Clerks BLAH!

Google Voice is a telephone service that gives you a FREE local number loaded with a ton of free features, like: Voicemail, call history, conference calling, call screening, blocking of unwanted calls, and voice transcription to text of voicemail messages.

They will provide you with a voicemail number, which is a perfect way to keep from having to give out your cell phone number, and still have the messages come in to you when you are on the go. They also allow you to use much of the websites features with your existing number too.

The website is very similar to their gmail site, and is one of the simplest interfaces I have ever worked with, without losing features.

The website is available at: https://www.google.com/voice

BONUS: I currently have a couple of invites that I want to share. I am looking for people to tweet about this site/post on twitter. Post a link to your twitter page on here (in the comments) and the top sharers will be rewarded with an invite!

One of the biggest downfalls to having a netbook, or a small laptop computer is having a small amount of screen real estate.  Plus with it being a NETbook is does spend a lot of it’s time online online, so an ideal app would be one that solves these issues.

Well that’s one (of the many) great features of the Google Chrome web browser.  It has taken the idea of browser tabs and pushed them up into the title bar, plus made it’s address bar into a single bar and also included your nav buttons and your menu system.  Also, the status bar (at the bottom) is hidden, unless it is in use.

One of the other great features of this browser is that it is very very fast.  The initial program loading time is less than half the time it takes to load Mozilla Firefox, and the page loading time is faster than BOTH Firefox and Internet Explorer.  See this CNET article for more information.

It’s a fast and compact browser that is free to download and works better than it’s counterparts.  You can’t go wrong!

Google Chrome is available for download from: http://www.google.com/chrome

What’s the biggest difference between using Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird verses using a web based email like Gmail? The fact that you can work offline with a standalone application where with a web based email you can only use your email when you have an active internet connection.

Well Gmail has solved this with their Offline Gmail option that is available in Gmail Labs. It works with Google Gears and allows your email to be synchronized into an offline mode.

What happens is when you access mail.google.com with no internet connection the page will load, but without the ability to actually receive or send. It simply waits until you get an active internet connection and processes everything at once.

To install it (from within gmail):
1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline 0.1″ link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.