Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Before Google became popular, it was common to see the expression RTFM  (or in polite terms, Read The Fine Manual) used in internet forums if a poster asked a question without doing any homework. These days it is more common to see messages directing such users to Google or Bing instead of the manual. LMGTFY.com (the word LMGTFY represents the initial letters of "let me google that for you") is one among a bunch of sites that sarcastically explains how to use Google. It lets a responder create a shortened URL for a saved search query for a question that a poster may have posed without putting any effort to solve it by himself. The popular Q&A site, StackOverflow discourages impatient responders from posting LMGTFY-like links.

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects. If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight . There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works - the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function) if the user selected a range of text, then it: creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen) reports what was copied back to Tynt's serv...

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category. To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on the StackExchange Web Apps forum wanted to know how he can automatically filter emails on arrival so that they are placed under a single category as in Hotmail. Here are the steps - 1. Click on the "Create a Filter" link that's next to search box in Gmail 2. As we want the filter to act upon ALL emails that are recieved, set the To: textbox to your own email address & click on the "Next Step" button 3. Choose the first option to Skip the Inbox alongwith "Apply the label:" option to move an incoming ema...