It used to frustrate me to no end that I couldn’t sort my Gmail inbox by Attachments like you can in Outlook, bringing all the messages with attachments to the top. Being able to do that is particularly important when you start to approach the 7GB limit and you need to clear out some old garbage.

So when I realized how to see just messages with attachments it was like a light went off in my head. Know you search operators!

To see messages with attachments search for has:attachment. You can search for specific file types like this: filename:pdf. That will give you a list of all the messages with pdfs attached.

There are a bunch of other operators such as in (in:inbox, in:trash, in:spam), is (is:starred, is:unread, is:read), and date operators (after:2004/04/16, before:2004/04/18).

See the complete list in Gmail Help.

About a month ago I loaded up the ipod with some podiobooks. I’m not quite done listening to them yet, but I thought I go ahead and update on the ones I have listened to.

3 Dooms of America by Eugene Fairfield – I have no idea what happened with this. It’s not on my ipod. I think I started listening but it didn’t grab me. I’m not even sure.

The Servant and Soothsayer by Michael Brownstein – Another one I don’t remember, but I did make a note about it. “Just under 4 hours. Good enough to listen to.” Wow.

The Gearheart by Alex White – I couldn’t get in to the theatrics. I felt like they were asking me to give them a lot of room because it’s labeled Steampunk.
And they asked the audience weird, irrelevant questions in each episode and read the answers on the next one. This let in the worst of all fictions – fan fiction.

Must Not Sleep by Michael Brownstein – Shades of Carlos Castaneda. Gave up halfway through as the story just got stranger and stranger for no apparent reason.

Vatican Assassin and Vatican Ambassador by Mike Luoma – This is good stuff. I have a few chapters of Vatican Ambassador left. It’s not at all what I expected – it’s better. I’m looking forward to Vatican Abdicator and Alibi Jones.

Just a quick note that was a tad too long to tweet – Google has added SSL to search. If you’re surfing the web on an open wi-fi network, like one in a coffee shop, do your searches from https://www.google.com/.  Note the “s” in “https”.

It’s in Beta, but whatever, it’s Google.

Ordinarily you’re sending your search requests out in the clear.  This way your request (the term you search on) is sent to google via a secure channel, and the results from google are returned on that same channel.

I’ve been using Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) to sync bookmarks and passwords across the various browsers and computers I use for about a year. During that year the product only got better, and I really had no complaints.

I could have just said it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. But two things happened - I got a Nexus One, and I saw people raving about LastPass. LastPass doesn’t do the bookmark syncing, but it does offer an Android app with the paid version. And bookmarks are so 90s. They’re rarely useful. And besides, Chrome, my current browser of choice, automatically syncs my bookmarks to my Google Docs account. I was really using Xmarks for the password syncing.

Now I’m not going to do the feature vs feature breakdown with charts and graphs that the title may have implied. I’m just going to describe the two experiences:

Xmarks - Create your account, install the software, surf the web. It imports the saved passwords in your browser and remembers new ones you use. It syncs automatically with their server. Browsers on other computers you use (or other browsers on the same machine) automatically stay in sync. After a couple of weeks of using Xmarks you forget about it, and it just becomes part of how surfing the web works. You can view your bookmarks by signing in to their website from any browser.

LastPass - Create your account, install the software, try to surf the web. It imports (and wipes out) the passwords in your browser. When you go to a site that requires a log in you get two weird options – AutoFill and AutoLogin. Try all the options listed under each and eventually sometimes one of them turns out the be your credentials for that site. You’re in! Unless of course none of those worked. In that case you get temporarily redirected to a form on a separate page that asks about dozen questions about that particular site / login. Most are optional. Instead of staying out of your way and working behind the scenes, LastPass is constantly in your face. About 25% of the time I end up having to log in without it. And lastly, if you lose your LastPass password you are SCREWED. There’s no recovery.

End result – LastPass uninstalled. I’m back to Xmarks. All is good with the world again.