An Improved Gmail Clipper from Evernote

Evernote, the quintessential note-taking software, has released a new web clipper add-on for Chrome, Opera and Safari browsers. While the web clipper is primarily used for saving snapshots of web pages to Evernote, the updated version is much more efficient at archiving Gmail messages.

When you clip an email thread with the new Evernote clipper, it creates a de-cluttered view and re-formats the whole thread so it is more readable. And if you are clipping a lengthy email conversation in Gmail, you now have an option to select individual messages in the thread that should be saved into Evernote.

The Gmail Clipper for Evernote can also save the inline images and file attachments found in your email messages. For instance, if there’s a PDF document or an Excel sheet attached to a Gmail message, the files will be directly saved to Evernote in their native format along with the email message.

You can get the clipper at evernote.com/webclipper – you would need an Evernote account to activate the clipper in your browser.

In my testing, the clipper worked as advertised for Gmail. It could easily handle large threads with 20+ email messages, the file attachments were successfully saved and the rich-text formatting of HTML messages was well preserved in Evernote. If you are to share an email thread with someone, it may be a good idea to save it as a note in Evernote and then share the link.


One more thing. The web clipper helps you manually save your emails to Evernote. If you are looking for an automated way to archive multiple emails from Gmail into Evernote, you can use a Google Sheet.

How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter

This tutorial explains how you can easily make a Twitter bot that will automatically favorite and/or retweet tweets that contain particular keywords or #hashtags. You need absolutely no coding knowledge and your Twitter bot will be up and running in few minutes.



  Before we get started, you may be wondering why would anyone write a twitter bot that mindlessly favorites or retweets tweets? Yes, bots are often used for spammy behavior but, if used right, they can also help grow your Twitter network. For instance, when people share a link from your website on Twitter, you can favorite that tweet and it will give an hint to the original poster that you are author of that page. A brand may like to retweet tweets that contain positive mentions of their product. The list goes on.

Also see: How to Write a Useful Twitter Bot

 The first thing you need to do is define a search phrase and any matching tweets will be retweeted or favorited by the bot. Add as many search conditions as possible to keep spam tweets away from your list. 

Some examples:

1. Tweets containing links to your website, sans retweets
example.com min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5 -RT

2. Mentions of particular hashtag, but no links
#WhatAnAwesomeHashtag -RT -filter:links

3. All tweets sent from a particular location
#hashtag near:”New York, NY” within:15mi

OK, next we need to build our Twitter bot app. I suggest creating a separate Twitter account to test your automated bots.

    Go to apps.twitter.com and create a new application. Fill in the mandatory fields (name, description, URL) and click the Create button. Next go to Keys and Access Tokens and click the Create my Access Token button. Twitter will generate the Consumer Keys & Access tokens that we will need in the next step.
    Click here to copy the Twitter bot script to your Google Drive. Replace the search phrase and Twitter keys that were generated in the previous step.

    Go to the Run menu and choose StartBot to initialize your Twitter bot.

That’s it. The bot will run in the background, every 10 minutes, and favorite / retweet matching tweets. It will fave/RT a maximum of 1 tweet per minute. If you wish to stop the bot later, go to Run again and choose StopBot.

 Use with care and, as always, the full source of the Twitter retweet bot is available on ctrlq.org under the “do whatever you like” license.

How to Find the Wi-Fi Password of your Current Network

Your computer is connected to a Wi-Fi network but you do not remember the password that you had earlier used to connect to this particular WiFi network. Maybe you forgot the password or maybe the network administrator entered it directly without revealing the actual password to you.

You would now like to connect a second device, like your mobile phone, to the same WiFi network but how do you find out the password? You can either send a password request the WiFi admin or you can open the command prompt on your computer and retrieve the saved password in one easy step. The technique works on both Mac and Windows PCs.

    

Find the WiFi Password on Windows

 Open the command prompt in administrator mode. Type “cmd” in the Run box, right-click the command prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator (see how). Now enter the following command and hit enter to see the WiFi password.

                                 "  netsh wlan show profile name=labnol key=clear "

Remember to replace labnol with the name of your Wireless SSID (this is the name of the Wi-Fi network that you connect your computer to). The password will show up under the Security Setting section (see screenshot).

If you would only like to see the password and not the other information, use the findstr command:

                            "  netsh wlan show profile name=labnol key=clear | findstr Key "

If you do not see the password, probably you’ve not opened the command prompt window as administrator
                                             

 Show the WiFi Password on Mac OS X

Your Mac OS X uses Keychain to store the configuration details of the WiFi network and we can use the BSD command “security” to query anything stored inside Keychain, including the Wi-Fi password.               Here’s how:

Open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type terminal to open the Terminal window. At the command line, enter the following command (replace labnol with your WiFi name), then enter your Mac username and password to access the OS X keychain and the Wi-FI network password would be displayed on the screen in plain text.

                                      "  security find-generic-password -wa labnol "

Reveal the WiFi Password on Linux

This trick for getting Wi-Fi passwords works for Linux too. Substitute labnol with the wireless name (SSID) of your network. The value of the field psk is your WiFi password.

                   " sudo cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/labnol | grep psk=  "

                  If you don’t know the network name, use the following command.

                "  sudo grep psk= /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/*   "

Start WLAN AutoConfig (Wlansvc Service)

If you are using this technique to retrieve the WiFi password on a Windows computer but getting an error that says – “The Wireless AutoConfig Service (wlansvc) is not running” – here’s a simple fix:

Click the Windows Start button and type “services.msc” in the Run box to access Windows Services. Here go to the WLAN Autoconfig service and make sure that the status is Running. Else right-click the WLAN AutoConfig service, select Properties and go to Dependencies. Check all the dependencies to make sure they are all running.


  

A Lynx-like Text Browser that Runs on Google Servers

Text Browser is a Lynx-inspired browser that lets you read the web in text and strips all Java Script, images, videos and other rich content that maybe embedded inside a web page. Unlike Lynx that require installation and run locally, Text Browser is a web app and runs in the Google cloud.

To get started, click here and authorize the web app with your Google Account. It requires authorization to sign-in and also for fetching web pages on your behalf. It will neither track your browsing activity nor will have access to any of your Google Account data.

Once a page loads inside the Text Browser, any of the internal links will also open inside the same browser automatically.

Text Browser as a Proxy Server :

Why would anyone want a basic text browser? Well, you can also use the Text Browser as a proxy server to access news articles and other text-only content on the Internet that may otherwise be inaccessible at your workplace.

When you request a web page through the app, the underlying Google Apps Script will fetch the page on Google’s servers and then renders the content on your screen using Google Apps Script. Thus, even if a site is restricted, you should be able to view the page indirectly through the Google cloud.

And if a website is down for you, use the Google text browser to confirm if the page is really down for everyone or it is just your Internet connection.

The Best Tools for Saving Web Pages, Forever

 Web pages change or may even disappear with time. Thus if you would like to preserve a web page forever, you should either need to download that page to your computer (and put it on Dropbox) or you could use a web archiving service that will safely store a copy of that page on their own servers, permanently.

There are quite a few ways to save web pages permanently and your choice of the tool will depend on the kind of web content that you are trying to archive.

Archive Web Pages, Permanently

If you are essentially interested in the saving text-only content, like news articles, Pocket and Instapaper are recommended choices. You can save pages via email, browser extensions, bookmarklets or through apps. These services extract the text content from a public web page and make it available on all your devices. However, there’s no option to download the saved articles, you can only read them on Pocket website or their mobile apps.

Evernote and OneNote are impressing tools for archiving web content in your own private notebooks. They provide web clippers (or extensions) that make it easy for you to save complete web pages – from tutorials to recipes to your online transactions receipts – with a click. The clipped web pages can be accessed from any device, the original layout is retained (mostly) and everything is searchable – these services can even perform OCR to find the text inside photographs. Evernote also lets your export these saved pages as HTML files that you can upload elsewhere.

If you prefer something quick and simple that works everywhere but doesn’t require extensions, you can consider saving web pages as PDF files. Google Chrome has a built-in PDF writer or you can use Google Cloud Print. It add a new “Save to Google Drive” virtual printer and the next time you print a page on our desktop or mobile through Cloud Print, it will save a PDF copy of the page directly in your Drive. This is however not the best choice for saving pages with complex formatting.

When the layout is important, your best bet is to use a screen capture tool. You’re obviously spoilt for choices here but I’d recommend the official Chrome add-on from Google – it will not only capture full-length screenshots of web page but it will also upload the image to your Google Drive in the same step. The add-on can also save web pages in the web archive (MHT) format that is natively supported in both IE and Firefox.

The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive is a perfect place for finding previous versions of web pages but the same tool can be used to save any web page on-demand as well. Go to archive.org/web and enter the URL of any public web pages in the input box. The archiver will download a full copy of the page, including all the images and assets, on their server. It will make a permanent archive of the page that looks exactly like the original and will stay even if the original page goes offline.

Internet Archive doesn’t offer an option to download saved pages but Archive.Is can be a good alternative. It is very similar to archive.org in the sense that you enter the page URL and it will make an exact snapshot of the web page on their server. The page will be stored online forever but here you also have the option to download the saved page as a ZIP file. It too provides date based archives so you can have multiple snapshots of the same page for different days.

All popular web browsers provide an option to download a complete web page to your computer. It will download the HTML web page as well as the associated images, CSS and JavaScript to your computer so you can read it offline. You’ll however have to put effort in organizing these archives as the saved content may not be searchable through your desktop search programs.

eReader owners can use dotEPUB to download any web page as an ePUB or MOBI ebook, formats that are compatible with most readers. Amazon offers a Kindle add-on to help you save any web page in your Kindle device but, as with Pocket, these tools are primarily for archiving text based web content.

Most of the tools discussed above allow you to download a single page but if you wish to save a set of URLs in bulk, wget may be your savior. We also have a Google Script for downloading web pages to Drive automatically (like a cron job) but it will get the HTML content and nothing else.