If you've ever wanted a one-stop shop for saving, organizing, and sharing your ideas,web application Wridea might be just what you are looking for.

Once you've signed up and created a free account, you can add new ideas, categorize them, and share them with your friends using the very simple web interface—in fact, that's the drawback of using this tool instead ofexpanding your brain with Evernote or using OneNote as a powerful note-taking application—it doesn't have enough features for a power user used to tagging and sorting their thoughts.

On the other hand, it does have the ability to share ideas and feedback with your friends, an interesting developer API for third-party add-ons, and a unique "Idea Rain" visualization that drops your ideas into the screen—so it could be worth a look for anybody looking for a completely web-based solution to storing and sharing ideas.

Wridea

Gmail Labs' newest feature, an "Inbox Preview" on the loading screen, might just be the best thing that ever happened to email checkers working off a shaky or slow connection.

As Gmail's engineers point out, it stinks to wait for Gmail to load up all its AJAX-y, gadget-loaded interface, just to find out there's no new mail. Sure, there's a "Basic HTML" view you can click in the lower-right corner to speed things up, but with Inbox Preview enabled in your Settings/Labs list, you'll get a plain text preview of your 10 newest messages and blurbs from each of them.

For those often facing a weak or restricted connection, this feature seems like a must-enable—even if it might tempt one into futile clicks on static messages. Others might have their new-message bases covered with any of the myriad message checker apps out there, but casual web users will probably dig this feature.

These days there are a proliferation of digital tools we use for productivity, for time management, for communication, for social networking, for keeping track of our lives, online and off.

It can be a nightmare to keep track of it all, and frankly, it’s a bit unproductive to keep switching between a dozen different tools.

Enter Gmail, my favorite solution for just about anything. OK, maybe not for things like solving marital problems or spending time with my kids, but … give it time. :)

It’s already pretty clear that Gmail is the best tool for email, and integrations with calendar and chat have made it the go-to place for much of our information. But Gmail Gadgets have allowed us to bring the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. Now we can do just about everying in one place - Gmail.

Here’s how:

1. Email: Gmail is how email should be done. With great filters, you can keep your inbox fairly clean. With keyboard shortcuts, you can get through the inbox in minutes. With labels and archiving, you don’t spend time filing. With threaded conversations, your email stays organized. There are dozens of smart little innovations, from automatic contacts to a “send and archive” button and much more. If you’re not using Gmail for email yet, you should strongly consider a change.

2. To-do: Gmail only recently added a Tasks feature, something most of us have been wanting for a long time. It’s just about the simplest to-do list there is. You add a task. You check it off. You can re-order them. That’s about it. But it’s incredibly useful, because here’s the trick: you’re zooming through your inbox, and when you find an email that requires an action … you add it to the task listin Gmail. Then you archive the email, instead of leaving it in your inbox. Result: clear inbox! Cool feature: you can turn an email into a task, which means the task is linked to the email, and you can easily open the email by clicking on the task. Enable Gmail Tasks by going to Labs (in the upper right corner of Gmail). For Remember the Milk users, there’s also an RTM gadget of course.

3. Calendar. Google’s Calendar (Gcal) is hands down the fastest, easiest and best calendar I’ve used (and yes, I’ve tried iCal, Outlook, 30 Boxes and Sunbird). It just works exactly like you’d want it to work. And now it’s in Gmail’s sidebar, so you can see your events at a glance while in Gmail, and even add tasks quickly without having to go to the calendar. Also cool: Gcal, like Google Docs and Gmail (see below) now has an offline mode, so you don’t have to worry about being connected to the Internet. Enable the GCal gadget in Gmail by going to Labs.

4. Docs. Are you still using a desktop word processing or spreadsheet app? Consider switching to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which I use exclusively now. It’s online (with offline access now), it’s simple, it opens the usual formats, and it’s so much better for collaboration. Seriously — no more emailing different versions to people. Best yet, no need to sync docs between computers or carry them around on a USB flash drive. And now, with the Docs gadget in Gmail, you can open your docs from within Gmail, making it even more of a one-stop center for all your productivity and information needs. Enable the Google Docs gadget in Gmail by going to Labs (in the upper right corner of Gmail).

5. Twitter. A lot of people are finding Twitter to be an incredible place to connect with others, to find great things to read, to keep in touch with what’s happening now. But keeping your Twitter app open all the time can be unproductive. Enter Twitter Gadget, which takes seconds to install into Gmail and lets you have the most important functions of Twitter right within your all-in-one productivity center — you can see your Twitter stream, replies, direct messages, and favorites, and send out Tweets quickly. Granted, it’s not as nice and fully-functional as other great Twitter apps (Tweetdeck comes to mind), but it does the job quickly and painlessly.

6. Bookmarks. Want to look up a site you bookmarked earlier? I’ve been using the delicious gadgetfor Gmail, and it works pretty much as you’d expect — you can see a list of your most recent bookmarks in the Gmail sidebar. You can even see the most popular bookmarks on delicious right now, which is cool. Having your bookmarks right within Gmail is a nice feature that brings together a lot of your online life.

7. Text, voice and video chat. I use the Gmail chat for all my chat needs (which are fairly minimal), because I can do it from within Gmail. And now you can use Gmail chat for video and voice— I’ve done it, and it’s super simple and works great. With these additions, Gmail takes care of all my communication needs.

8. Social media. What about other social media you might use, such as Facebook, MySpace or Friendfeed? Put them right in Gmail with the Facebook, MySpace and Friendfeed gadgets. There are even gadgets for Digg and Flickr.

9. RSS feeds. I think Google Reader is the best RSS reader for its speed and simplicity. However, while you used to be able to add Google Reader to Gmail using a Greasemonkey script, with the newer version of Gmail that script became unusable. So what I do now is add Google Reader to my Firefox sidebar, so I can easily check my RSS feeds while in my all-in-one Gmail productivity center (only works in Firefox afaik).

10. Managing your gadgets. As you can tell, this is a lot of gadgets to add to Gmail. You can end up with a ton of gadgets running down the left side of Gmail’s window. I recommend, if you have a fairly wide monitor, that you move the labels and chat boxes to the right side. Also, you can minimize any of the gadgets with a click (there’s a minimize button at the top of each gadget), to keep things manageable. Finally, get rid of gadgets you don’t use very often, to simplify things.

11. Offline Gmail. One of the problems people use to have with Gmail is that it’s online — meaning that if you can’t connect to the Internet (if you’re on the road, on an airplane, or your connection goes down), you can’t use Gmail. Well, that’s now changed with Gmail’s offline mode — you can read, compose and organize messages while offline, which is nice.

Most Important Tip
Finally, now that you’ve set up Gmail to do everything you need it to, here’s the most important tip for staying productive: don’t keep it open all the time.

Ideally, schedule certain times to use Gmail and the other gadgets you have set up — maybe 2-3 times during the day. Or close it when you’re ready to work on an important task, and then open it when you’re done with the task, but only for 10 minutes. Find what works for you, but set your limits and stick to them!

Courtesy: Leo Babauta || zenhabits.net

The official Windows 7 Release Candidate is now available for all users through Microsoft's Customer Preview program.

Officially the folks at Redmond had said the release would be available tomorrow (May 5), and while it's not May 5 anywhere in the US at the time of this writing—hey, it's May 5 somewhere.

To download Windows 7 RC, you'll need to hit up the link below, head to the bottom of the page to select which version of Windows 7 you want (32-bit or 64-bit), select your language, and then sign in with your Windows Live account (that means you'll need to get one if you don't have one already). After that, just grab yourself a cold drink and wait. So far the download is moving swiftly for me (around 450KB/s) and should be done in just over an hour and a half. Hopefully they can keep it up, but if not, remember: This download and product keys will be available through the end of June, so you've got plenty of time.

If you give it a go, let's hear how the download goes for you in the comments. Maybe Microsoft won't underestimate the webthis time around.

Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and the same-named blog, answered a few questions recently about managing and automating money. Oh, and he's raffling off Kindles to book buyers.

Sethi is a recent Stanford graduate who jumped into personal finance blogging and writing after facing the murky world of money and investing after college. His I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog, and book, takes a different approach to smarter money management, skipping the "buy fewer lattes" route and aiming at changing your mind and creating a system. The blog has garnered acclaim from lots of financial and other news publications, and has gotten more than a few nods from our own site. And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that our own Gina Trapani contributed to his new book. We interviewed Sethi by phone last Friday to talk about the compatibilities between productivity and smart money, and a few other topics we'd been waiting to ask.

Oh, as for the Kindles, and $5,000 in cash: Sethi's detailed the rules and keeps listing the winners at his blog, but the basics are that if you buy the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or elsewhere between 8am - 4pm Pacific time (PST), forward your receipt to iboughtthebook@iwillteachyoutoberich.com, and you'll be entered to win one of the hourly drawings. Now, onto the interview:

Lifehacker: Most personal finance sites have a name or a theme that carries a certain kind of feel-good charm: Smart Spending, Your Money, that kind of thing. Yours is the most blunt, and kinda cocky, name I've ever heard. Was that intentional, and how'd you come up with it?

Ramit Sethi: It's very intentional. If I'd started a site called, say, Conscious Spending Living, you'd be bored to death by the title alone. Instead, I wanted to create a site that was like you and me sitting around a table together, talking about how this friend's spending way too much money, smart saving plans, the way money or deals trick us ... I really want to show people that this is about becoming rich, not just about money. A part of that is money, but we're also talking about philanthropy, about having time for yourself and your family. Rich can be, for some people, finally having a flexible schedule. Chapter 9 is called "A Rich Life," and it's only partially about money.

Lifehacker: How long ago did you start writing this book?

Ramit Sethi: It's been about two years of Hell writing this thing [laughs]. I wanted to die step of the way. The blog is about three years old, but when someone new comes to the site, or anyone, really, some days there's a post about weddings, some days taxes, asset allocation, market investing. I focused the book on writing for someone who wanted to get started and go all the way through, every step of making themselves smarter financially ... Basically, I wanted to write this thing that, I would be proud to hand it to someone just coming out of college, who has a bit of money, but doesn't know what to do with it.

Lifehacker: That situation happened to you, and was the inspiration for starting the blog, right?

Ramit Sethi: Exactly. One thing I realized is, a lot of people think personal finance is about willpower, like dieting or exercise. I think that really has not worked over the last 50 years ... People don't realize how many decisions they have to make with their money, every day. With the money you have today, you could pay off debt, reduce a credit card balance, or start investing it. But we don't, usually, because we're cognitive misers.

We can only have enough cognition to do a few things. If we try to work on 50 things, we're not going to do hardly any of them, and that's where my financial advice comes from. Focus on the two areas you have the most problem with in spending. For most young people, that's entertainment spending or restaurants, bars, that. Your goal should be building a system that doesn't make you think, every step of the way, about how you're spending or saving.

Lifehacker: You challenged people to save $1,000 in 30 days—some of it instantly, some by cutting down on monthly expenses. What were some of the most unexpected successes? Did any challengers surprise you with how they saved money?

Ramit Sethi: The first thing that really surprised me was a lot of negative feedback I didn't expect. "This is ridiculous." "Yeah, but you have to go to Stanford to save $1,000." Those types of comments. To save $1,000 in 30 days, you don't have to cut it all from your budget. Optimizing your existing spending, negotiate with your banks. People saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, cumulatively, and that was inspiring.

To get everyone there, I tried to be deeply practical. One of the fastest, most direct way to save money would be for everyone to pack up and move to Kansas, but nobody's going to do that, or even move into a cheaper apartment, in most cases. So I tell people to pick the stuff they're not thinking of. (For instance), I put up a prompted script for calling your car insurance company, and people saved $600-$700 with a 10-minute phone call.

... The other side is earning more. I advise everyone who wants to make more to become a consultant.

Lifehacker: That probably sounds a bit wishful thinking to a lot of people—or at least like a stretch for someone used to a pre-defined, W2 job.

Ramit Sethi: Absolutely. But what you're doing is not necessarily giving up everything and going freelance. You're just sharing your expertise with somebody else and becoming a tutor. Do you speak English? Than you are an expert to someone who wants to learn it. Do you know 4th-grade math? There are people who need that.

Lifehacker: These days, a book titled I Will Teach You To Be Rich sounds audacious. I Will Help You Pay Your Mortgage This Month sounds more like the current climate. How do you think the recession affects the advice you're giving?

Ramit Sethi: For the people that know about long-term investing, this is basically just a really strong reminder to keep focused on the long-term. You have an emergency fund, and I really hope you're not trying to time the market, because you'll fail over the long term.

... The unfortunate part of this economy is, there is so much gloom and doom in the news. If you watch the news, you'll hear questions and talk about, "Should I take all my money out?" "Where should my money be?" It's overwhelming, so people do what's easy—they read the New York Times, and then complain about it. Or they spend way too much time doing I term debating minutiae, about the stimulus package, who's to blame, predicting when the recover comes. My take is, what did people do to set up their investing accounts? Way too many people feel they only two levers to pull, either investing or pulling money out of the stock market. People need to really learn more about their money, and long-term investing, now, or there's a lot of the same kind of complaining and not much action coming out of it.

Lifehacker: Are you a pretty tech-focused, gadget-hungry guy?

Ramit Sethi: Oh, definitely.

Lifehacker: So how do you rationalize whether a gadget, a new computer, phone, whatnot, are worth the cost, rather than just filling that geeky void?

Ramit Sethi: I believe in paying for value. If you're going to get value out of something, you should pay for it, and you should enjoy it. If you've got your finances in order, for the things you love, you can spend extravagantly on them. If you've set yourself up to automatically invest 5% of your money, set aside money for a down payment on a car in a sub-account, that kind of thing, then go ahead and feel guilt-free when you spend on something that's really important to you.

... At the same time, I will hold something like my iPhone for like 3-4 years, until it doesn't work anymore. You buy the best, and you hold for the long-term. Whether it's a $300 phone, or designer jeans, it's okay to spend if that's what matters, but the flip side is that part of you will always want the best, keep staying up with the newest stuff. It's important to balance those two things. If you find that you're not, either figure out why, just like you'd cut other costs.

Lifehacker: Why is automating your billing so important? I'm cynical, so I might say it doesn't matter if all my bills arrive at the same time, or how many sub-accounts I have set up.

Ramit Sethi: It's a kind of psychology, the same as with dieting. Ask people what they care about in life. They'll clearly say, money. "So you're interested in learning about money and using it better?" "Yeah, sure, I definitely want to do that!" "Okay, so do you max out your 401(k)?" "Oh, no, I reallyshould, but ..." That's free money. Money is so important to people, but the contribution rate for 401(k)s is less than 50%. The way to get around that block is to automate it. You should automatically be enrolled in your work's 401(k), up to their compliance rate. It's the same exact principle with your own money. If you tell yourself, "I really should save for some nebulous goal," you will almost certainly do nothing, and in 12 months, you'll be great at saying you should have. If it's saving itself automatically and your bills are paid, you will not miss that money. If you do, you restructure from there, not from a fake feeling that you're doing everything fine.

What it really comes down to is what my parents tell me all the time: A year from now, you're going to be a year older. What are you going to do?

What that means is, why do we pretend like we won't have things to save for. Why are we all hypocrites about our wedding? We all say we want a "small thing," "nothing big," but the day comes, and it's the best china, the best flowers. And that's fine, but at the same time, if we we were true to ourselves, we would have been puting away money every month from age 20. The fact of the matter is, if you're in your 20s, you're probably going to need money in the next 3-5 years, for a house, a car, things you don't think of day to day. With sub-savings accounts, you'll be ahead of 90 percent of the crowd.

The average Christmas shopper spent $700 on gifts last year, which is down from $900, and that's kind of amazing. But if you pretend like Christmas won't come, you're trying to pull $700 out of one month, December, and that probably means going into debt. If you start saving in January, less than $100 per month, you're covered for Christmas, and you won't feel the expense all at once.

Lifehacker: What's the hardest part of running your blog, and giving out financial advice?

Ramit Sethi: I think it's trying to find ways to create behavioral change. The thing that makes me the happiest, and it basically gives me a birthday present every day, is seeing what kind of behavioral change my blog or my book has affected. It's easy to guilt people into what they should be doing, but to work on high-level attitude changes and hear that it really saved someone money ... that's something else.

So far, I'm really pleased with the blog's reception, the comments ... but it is hard, day by day, to reach people on a level of attitude.
Sethi started his blog
Lifehacker: So, you kind of answered it, but what's the best part?

Ramit Sethi: Real quick, then, it's hearing from someone that, "I decided to go on vacation. I bought a $150 pair of jeans, and it felt fine, because I knew my money was in control."

Lifehacker: That sounds like the ultimate reward of a Getting Things Done system—knowing deep down that your work time was spent efficiently, so you don't worry about how you spend your un-portioned time.

Ramit Sethi: That's exactly right ... For me, every dollar that comes in is routed to the appropriate place. That leaves me free and clear to focus on either my business, my life, or whatever I might want to actually spend on.

Coutesy: Lifehacker

For people who love to carry software on a USB drive or if you are behind a corporate firewall and can’t install new software, here’s something you have been waiting for - Google Chrome 2.0 in a portable avatar.

Like other portable apps, Google Chrome 2 portable too has all the features available in the main Chrome browser but requires no installation - just unzip the files in a folder and start Chroming.

To download your copy of portable Google Browser, head over to this site and click the download link - the site in German but the software language is English.

You can also consider using the portable version of Google Browser in case you have trouble installing Google Chrome via the standard Google Pack Installer - the other alternative is to use the offline installer of Google Chrome browser available here.

With Google Chrome portable, all user settings including web history and cookies are saved on to the same folder - the program settings are saved in "Chrome" folder while the user settings go in the "Profile" folder.  Portable Chrome was earlier tested on Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1 machines.

Google India has a launched a very unique initiative to educate the offline population in India about the benefits of Internet.

The project is called The Internet Bus and, as the name suggests, it’s a web connected bus that will travel to different cities of India giving people an opportunity to experience the Internet first hand through the various computers installed inside the bus.

Google Internet Bus in India

The Internet Bus website is available at google.co.in/internetbus where you can see the exact itinerary of the bus or check out Picasa for more photos of this Internet bus.

The bus was flagged from Chennai today and will cover most cities in the state of Tamil Nadu over the next six weeks. Prem Ramaswami & Srikanth Belwadi of Google India say that the bus will showcase Internet services like search, email, social networking, maps and others.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.

It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” he said.

Google said: “We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers.”

Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”

Though energy consumption by computers is growing - and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.

If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.

Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV presenter, was posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of bungy jumping and ‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ weather makes UK look stable and clement”.

Jonathan Ross was Twittering even more, with posts such as “Am going to muck out the pigs. It will be cold, but I’m not the type to go on about it” and “Am now back indoors and have put on fleecy tracksuit and two pairs of socks”. Ross also made various “tweets” trying to ascertain whether Jeremy Clarkson was a Twitter user or not. Yesterday the Top Gear presenter cleared up the matter, saying: “I am not a twit. And Jonathan Ross is.”

Such internet phenomena are not simply fun and hot air, Newcombe warns: the boom in such services has a carbon cost.

Source: Timesonline, UK