• The received code put at the field named Verification code
• Click on the Finish setup button

That’s it. You can use this feature right now.

Example

Let’s try something out. Create an new event (click on Create event menu item on the left). Give it some title, set its start time to occur in about 4 minutes and look at the Options section. There you can add several reminders for this event – Email, Pop-up, SMS. Choose SMS option for first reminder and set it to one minute. Click on the Save button. In about 2-3 minutes you will get a notification about this event.

Make it default

For each calendar you can specify its notification preferences. For instance, you night want to receive SMS reminders for each newly added event. To do this, click on the Settings – Calendars.

You will see a list of your calendars (My calendars section). For each one you have a link-like button named Notifications. Click on it. You will be presented will the following page:

In this page you can set up your default reminders. You can have more than one (Email/SMS).

I find this feature very useful. It’s very handy that you can get SMS alerts about your upcoming events when you do not have access to your calendar.

I hope you will find it useful as well.

Related posts

• View your national holidays in Google Calendar

While connecting my laptop to other TVs, I’ve noticed that on some of them the played video was darker than it was supposed to be (maybe because the TV was old ). In this case I was adjusting the brightness of the player itself. Unfortunately Media player did not save the setting so I had to do it manually each time I wanted to watch a movie.

I was suffering like this for a while until I’ve stumbled upon the feature in NVIDIA Control panel (the graphics in my laptop is by NVIDIA). It enables users to adjust the video color settings that will allow to fine tune the color settings for video content on the display.

How to configure it 

• Open the NVIDIA Control Panel (within Windows Control Panel or right click on empty place on Desktop and choose it from the menu list).
• Expand the Video & Television item on the right side of the menu tree
• Click on the Adjust video color settings
• On the right side of the window select your TV monitor for step 1.
• For step 2 select the second option named With the NVIDIA settings

  Now you can adjust the brightness of the video so it will be played in natural colors. It is recommended to use the sliders while watching a movie so the result will be seen immediately.

I was very happy to discover this feature and I hope it will be helpful to you as well.

Related Posts

• Switching to external display or projector in Windows 7

Follow the following steps to configure this on your laptop:

Windows 7

• Open the Control Panel
• Navigate to the Hardware and Sound category
• Click on the Power Options item
• On the left side of the window click on the menu item named Choose what closing the   lid does

or just click on the Start button and type the word lid and the search results will contain item named Choose what closing the lid does 

You will be presented with the following options:

You can control the functionality of various buttons (power and sleep) and the lid here depending whether your laptop is plugged in to the power source or it is running on battery.

I personally set it the way that when my laptop is plugged in and I close the lid it should continue working (Do nothing option). This is very useful especially when you connect your laptop to external projector/monitor (I also have wireless keyboard and mouse connected to it).

The same can be accomplished in Windows XP and also Windows Vista. In Windows XP the setting window is different but you can do it in Power Options item in the Control Panel.

Hope this was helpful for you.

You can click on a desired option with your mouse and it will be immediately applied. Alternatively you can keep pressing the Windows key and tapping the P key again. Each key press will select the next available option thus you can scroll through all listed items (pressing on Tab will have the same result). To scroll through this list backwards hold the Windows Key and Shift key at the same time and use Tab to move back. You can always use the Arrow keys to move forward and backwards as well.

This new feature provides a very convenient and quick way to switch display to external monitor/projector. In case you haven’t connected any external monitors to your PC (or it’s not turned on) you will be see the following message:

Another very nice feature that I like is once you’ve connected your PC/notebook  to external monitor/projector and configured this setting – next time your computer starts, Windows 7 will automatically switch your display to connected device.

I’m using this quite often when I want to watch movie on bigger monitor.

Related articles

• Multiple monitors support in Windows 7

How to set it up

Click on the Settings menu option at the top-right corner of the page. Click on the tab named Calendars. At the Other Calendars section click on the link named Browse interesting calendars. You will be presented with a list of different calendars: national/religious holidays, sports and much more. Each calendar can be previewed and subscribed to.

Once you’ve clicked on the subscribe button the chosen calendar will be added to your calendars list. All the events from this calendar will be available for you. Each calendar has it’s own color and you can easily choose your own color for holidays. For example, you can specify that all holidays will appear in Red color. This way it will look different from the rest of your appointments and even tasks.

Check out all the available calendars. For example, the tab named More will list you some very useful calendars – like your contact’s birthdays and events.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to specify alerts/notifications for such events.

So, go ahead and try it and I’m sure you will find it as a pretty useful feature.

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• Forgotten Attachment Detector in Gmail

Once you are on a screen that you want to capture, just press and hold the Home button and then press the power button. You will hear a sound that you used to hear while taking pictures and you screen will blink. The image will then appear in photo gallery in the Camera Roll album. From there you can share it (send by email or MMS), delete it or copy it and paste in other app.

I tried to take screenshots of running apps and it just worked.

I’m sure you will find it useful for yourself one day.

I’ve been using Gmail for few years now and I absolutely love it – fast, simple and useful. I can access it from anywhere I need and want. They’ve added a new feature a while ago called “Forgotten Attachment Detector”. And it saved me again few days ago: I was sending an email to my client mentioning the attached document and as always I pressed the Send button and a nice message popped up notifying me that I haven’t attached any file yet. That was wonderful. I felt joyful – as if it saved me from something unpleasant.

Google labs

This feature can be added to your Gmail account easily and most important it’s for free. In addition it works in all the popular browsers. No need to install anything and it works from anywhere you access your email.

How to enable it

Navigate to the Settings section of you account.  Click on the Labs tab. You will be presented with a long list of available features that you can enable. This one is called “Forgotten Attachment Detector”. Just select the Enable option and press on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

How to use

Click on the “Compose Mail” link and at the body of the new message type something like “attached is …”. Click on the Send button and you will be presented with the following message: “It seems that you might have forgotten to attach files. Send this message without attachments ?”.

I believe that it’s a very nice addition to the mail system. What do you think about it ?

Related Posts

• View your national holidays in Google Calendar

I’ve plugged it to my ThinkPad X61 and the process of connecting was very simple and straightforward.

To set up the appearance of your displays perform the following steps:

• Right click on mouse on any empty area of the desktop
• From the menu list choose the Screen Resolution option (see below)     

Alternatively you can navigate to Control Panel –> Appearance and Personalization –> Adjust Screen Resolution.

Ether way you will end up in the following window.

Display

List all available and detected monitors

Resolution

Provides you with a very cool slider to adjust preferred screen resolution. It also shows the recommended and optimal settings for your monitors.

Orientation

You can choose between Landscape and Portrait (and Flipped version for each one).

Multiple displays

You can duplicate, extend or choose to display only on one specific monitor.

I’ve decided to extend my desktop on both monitors. The main desktop area (with the taskbar) will be shown on the big monitor and the rest will be extended to the laptop screen. However I’ve tried to find out how to specify the location of the monitors relatively to each other – whether my laptop located on the right or the left side of the big monitor. This is important and convenient way to use mouse when you move windows to the secondary extended monitor – it feels more natural. For example, if your laptop is on the right side of your monitor so it will be more natural to move window to your right side and vice versa.

Windows 7 let’s you adjust this option and even more !

At the window above, you can drag any monitor and drop at the exact location relatively to another one. Not only you can set the sides of both displays (which one is at right or left side) but also the vertical position of each one. For example, my laptop is located a little bit below the main monitor so I’ve used the above window to let Windows know its approximate location. I guess this setting is used later when you move windows to the extended area and it will be shown in a more accurate and precise way.

I’ve been using Windows 7 since it’s early release and I’m very pleased to see all these improvements and features.

Installation

When I tried to install it a message appeared informing me that I had to remove other versions of Office. Since I was too excited to try the new release I’ve uninstalled the current Office installation (Office 2007). After that the installation process was pretty quick and smooth.

Word 2010

After a quick reboot I went directly to Word 2010 and opened some existing documents to experience new features. The splash screen was absolutely beautiful and the program load was very fast. I wasn’t looking for new stuff – I just wanted to work as I usually do and to see if my experience would change/improve.

I loved the new ribbon design – very clean, nice colors – simple and yet powerful.

Insert – Screenshot 

I wanted to insert a picture to my current document and that’s when I’ve stumbled upon it at Insert tab – menu item named Screenshot.  When I’ve clicked on it I was presented with a list of images each of which represented a screenshot of currently opened programs (Task manager for some reason was not in that list). That was very cool ! In addition there was a button named Screen Clipping and when you click on it – it allows you to select any area of the screen and the result is automatically inserted as an image object to the document.

The following screen is presented when you click on the Screenshot button above.

Picture Tools

A very impressive and features rich tab named Picture Tools appears when you click on any image. It’s not a new tab but I can see that it includes a lot of small features that enrich the image editing experience.

Technical Preview

Since this is still an early release of the product I truly hope that this nice feature will be available in final release as well.