Regular readers would know that we’re big fans of Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that displays a sidebar widget linking to social profiles of contacts when you hover over their email addresses. Rapportive is far more feature-rich and advanced when compared to its official counter part, the Gmail People Widget.

You could do a lot more with Rapportive than just viewing contact information. Here are five little-known ways to to use Rapportive:

1. Use Rapportive to verify email addresses

As previously mentioned, you can use Rapportive to verify email addresses. If you’re guessing someone’s email address, just type it in the ‘To’ field and wait till Rapportive fills the sidebar with links to social profiles of that person. If Rapportive just loads a grey avatar, the email address probably doesn’t exist.

2. Use Raplets to add additional features

Raplets enable third party tools to integrate with Rapportive. Raplets can provide more information about the person you’re emailing. For instance, there’s a Raplet that adds a direct link to the CrunchBase profile of the person you’re shooting an email to. There’s another Raplet that displays the Kred score for profiles that appear in the sidebar.

Take a look at some featured Raplets here.

3. Make use of contact notes

Contact notes is probably Rapportive’s most underused feature. You might already be using Gmail Contacts to the same, but you’ll have to load Gmail contacts to see the notes every time. You can do the same thing in Rapportive as well.

Just jot down whatever you want to remember about a contact using the notes box that appears in the bottom of the Rapportive widget and hit ‘Save’ and they will be visible every time the contact’s profile loads in Gmail’s sidebar.

If your laptop is connected to a projector, you probably don’t want your contact notes to be visible to everyone. Rapportive doesn’t give you a hide button though. You can instead restore your Gmail window and move it to the right, so that the widget goes out of display area, as suggested by a Rapportive employee here.

4. Remember: Gmail People Widget is already integrated with Rapportive

If you thought you’re missing something by replacing Gmail’s People Widget with Rapportive, think again. Rapportive already works in tandem with the Gmail People Widget to display recent conversations and shared Google Docs files in the sidebar. You can even quickly call a number via Google Voice from the sidebar.

5. Use Rapportive with Mailplane

If you use Mailplane on your Mac to access Gmail, you can use Rapportive there as well. This page says you can turn Rapportive on from Mailplane’s preferences dialog. Just go to Preferences > Accounts > Plugins and check ‘Load Rapportive Gmail Plugin’. Voilà!

That’s about it. Got more tips that you think every Rapportive user should know? Use the comments section below to share your tips! (Thanks Shrihari from the Mailplane screenshot!)

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5 Ways To Make The Best Out Of Rapportive

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If you’re having a hard time trying to format your USB pen drive, keep reading. Sometimes when you try to format your USB pen drive, you might get an error message saying ‘Windows was unable to complete the format’. Most of us assume that our pen drives are no longer usable and ditch them.

One cannot narrow down to specific reasons why this error message appears. But, your pen drive is still usable 90% of the time despite this error message. All you have to do is install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and try formatting your removable drive again.

Go here and download HPUSBDisk.exe. Run the executable, and you’ll see a window like the one below, popping up:

Choose the USB drive that you want to format from the list that appears on top of the window and then choose the filesystem for the format (FAT/NTFS). Give the pen drive an optional label and choose ‘Quick Format’ if necessary.

Click ‘Start’ and hit ‘Yes’ in the confirmation dialog that appears next.

When the formatting is complete, HP USB Disk Storage tool will return a message with details about the drive and file allocation units, like below:

You can now continue using your pen drive. The next time Windows issues an unable to format error, use this tool again to erase data from your USB stick. Hat tip: Shrikanth!

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

Windows was unable to complete the format

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Those asterisks. Here are four not-so-obvious passwords you’re not making use of. They add an additional layer of security to your digital assets. Make sure you use them all!

1. Use a blank Windows password

Using a blank password for your Windows account prevents remote access to your computer over a network or the Internet. By default, computers without passwords can never be accessed over a network. That’s what Microsoft’s guidelines say, according to Digital Inspiration.

So if your computer is physically secure already, there’s nothing preventing you from setting a blank password and preventing intrusions from hackers elsewhere. This tip works in Windows XP, but for other versions please try and let us know!

2. Use two-factor authentication with a verification code

By turning on two factor authentication, you can add an extra layer of authentication to your online accounts. After you have turned on two-factor authentication for your Google account, you receive a text message or a voice call with a unique code that you’ll have to key in before you log in, along with your password.

This is useful because even when someone gains information about your password, he still can’t access your account without this verification code. Many other online services have started providing two factor authentication as well, and you should definitely use this feature! Here’s how you can turn it on for your Google account.

3. Use a master password to secure your saved passwords

If you save passwords for your online accounts in your browser, anyone who has physical access to your computer can take a peek at them from the settings. The way to get around this is to set a master password on your browser.

Use this guide if you’re a Mozilla Firefox user. Once you set a master password, you will be asked for the same every time you need to access your stored passwords. This feature is not available in Chrome, though.

4. Use app-specific passcodes on your phone

If you’re an iPhone user, you may have noticed that some applications let you set app-specific passcodes to prevent that random guy who just got your phone from seeing your information. For instance, after setting a passcode for the Dropbox app, you’ll be asked for the code every time you open the app or switch back from another application.

If you have jailbroken your iPhone or if you use Android, there are a variety of solutions available as well. A search in Google Play will give you plenty of choices.

Do you use any additional passwords to protect your online accounts or computer/smartphone applications?

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Four Passwords To Make Your Digital Life More Secure

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Now that Facebook has acquired Instagram, there’s some talk about what will happen to all our photos. Although Facebook doesn’t have a track record of killing companies it has acquired in the past, it’s safe to have a backup of your Instagram photos. If you want to export your Instagram photos and take them with you, here are six options to try:

1. Download all photos, or photos by date to your hard disk
Downloading your Instagram photos to your hard disk is a piece of cake with Instaport. After authorizing your account, you can download not only download all your Instagram photos but also limit the backup to photos you took between specific dates.

Besides that, you can also download photos from others that you had liked on Instagram. Instaport also promises to support porting of Instagram photos to Flickr and Facebook soon – so watch out!

2. Download Instagram photos individually

If you want to preview all your Instagram photos and download them individually, try Gramgrab. Gramgrab displays all your photos in a grid and you can click on selected photos to download them immediately to your computer.

3. Quickly download your photos from Mac or Windows Desktop

InstaBackup is a neat little app that you can use to backup all photos from your Instagram account to a specific folder on your Mac. Get the .dmg here.

Instagram Downloader is a bare bones desktop application for Windows that does pretty much the same thing – you don’t have to authenticate your account though. Type in any Instagram username and voila – all photos are grabbed instantly.

4. Print your Instagram photos

If you’re really concerned about privacy, you can print your Instagram photos using Prinstagram and delete them online. You can get them printed on a T-shirt, as a small book and in several other formats like they’ve mentioned on their site.

5. Backup Instagram photos to Dropbox

If you’re wary about Facebook shutting down Instagram (although we doubt that will happen at all), you can chroose to save your Instagram photos to Dropbox with Instadrop. Authenticate both Instagram and Dropbox and you’re good to go.

There’s a caveat: this service doesn’t save your old Instagram photos though. Only your future uploads are copied to Dropbox.

If you are aware of any other services that let you export your Instagram photos, let us know in the comments below!

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Six Options To Backup Your Instagram Photos

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If you use iTunes on Windows to download songs, movies and podcasts, chances are you’re annoyed by poor download speeds and disconnections. Despite having a strong internet connection, you’ll find iTunes suspending a download, sometimes even after it reaches 90%. Most of these iTunes downloads are non-resumable.

Internet Download Manager comes to the rescue, though. You can set IDM to capture your iTunes downloads automatically. IDM speeds up your iTunes downloads by opening multiple connections simultaneously, and it is claimed that IDM could increase download speeds by upto 500%. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can use IDM to increase iTunes download speeds:

First, open Internet Download Manager and hit the ‘Options’ icon in the toolbar. You can also go to Downloads > Options from the menu bar.

In the General tab, make sure that the option ‘Use advanced browser integration’ is checked. Now, hit the ‘Add browser’ button right below the list.

Navigate to the Program Files directory where iTunes is usually installed and pick iTunes.exe, as shown below:

Click Open, and then click OK to exit the Options dialog. iTunes downloads will henceforth be captured by IDM. Restart iTunes and IDM. Start downloading something on iTunes. In the screenshot below, you’ll see a podcast about to be downloaded.

IDM will now capture your action, and a dialog box will open up asking if you’d like to start the download on IDM. Hit ‘Start download’.

The movie/podcast you choose will now get downloaded via Internet Download Manager. As easy as that.

The only downside to this workaround is that iTunes is not aware that your movie/podcast/song has been downloaded via Internet Download Manager. You can’t open the file from iTunes directly – but you can go to your downloads folder any time to play or view the podcast, song or movie you just downloaded.

That’s how you make downloads via iTunes faster. Hat tip: Sai Nikesh

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

Speed Up iTunes Downloads By 500%

Related posts:

1. How to Automatically Update Your iTunes Library?
2. How to sync selected songs to iPod/iPhone/iPad?

We’re big fans of Rapportive here. Rapportive displays information about any email address you hover over when you’re in Gmail – tweets, links to social networking profiles, photographs, and more. It’s like the Gmail People Widget on steroids.

You can use Rapportive to quickly verify if an email address exists or not. Imagine you’re cold calling someone by guessing his email address – a glance over Rapportive on the sidebar will tell you if the email ID is valid or not – if Rapportive guesses the name of the person you’re emailing right away, and displays links to even one or two social profiles, you’re good to go.

Otherwise, if Rapportive just displays a question mark in the place of an avatar and doesn’t link to any social profiles, it’s safe to assume that the email address does not exist.

Got any interesting uses for Rapportive? Tell us in the comments.

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Quick Tip: Check if an email address is valid with Rapportive

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If you recently updated your iPhone or iPad to iOS 5.1, you should have noticed the Camera icon in your lock screen. Earlier, you had to tap the home button twice to make the Camera icon visible and then tap the icon to launch the Camera app.

With the new iOS 5.1 update, all you have to do is tap the home button once and the camera icon appears in the lock screen. That reduces one gesture. But if you tapped this Camera icon and all that happened was a bounce up and down, you came to the right place.

You need to hold the camera icon and swipe it upwards to launch the Camera app in iOS 5.1 – tapping it results in just a bounce. See the video below if you still can’t get it.

Swiping up camera icon in iPhone lock screen

Lots of people say that the two bars over the camera icon in the lock screen indicate the swipe up gesture, but we don’t think it’s as intuitive as it’s being touted. Our very own Apple fanboy Nikesh tried it and couldn’t get it at first try, so we’re just letting everyone know.

Remember: Swipe up the camera icon, not just tap.

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iPhone Lock Screen Camera Icon Not Working

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Those of you who have an iOS device – an iPod, iPhone or an iPad – would frequently use iTunes to sync music and data from your computer. You can use iTunes to sync your entire music library, or just selected playlists. Besides that, you can also sync music videos and voice memos from the music tab that appears in the iTunes window when you connect your iPod/iPhone/iPad to your computer.

What if you want to copy a particular song to your iOS device? Discussion boards online mention that you can create a playlist with the song you’d like to transfer and then sync that playlist, but that’s not really necessary.

There’s a way to sync and copy certain songs individually to your iPhone or iPod in iTunes. Here’s how:

First, connect your iPhone or iPod to your computer via USB. If iTunes doesn’t open automatically, launch it manually. You should see your iPhone or iPod listed on the left, like it always happens when you connect your device.

Now, click ‘Music’ or any playlist from the left panel in iTunes. Now, click on the song you’d like to transfer to your iPhone. Drag the song and drop it into the name of your iOS device on the left, as you can see below.

You should see the cursor momentarily turning into a ‘+’ symbol. You can manually transfer as many songs as you’d like to, in the same way.

Now, click on the device’s name, and then the ‘Music’ tab in the iTunes window. Scroll down, and you should see the song you added under ‘Manually Added Songs’.

Right click on your iPod’s/iPhones name in the left panel, and hit ‘Sync’. iTunes will now send the songs you dragged to your device.

In case you want to remove a certain song, just select it and hit the ‘Remove’ button. The next time a sync happens, those songs you removed will also disappear from your iOS device.

So, that’s how you manually select and add songs to your iPod/iPhone. Don’t use other workarounds – this is a neat feature built in, but not really used much because it’s buried deep inside. Check it out and let us know if you have any questions.

Post from: Killer Tech Tips

How to sync selected songs to iPod/iPhone/iPad?

Related posts:

1. How to Automatically Update Your iTunes Library?
2. Speed Up iTunes Downloads By 500%

If you are active on Twitter and if you’ve got an iPhone, chances are you’re using Tweetbot already. Tweetbot is, by far, the best Twitter client for iPhone.

Here are three tips that will make your Tweetbot experience better.

Customize triple tap to do any action

If you didn’t know already, you could triple tap on any tweet in Tweetbot and reply to it instantly. Alternatively, you could customize the action that has to take place when you triple tap a tweet.

From Tweetbot settings, you can configure triple tap to retweet, favourite, translate or even check it out in Favstar. See the screenshot above.

Turn on the ‘Post In Background’ feature

If you want to be able to do other things when your tweet is being posted, turn on the ‘post in background’ feature from the settings.  This is especially useful when you’re posting images or videos to your Twitter account.

You can play around with other screens on Tweetbot as the tweet is being posted, and the app notifies you with a ‘tweet posted’ message when it’s done with uploading your tweet. Should have been an opt-out feature, if you ask us. Thanks for the heads up, Nikesh!

Double tap a tab to mark as read

If you want to quickly mark the messages in a tab as read, just double press the tab quickly. For instance, to mark all your direct messages as read, just double tap the messages icon in the bottom and voila!

In addition to marking all the tweets in the view as read, double tapping also lets you scroll to the top and see the most recent tweet in the list.

Got a Tweetbot tip? Tell us in the comments.

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Three Tweetbot Features You’re Not Making Use Of

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Oh, you’re probably getting bored of all the Google Search tips we’ve shared already. But here’s another one that one of our readers, Ning Nu sent in.

If you’re downloading a software application and would like to know the terms it’s licensed under, you can quickly Google for [{software name} license]. For instance, if you search for [ccleaner license], Google tells you that it’s a freeware almost instantly.

It’s not 100% perfect, because Google could fetch the information from a source that has gotten it wrong. Try it and let us know if it works!

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Reader Tip: Quickly know any software’s license using Google

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