Blog from your phone, call for free or use your computer to make free phone calls. Google Voice isn’t the easiest Google service to explain to non-techies, partially because it can be used for so many different things. Find a short list of those things below.

Using only a phone to manage voicemail is old fashioned: Google Voice does a much better job. Manage your voicemail on your computer or phone, and enjoy unlimited free texting within the US and Canada. It’s a service no human should be without, but which is sadly (still) limited to humans who reside in the United States of America. Google, remedy this!

Find below just a few advanced Google Voice tricks. Know some more? Leave them in the comments below the article and share them with the world.

Blog From Your Phone

Imagine being able to blog by phone, from anywhere. It’s not farfetched: our very own Ryan devised a method of voice blogging. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great way to get in a quick blog post from the road.

Free Calls and Texts To Canada

Cell phone has no concept of long distance, provided I’m calling or texting a US number. It’s another matter when you call or text Canada: that costs extra. Good thing I have Google Voice: it allows you to call or text Canada for free.

You can do this one of two ways. The first is to call Google Voice number from my cell phone, then call Canada from that. It’s easy, but requires some extra dialing.

The second way requires some setup, but works very well: have your Canadian friend send a text message to your Google Voice number. Assuming you’ve set up Google Voice to forward texts to your phone, you will now have an American number you can use to reach your Canadian friend. Save this new number and you can call your friend as though it were a domestic call, anytime.

Free Calls From Your Browser

This isn’t exactly a secret, but many people don’t seem to realize it: you can make free phone calls from within Gmail, provided you’re calling a number inside the US or Canada.

Even cooler: if your Google Voice number is your primary phone number, you can pick up your phone calls in Gmail. You just need to turn on chat and install the Google video chat browser extension.

Another related but also lesser-known trick: you can add any phone number to a Google Plus Hangout, allowing you to include people without Internet access in your conversations.

Combine Google Voice and Skype

Skype is a very affordable way to make long distance phone calls, but there is one problem with it: unless you set up a call display number you appear as ‘unknown caller’ on the phone of the person you’re trying to reach. Many people will, assuming you’re a scam artist, and refuse to pick up.

You can buy a phone number from Skype to avoid this. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you can set up your Skype account to display your Google Voice number for call display. That way people you call will see a real phone number.

You might consider doing this even if you’ve paid Skype for an incoming number: people will call you back at your Google Voice number instead of your Skype number, meaning you’ll get the call on all of your phones instead of just Skype.

Add a Voicemail Feature To Your Blog

Want to hear from the people who read your blog? Add a voicemail button to it. This allows people to leave you a voicemail without telling the world your phone number. People who visit your site can enter their phone number and, in one click, connect their phone to your voicemail inbox.

Read the full instructions for setting up a voicemail feature on your blog here.

Other Cool Tricks

Of course, there are many more cool things you can do with Google Voice. Ryan outlined several of them in 2010, and his tricks still work very well. They are:

• Integrating Google Voice for all mobile calls
• Listening in to your voicemail in real time
• Automatic transcriptions of all voicemails
• Recording phone calls
• Custom greetings for different groups of people

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul or Stratocaster.

Head over to the Tronical website below and register your interest to find out when this system becomes available:

http://www.tronical.com/

Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum, the astoundingly successful sub-£100 personal computer, is 30 years old today.

Magican AntiTrojan is a free antivirus app designed for protect Mac from Flashback Trojan attack. Besides helping users check the Flashback Trojan, it still could help delete the Flashback Trojan and all the infected files in your Mac. Still Magican AntiTrojan has an easy to use interface; users could only click a button to easily detect Trojan and a Delete button could helps delete all infected files.

Besides checking the complicated solutions on net, we strongly recommend to use Magican AntiTrojan easily protect your Mac.

You probably won’t always remember to bring an umbrella when the weather is gloomy, but as long you’re wearing thisPuma Urban Mobility Backpack from designer Hussein Chalayan, you’ll always have a quick way to keep your head dry.

As an added bonus, when the backpack is particularly full and heavy-laden, you can put the hood up for some extra support. After all, haven’t doctors been telling us to lift with our necks all these years? There’s no word on pricing for the pack just yet, but it will be available as part of Puma’s upcoming Spring/Summer line. [Puma via Hypebeast]

Besides using Skype for instant messaging and video chats, a musician has found a way to use the service to his advantage – by giving his fans personal one on one concerts over the internet. Denison Witmer, a singer/songwriter, had to turn down a tour to spend time with his wife and newborn child but he still wanted to keep performing for other people.  Fortunately with the technology available today – he managed to make it happen.

(Via Ubergizmo.)

I wasted half an hour yesterday morning looking for my cellphone, only to find it and spend another twenty minutes looking for my car keys, which I had in my hands while looking for the aforementioned cellphone. Needless to say, I was late, my boss gave me an earful, and I had a pretty crappy day.

If you can relate, then you’d also probably be interested in the U Grok It.

It has a weird name but a pretty neat purpose. Here’s how it works: you stick a tiny RFID tag on objects that you lose on a regular basis, add them to your list of items, and locate them using the U Grok It receiver when you need to find them.

The U Grok It has a range of about six to ten feet and signals just how close you are to finding whatever it is you’re looking for with beeping signals. The closer you are, the louder and faster the beeps will be.

U Grok It plans to conduct an initial test run with 1,000 units, with full-scale production scheduled for 2013. No prices have been announced yet, but the devices is said to be around $100(USD) while each RFID tag will be sold for $1.

(Via Technabob.)

There’s a nice refinement to the iOS lock screen in the 5.1 update released today: now, your iPhone’s camera lurks just beneath the lock screen, and you can jump straight into it with an upward swipe.

Previously, it was possible to toggle a button that appeared in the same position, and took you to the camera when tapped. In iOS 5.1, that button becomes a handle for swiping, and seems to be permanently in place.

(Via Cult of Mac.)