#google

Force Gmail to Use Secure Connection Via SSL

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With the recent announce­ment of SF Reverse Engi­neer, Mike Per­ry, intend­ing to release his Gmail Account Hack­ing Tool to the pub­lic, there is no bet­ter time than now to secure you Gmail con­nec­tion by using the Google’s pro­vide SSL.

To do so, do the fol­low­ing:

  1. Click on SETTINGS (top-right of the Gmail page). It will look some­thing like this:
  2. Scroll all the way down, or try to find “Brows­er con­nec­tion”
  3. Select “Always use https”, and the “Save changes”

You might have to refresh/reload your Gmail page. To ver­i­fy, you may look at your Address Bar and it should sim­i­lar to the fol­low­ing:

You will also notice that the brows­er win­dow’s SSL con­nec­tion icon has been enabled/locked. In Fire­Fox, its on the bot­tom-right of the Sta­tus Bar.

Do note that if you are also using Gmail via Google Apps for work, or what have you, forc­ing SSL con­nec­tion is cur­rent­ly not avail­able. But alas, Google does have it on their to-do list last month. Hope­ful­ly, they can see the urgency and add it on some­time soon due to Mike Per­ry’s announce­ment.

But for now, you can just man­u­al­ly change the URL from hav­ing “http” to “https”. Or, if you are using Fire­Fox (which you should), you might grab this Grease­mon­key plu­g­in called GMailSe­cure. You will just need to add your Google Apps’ Gmail URL to its “Includ­ed Page” list under GMailSe­cure’s options. For exam­ple,

http://mail.google.com/a/company-domain.com/*

Fur­ther read­ing about this sub­ject can be done via Web­mon­key’s arti­cle, Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Fea­ture On Now.

I hope that helps.

Sync iPhone and Google Calendar via NuevaSync

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I have been tin­ker­ing around try­ing to get GCAL­Dae­mon work­ing again after the update to Leop­ard, but it just has­n’t been the same from its for­mer self of 1‑to‑1 sync. Thought you can find dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the pow­er of the crowd. But things have been look­ing grim late­ly as get­ting GCAL­Dae­mon to work with Leop­ard is still up in the air. Enter Nueva­Sync.

Nueva­Sync allows direct, over-the-air, native syn­chro­niza­tion of cer­tain smart phones and PDA devices with pub­lic PIM, and cal­en­dar­ing ser­vices includ­ing Google Cal­en­dar. Nueva­Sync does not need any soft­ware installed on your device because it uses syn­chro­niza­tion pro­to­cols that are already built in.

I had giv­en it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its anoth­er account to keep track of from the many ser­vices out there, but hey… if it works—it works. The set­up is pret­ty sim­ple. You pret­ty much just have to fol­low the instruc­tions which were writ­ten in terms of a 7th-grader—easy enough.

A cou­ple of facts that I found out along with Nueva­Sync’s FAQ:

  • It cur­rent­ly sup­ports the fol­low­ing mobile devices:
    • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
    • Win­dows Mobile based PDAs and smart­phones
  • You’ll be doing push/fetch to Nueva­Sync’s “Exchange Serv­er”
  • Adding an alarm noti­fi­ca­tion on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the even­t’s Google Cal­en­dar (gCal) ver­sion. Vice-ver­sa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when cre­at­ing the event in gCal in order to have it also avail­able in your iPhone.
  • Hav­ing your iPhone’s set­ting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Man­u­al­ly” will still enable to Nueva­Sync to per­form its job while allow­ing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
  • It can sync to mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars under your gCal account of those Cal­en­dars you have a per­mis­sion to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the Nueva­Sync sta­tus page.
  • Even though you can sync with mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, cre­at­ing an event in your iPhone would default to your main cal­en­dar. This you can say would be a step back if your try­ing to keep things very orga­nized and cat­e­go­rize your events (i.e. Per­son­al, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t real­ly using more than one cal­en­dar or don’t care if the events from your write-per­mit­ted cal­en­dars are merged togeth­er into one in your iPhone, I’d def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend you to give Nueva­Sync a try. But don’t wor­ry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you sup­port mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new fea­ture pri­or­i­ties.

Any­ways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you hap­pen to find new, inter­est­ing things about it. Have a good sync!

WordPresss Plugins Search

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Search­ing for Word­Press Plu­g­ins seems to not be very help­ful. The results that comes up on the page ain’t help­ing out. Although, there’s a “you may also try your search at Google” link below the results page—it should be eas­i­er to find the right ones.

Hmmm… will see if I have time to cre­ate maybe a boor­marklet. Unless there’s one already… any­one? For the time being, book­mark­ing or copy-and-past­ing the fol­low­ing would be best and make things effi­cient:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awordpress.org%2Fextend%2Fplugins%2F+

Note: You should be able to add your search keyword(s) after the “+” plus-sign. For exam­ple:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awordpress.org%2Fextend%2Fplugins%2F+test

To-do List in Google Calendar

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It seems that I am find­ing Google Cal­en­dar (cur­rent­ly being referred to as gCal by technopiles) an alter­na­tive to Out­look late­ly. Even though I wish that Google would fin­ish up imple­ment­ing some kind of sync­ing between gCal and Out­look already. But luck­i­ly, there’s a “hack” that helps out in that side of things. I guess its enough to hold me down for a bit till some­thing from Google comes about.

Any­ways, one of the oth­er things that I was hop­ing gCal to have was a sim­ple to-do list(s), aka. Tasks for those Out­look-ori­ent­ed peo­ple. As I was Blin­go-ing for an inte­gra­tion of some kind of to-do list with gCal, this arti­cle was on top of the list by Matias Pelenur. It does the job using JS, GM and Fire­Fox. Although at the moment, it only saves your to-do list per GM install; local­ly that is, per com­put­er. But there are a cou­ple of workarounds that can be done to make it store to ser­vices such as Ama­zon S3, gCal itself, etc. as not­ed by Matias.

Sup­pos­ed­ly, Google men­tioned the avail­abil­i­ty of an “Account Authen­ti­ca­tion Proxy for Web Appli­ca­tions” fea­ture that will be inter­grat­ed with their gCal API in late April… this past April in fact. I guess we’ll just have to wait for an update on Matias about that, or from Google regard­ing their own home-blend­ed to-do list inte­gra­tion with gCal.