Do you want to put all your Google Docs files on a USB drive before you take that road trip' The Google Docs website does offer an easy option to help you download all your documents in one zip file but there's another simpler alterative that you may want to give a try' it's called Google Takeout.

Once you have logged in to Google Takeout with your Google Account, select the Google Docs service and hit the 'Create Archive' button. It will create a zip file with all your Google Docs files and you can either keep the browser window open while the archive is being readied or download that file later from the Google Takeout website.

Google Takeout will export your Google Documents in standard Office file formats by default – Excel for spreadsheets or PowerPoint for Presentations – but you also have an option to export files in either PDF or OpenOffice formats.

Google Takeout is part of dataliberation.org, a Google project that wants to make it easy for you to import and export data out of various Google products. The same tool may also be used to export your Picasa photos and Contacts data out of Google Servers though, surprisingly, it doesn't offer Gmail export yet.

Coming back to Google Docs, here's a quick video that shows how easy it is to export your Google Docs files using Google Takeout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch'v=iu4vkCWKTr4

This story, Export all your Google Docs Files with One Click, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Export, Google Docs, Internet.

If you have small kids at home who are still trying to learn the English alphabet, you got to show them Alphabetimals (Alphabet + Animals).

This little site, designed like a flipbook, has cartoon images of animals that are shaped in the form of alphabets (the letter ‘E’ will look like an Elephant) and the visuals should help your kids quickly recognize and learn their ABC.

The illustrations are also available in the form of printable posters, Flash cards and coloring pages that be downloaded as PDFs from Alphabetimals' Facebook page.

Everyone else may just use the Alphabetimal site to write their own name using the very-cute animal font. [via].

This story, Teach your Child the ABC with these Animal Alphabets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Offbeat.

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of a QR Code' A confusing maze of black rectangular patterns arranged on a white background'

True, most QR Codes are available in black and white but they don't have to be that way.

There's an excellent online QR generator at qrhacker.com that lets you create colorful QR codes and what makes this tool different is that it provides you can option to embed photographs and logo images to your QR codes. You can even edit the colors of individual pixels that form the code.

To give you an example, here's a QR code made using a picture of Zuckerberg and if you scan the code with an app on your phone, say Google Goggles, it should take you to Facebook.

Every QR code has a unique URL for easy sharing or you can download the image locally in PNG or PDF. Here are more examples.

QR Code made with a colored picture of Zuckerberg.

This story, Embed Images and Make your QR Codes Look Different, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Embed, Qr Code, Internet.

TechSmith has released a new iPad app called Fast Track that will help you learn the Camtasia Stuidio program at your leisure on your iPad.

The app has a collection of video tutorials, or screencasts, that cover almost every feature of the Camtasia screencasting program and whether you use Camtasia for screen recording or for recording PowerPoint presentations, you may learn something new through these tutorials. All videos tutorials have text transcripts as well though they are only available in the portrait mode.

TechSmith's YouTube Channel (@ChannelTechSmith) also contains a good collection of screencasting related tutorials but the advantage with the new Fast Track app is that it also works offline – you don't need an Internet connection to watch any of the tutorials. And it's free.

I think, going forward, TechSmith will extend this app beyond Camtasia Studio and include tutorials for other products as well including SnagIt, Jing and Camtasia for Mac.

This story, Camtasia Studio Tutorials Available on your iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Camtasia Studio, IPad, Software.

All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure' Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages'

In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.

Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren't a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it 'scanning' and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like 'checking for spam' but it's quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it's not spam, it's personal.

Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn't therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes ' after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren't buying Microsoft's argument.

http://www.youtube.com/watch'v=TDbrX5U75dk

Related: Find if your Email has been Read

This story, Can Google Employees Read your Gmail', was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under GMail, Tech Notes.

Amazon today launched Junglee.com in India today and, in its current form, Junglee is more like an online marketplace where you can quickly compare prices of books, electronics, music, apparel and other products offered by hundreds of online and offline retailers in India.

Several shopping stores in India – including Homeshop18, India Plaza, Shoppers Stop, Fabindia, Microsoft Store, Future Bazaar and many others – have added their product catalogues to Junglee so it becomes a little easier for the consumer to research product prices from one central place.

Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam'

As you may have noted, the two most popular shopping sites in India ' Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com ' are both missing from Junglee.com. These sites might have better deals to offer than Junglee so I have a written a simple bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Is Junglee Cheaper

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag the 'Is Junglee Cheaper' button from this page to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Then open any book page on Junglee.com and click the bookmarklet to instantly know the price of that book on Infibeam and Flipkart.

The first version of the bookmarklet works for books only though I might expand it to other product categories later. Here's a quick video that demonstrates how the Junglee bookmarklet works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch'v=y9P53TLGBJ8

This story, Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under Amazon, Bookmarklets, India.

Amazon has just gone live in India as junglee.com but unlike the main Amazon.com store where most of the products are sold directly by Amazon, their India store is more like a yellow pages-style directory where hundreds of online and offline sellers in India have uploaded their product catalogs.

If you are to a buy a product from Junglee, you don't buy it from Amazon.com (probably because of the FDI rules in our country) but will be redirected to the seller's website. The seller is responsible for the shipping, they may have their own refunds and returns policies and each may offer a different payment mechanism.

Also see: Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart

Amazon in India

Thus, at this time, Amazon in India is mostly looking like a comparison shopping engine. There's no universal shopping cart (you cannot buy products from multiple sellers in one go) though you can use your main Amazon.com credentials to log into Junglee.

I am still quite happy with this development though as it highlights the lesser-known online merchants in India and one can always use Junglee to get a better idea of the price of a product. It may not have an immediate effect on the business of Flipkart but going forward, that could change.

Full credit to BGR and MediaNama for breaking this story.

This story, Amazon Online Store is Live in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Amazon, India.

If you have enabled keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, you may have noticed that pressing the J key selects the previous (older) message in your inbox while the K key moves you one message up to a newer conversation.

The same j & k keyboard shortcuts can be used for navigating items in Google Reader, for moving between tweets on Twitter.com, and it even works with Tumblr.com.

So why do developers commonly assign the k and j keys for moving up and down respectively and not any other key combination'

When Bill Joy created the vi text editor for Unix, he used a ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard didn't have any dedicated arrow keys (see illustration above). Instead the keys h, j, k and l were inscribed with arrow symbols and these keys, in combination with the CTRL key, were used for moving the cursor on the screen.

The keyboard layouts have changed (they got dedicated arrow keys) but the same j & k keys are still popularly used for moving the cursor up and down inside the vi text editor. And since most developers have their roots in the Unix world, they implemented the same shortcut inside their web apps.

Wikipedia has more details on the history of vi and the HJKL keys.

This story, Why do Gmail and other Web Apps use j & k Keys for Navigation', was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Keyboard Shortcuts, Internet.

Jef Poskanzer has been an AdSense publisher since June 2003 but last month, an automated email from the AdSense team landed in his inbox:

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Google's click fraud detection algorithm may have detected invalid clicks and thus disabled the AdSense account. Jef raised an appeal but the AdSense team wrote a final response saying they were unable to reinstate his AdSense account.

Jef shared his ordeal online (Jan 30, 9:32 PM), Matt Cutts re-shared the story on his Google+ page (Jan 31, 2:36 PM) and the next status update from Jef said that his account has been reinstated (Feb 1, 8:08 AM).

AdSense reinstated my account earlier today, and the ads are now appearing again. Yay! I’m still having a conversation with them about what happened and what we should do to keep it from happening again.

Jef was exchanging emails with the AdSense support team for the past 15 days and none of that worked in his favor. Matt Cutts (Google's best known public face) entered the scene, the click-fraud team probably did another review and Jef's AdSense account was quickly reinstated in less than 24 hours.

This is good news for Jef but it does expose a very serious flaw in Google's click-fraud detection algorithms. An account that was deemed a 'threat' to advertisers just few days ago is considered safe again. What changed Google's mind in such a short duration of time'

There could be hundreds of other honest and legitimate web publishers who have been wrongly banned from the AdSense program without explanation and all they get from Google are these automated replies.

This story, Publisher’s AdSense Account is Disabled, Reinstated Quickly, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Google Adsense, Internet.

If a tweet contains two words that are separated by a dot (or period), Twitter – and the various apps like Tweetdeck – may sometimes interpret that combination as a web address and will auto-convert the words into a clickable link wrapped inside a t.co URL.

This is helpful is most cases because you can safely avoid writing http:// in your tweets and Twitter will still convert all the included web addresses into hyperlinks.

However, if you want Twitter to display URLs in plain text and not convert them into hyperlinks, here's a simple trick ' just replace the period (or dot) symbol in your tweet with its ASCII equivalent (.) and Twitter would display your message without conversion.

For example, if I were to tweet ' 'is twitter.com down'',  the modified tweet will read like 'is twitter.down'' and Twitter will show that link in plain (non-clickable) text.

It’s a simple trick but the only problem is that some apps, like the Twitter app for iPad, do no correctly handle ASCII codes correctly but that should get fixed with time.

This story, Prevent Twitter from Auto-Converting Words into Hyperlinks [Trick], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 31/01/2012 under Twitter, Internet.