After reading “New ways to store data,” Stephen Olano wrote in to share another way to get free online storage. Olano said I had missed Gmail Drive. Indeed I had and I thank him for bringing it to our attention.
Gmail Drive, as the name suggests, turns your free Google Mail account—with its generous one gigabyte of storage—into a virtual drive. As long as you’re online, you can save to and load from the drive like any other storage device on your system.
To get Gmail Drive, download it (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) and run the installer. After that, an extra drive called “Gmail Drive” will appear when you double-click on My Computer. Unlike local drives, this one requires you to log in using your Gmail account name and password.
You can create new folders or rename existing ones, but you can’t run programs from your Gmail Drive.
Gmail Drive saves your files as file attachments in your inbox. To keep these from cluttering up the inbox, use the
Gmail filter (go to Settings and Filters) to automatically archive all incoming mail with GMAILFS in the subject line.
Gmail Drive will work on Windows 98 or XP and is based on GMAILFS for Linux by Richard Jones, an Australian software engineer.
Google hacks and tips
Gmail Drive is called a hack because it’s code written to provide extra functionality to an existing program, in this case Google Mail.
For years, Google fans have written hacks to tailor Google’s results to specific requirements. “Google Hacks” by Tara Calashain documents 100 of these, many of which require knowledge of programming to use.
You don’t need to write code to make better use of Google, however. Special features and advanced operators can help fine-tune the results right from the search form. Here are some favorites:
Use Google as a calculator. Type in a mathematical expression (e.g. 254+396) into the search window and hit search and Google will give you the answer.
Use Google as a metric converter. Type in a measure in English (e.g. 5 feet 8 inches or 170 pounds) into the search window and hit search and Google will return the equivalent in metric. You can also convert Fahrenheit to Celsius but the conversions don’t work the other way around.
Use Google as a quick dictionary. Type “define:” (no quotation marks) followed by the term you want defined to quickly look up word meanings.
Search specific sites or domains. Want to limit search results to certain domains? Use the “site:” operator. For example, to narrow your search results for “Jose Rizal” to educational sites in the Philippines, type this in the search window: site:edu.ph Jose Rizal. To limit results to government sites, use “gov” instead of “edu.” This operator can also be used to limit results to a specific Web site. For example, to find all references of “Linux” in Microsoft’s site, type this into the search box: site:microsoft.com Linux.
If you don’t want to play around with special operators, try Google’s Advanced Search form, which is easier to use. There’s a lot of power behind Google’s simple search form. The trick is in knowing how to use it to your advantage.
