Tag Archives

App Highlights: Pushbullet

By Sunday, December 7, 2014 0 Mobile , , , Permalink 1

Pushbullet is the missing link between your mobile devices and other computers. With its various mobile apps and browser extensions, it finally allows you to move between mobile and desktop with ease.

The features that make Pushbullet one of the first things I install include:

  • Notification sync: the mobile app sends notifications to the desktop, so I don’t need to pick up the phone while working on my laptop.
  • Push links (and files, and notes): push something from the desktop to the phone, instantly. no more emailing-to-self nonsense!
  • SMS from desktop: send and reply to SMS messages from the laptop, without picking up the phone!

App Highlights is a recurring series. From time to time, I highlight one Android app that I found useful. Feel free to suggest apps for me to highlight, but be advised that I focus on apps that I actually use.

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My Favorite Chrome Custom Searches

By Sunday, July 21, 2013 0 Lifehacking , , Permalink 1

Custom search engines are an awesome feature in modern web browsers at large. This is especially true in Google Chrome (which is incidentally my favorite desktop browser for daily use).

In a nutshell, custom search engines power-charge the address bar (or omnibar), and allow the user to assign keywords for special operations. Custom operations include searching in a specific site (e.g. Wikipedia, or this blog 🙂 ), run some JavaScript, or invoke commands in various web-apps using crafted URL’s (e.g. creating a new calendar event).

See Google’s support for more details.

In this post I describe my favorite custom search engines, as I configured them in Chrome on my computers, including site-specific searches, time-constrained searches, etc.

It should be noted that other browsers have a similar feature with similar syntax, so the same definitions might apply as well. Note that I did not test them on browsers other than Chrome.

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