Siri - My Personal Assistant reminds me of everything

Siri (Voice activated Personal Assistant) is a wonderful feature in iPhone 4S. You can talk to Siri as if conversing with your friend. Let us see how to make our friend Siri to remind us our stuffs.

How to launch Siri?

• Press and hold the Home button

                                 or

• Take iPhone to your ear and look back into Home Screen

Siri will be launched. Wait for Siri to beep and you can start talking to her.

How to set reminders with Siri?

Exemplar:

Talking to Siri "Set a reminder to take tablets everyday 1 PM"

Say "Yes" to her to confirm

Siri has set reminder successfully and she will never forget to remind us.

Siri reminds using GPS:

•  You can tell Siri to remind something when you leave some place. Say "Remind me to take Umbrella when I leave here".
• You can tell Siri to remind something when you arrive some place. Say "Remind me to talk to John when I go to Office" (Office address should be added in Contact Information).

Certain Reminders:

•   Remember to start cooking at 8 PM.
•   Remind me to buy milk at 5PM tomorrow.
•   Remind me to buy bread every 5 days.
•   Remind me to finish this article by 6 PM. 
•   Remind me to attend meeting every Monday (everyday, every week, every two weeks, once a month, once a year). 

Note:

You can check back your reminders by asking Siri - Reminders for today/Reminders for July 28/Reminders for next month etc.

Google Alerts - Perceive latest info on your desired search to your Inbox

Google alert is a facility to preset your Google search and get the latest information regarding the search to your inbox directly. One should be aware of Creating and Managing Alerts in order to make use of this feature.

• Stay signed in your Google account and launch http://www.google.com/alerts in your browser.
• In the Search query field, enter your desired search term. Preview of your search is shown at the right side of the Google alerts home page. By having a look at the Preview, you can make sure if the search term chosen is appropriate.

• Select the Result Type (Everything/News/Blogs/Video/Discussions/Books), How often - frequency of alerts (As-it-happens/Once a day/Once a week), How many (Only the best results/All results), Deliver to (Your email id) and Click on Create Alert button. You are taken to the Google Alerts page with the alert set up.

•  Click the Edit button to change the Search term, Volume and How often and Save after editing. 
•  To delete an alert, tick the Check Box ahead of the alert and Click the Delete button.

Search on Mac smartly by configuring Spotlight

Spotlight is a tool to search the contents on Mac. The search is efficient with Spotlight as it focuses on Metadata. By configuring the spotlight on Mac you can go for a more effective search.

• Go to System Preferences and Open Spotlight Panel.

• You can check the check Boxes of items to be included in the Spotlight searches. (Eg Applications, System Preferences etc)
• You can choose your preferable "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut" (to launch spotlight) as any function key. The default choice is command + space. 
•  You can choose your preferable "Spotlight window keyboard shortcut" (to launch spotlight search result window) as any function key. The default choice is option + command + space.

How to prevent spotlight from searching certain locations?

At times, you don't want the spotlight to search certain sensitive locations on your MAC. To do that,

• Click Privacy tab on Spotlight Panel
• Click the Add button (+) and browse the folder you like to prevent from spotlight search and click Choose.

• You can also drag and drop the sensitive folder into the list under the Privacy tab.

Generate traffic to your blog via Pinging

Pinging is a technique to drive the contents of a blog to the leading blog search engines and directories. Whenever you update the blog, you can send a Ping to the search engines by means of various free pinging services available on the web. A Ping is a brief message containing the basic information about your new post on the blog. Pings are good traffic generator. Here are some of the fascinating pinging services.

1. http://pingomatic.com/
2. http://blo.gs/ping.php 
3. http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping
4. http://ping.in/
5. http://pingoat.net/
6. http://pingler.com/
7. http://freewebsubmission.com/#fws_submit_form

 Exemplar:

• Go to http://pingomatic.com/
• Enter the Blog Name, Blog Home Page,RSS URL (optional) on the pingomatic home page. Check all the services that needs to be pinged.

• Now Click the Send Pings button at the bottom of the page and You will be redirected to the Pinging Complete! page. Hence Pinging can generate traffic to your blog with ease.

Google Reader for your favorite blogs

Everyone of us have our own favorite blogs, where they add regular content. But the site won't be notifying us when they post any new article. Its tedious for us to go and check the site often to know about the latest updates. We are going to make use of a cloud based application called The Google Reader to read all our favorite blog updates aggregated at a single place.

Feature behind the Google Reader

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the feature of the websites which allows us to subscribe to the feed sent by the website.

Feed is nothing but a date file sent by the website, to display the latest updates on the site.

In order to subscribe to and display the Feed, we need a Feed Reader (like Google Reader) so that we can read the contents.

How to use Google Reader?

• Go to this link http://www.google.com/reader/view/ to launch the Google Reader. Currently the reader is empty without any feeds.

• Click on the Subscribe button on the left navigation pane of the Google Reader and enter the address of your favorite blog (I have entered techzio.blogspot.com).

•  Now click the Add Button. You have subscribed to "TECHZIO". Similarly you can subscribe to all your favorite websites.

 

• The list of the sites subscribed will be at the bottom pane under the Subscription list. You can click on the specific blog to read or click on All items at the top of the navigation pane to read all the blogs subscribed. The Google Reader displays the contents at the right side of the page. By default the contents  are shown in Expanded view. you can also jump to Quick view by clicking the list view icon at the right side top corner.

 

Enjoy reading all your favorite blogs at one place.