If you have a printer attached to a Linux machine, you can easily send print jobs to that printer from another remote computer using Dropbox (see similar solutions for Windows and Mac).
The idea is that you create a shell script to monitor a local Dropbox folder. As soon as a new file is added to that folder from a remote computer (or mobile phone), the script will send the file to the attached printer. Once the the printing job is completed, the file is removed from the incoming queue.
The implementation is easy. Kurt Granroth sent me this improved* shell script that you can use in any Linux environment. You only have to setup a cron job against this script such that it runs after every ‘n’ seconds (or minutes).
If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked , you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.
Google’s Realtime Search offers you a convenient way to search through status updates, news articles and other links that are shared on the social web, mainly Twitter and Facebook.
Microsoft too has a similar search product called Bing Social and though both these tools are powered by the same data coming from Twitter and Facebook, I find Bing’s Social Search a slightly better product than Google’s Realtime Search.
Both Bing and Google display search results from Facebook and Twitter in a self-updating river of news format but with Bing Social, you have an option to filter out status updates by source.
That means you can limit your search results to either Twitter or Facebook, something that is currently not possible in Google’s Realtime search.
