Picasaweb: unlisted does not mean private

There is a misconception that Google's photo service, Picasaweb, has a private option. There is an 'unlisted' option, but no 'private' option. There is a clear difference: the unlisted option required an Authkey to access to album, but if you have this then you get access with no further input required.

If you put the link to an unlisted album with its Authkey on a web site indexed by Google, then your unlisted album becomes findable and accessible.

This has happened quite a bit as you can see by using the search term "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=picasaweb.google+inurl%3Aauthkey&btnG=Search". You get back 40,000 hits in Safari, and 60,000 in Camino. Curious difference!

You can refine your search by adding, say, "London" (5 hits), or Bankgkok (4).

You can also add your own Picasaweb / Gmail ID to see if any of your own albums are findable.

Gmail now have fulltime https

As reported in the Register, consumer gmail now has an 'always use https'. You can choose to stay opportunistic if you want. The difference is that always on means if you try to load http://mail.google.com after (https) login you'll be re-directed to https://mail.google.com, while with opportunistic means after login you'll go plain http, although you can manually change to https.

Personally I don't see why youldn't want to use fullltime TLS.

Read more here

To use the fulltime https, go into Settings and scroll to the bottom and select "Always use https", save the changes and off you go.

Google Apps now have enforced fullltime SSL

It seems Google Apps now have a force SSL option available. In order words you can enforce access over https. Hurraay!

I noticed in the control panel this morning a box that says

"Enable SSL Automatically enforce Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections when your users access Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Sites."

The help page are here at www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=100181&hl=en

Nice!

Blogger / Blogspot - visitor tracking

Google handily offer some free visitor counting and tracking services through analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ and sign in with your Gmail account, and off you go. Then modify your Blogger template - I put the tracking code (ga.js) into the template at the bottom, just before the final tag.

You can create multiple trackers for your other web sites as well.

Stats get generated daily.

Sharing Google Docs outside your domain

Ordinarily it seems you cannot share Google Docs with people outside your domain.

But using the Sites trick I blogged about previously, you can.

Create your Google Site and pages.

Create your Doc. Publish it. Share it with the external person

Insert it into your page / Site

Now send them the URL and they should be able to login and see your Site.

Selective sharing of Google Sites outside your domain

Google Sites does not have ACLs yet, so in the meantime here is a way to selectively share a site outside your domain.

Part 1: The person you want to share your site with needs to go to the Team Edition web site at http://www.google.com/apps/business/index.html and sign up. NB I haven't tested freebie webmail accounts other than gmail - you cannot use a gmail.com address.

When they get the confirmation email tell them to click the link, follow it through and they will get the dashboard logon.

Part 2: When they tell you this is done, you share out your site with this other account. Personally I would select 'viewer' for them.

You copy the URL from the site you are sharing, and send it them. When they load it they get this screen:


Part 3: They click on 'sign in with a different account' and put in their Team Edition credentials into the box labelled "Enter your email address", NOT the box above! Then press 'go'.
and they get the Site.

If you revoke their share permission they will get a denied page:

Importing email into GMail part 4

If you've been reading the other parts (one, two and three) 0f this story, well, thank you! Here we are at part 4 and its looking good.

One of the things you can do in Thunderbird is to have tags, or in GMail speak, labels, for your email. Thunderbird allows you to colour them. So does GMail.

First create your labels, and then scroll down and then in the the small box to the right of the label, click in an select a colour.

Importing email into GMail part 3

So following part 1 and part 2, we've moved all the email stored remotely into GMail, but now what to do with the email in Thunderbird's local folders?

Well again Apple Mail comes to the rescue. We need to import the Thunderbird folders in Mail, and then we can drag and drop into GMail.

To do this safely, I went into the profile folder where Thunderbird keeps its mail

~/library/Thunderbird/profiles/xyz123.default/Mail/Local Folders

and in there found the items with email: Inbox and Sent. Copy them elsewhere, and stick a .mbox on them ie so they are named Inbox.mbox and Sent.mbox.

Then go into Mail and go into File>Import Mailboxes and select 'other'. Navigate to the folder where your mboxs are. They will be greyed out. Don't worry. Select 'continue' and they will be imported anyway.

After a few minutes they'll show up in Mail and you can then drag and drop into GMail.

Importing email into GMail part 2

In a previous post I discussed how to move email into GMail.

Some people have seriously large email collections ie tens of GBs, perhaps 1TB or more.

So if you want to move them to GMail you will need to factor the rate of ingestion ie how fast GMail is at importing email. This article talks about this issue - they did 10,000 emails in 3 hours which works about to be about 1 per second.

Moving and migrating email to GMail

I needed to help a family member move their email from a very space limited email account into a nice roomy comfortable GMail account.

No problem I thought, Thunderbird will do the job. Load both accounts as IMAP folders, and drag and drop.

Well, no.

The email moves thats true, but Thunderbird does not save the dates of the emails. All the email shows up as brand new.

Not good!

Fortunately being a Mac user I was able to use Apple Mail to move the emails over.

Backrub - when Google was a start up!

While troubleshooting a family members Huawei SmartAX MT882 supplied for the TalkTalk ADSL service, I came across some pages about Google's past as a startup.

Fascinating!

Here's their _entire_ hardware setup!

And this is their Stanford paper

I never did find the firmware upgrade I was looking for!

Nokia N73 and Google Maps Mobile gets Cell and GPS support

Discovered from here that there is a new version of Google Maps Mobile for the Nokia S60 series of phones in SIS form ie native application instead of the previous Java J2ME.

The new version also has Bluetooth GPS support. Magic!

On your phone, go to www.google.com/gmm and follow the instructions.

Pressing '0' or selecting options>mylocation will use the data from which Cell you're in, and calculate your position. You can switch the display between map and satellite view. Its surprisingly accurate.

Pressing '2' switches between map and satellite view.

To turn on GPS support you have to switch to it. Options>Tools>Use GPS.