Lifehax0r: How To Get Meeting Reminders from Google through SMS (for free!)

One of my favorite website is Lifehacker.com and as a hommage to Lifehacker, here's my own lifehack.


My current job involves a lot of meetings.  Either I initiate meetings by creating meeting invitations through MS Outlook 2003 or I receive meeting invitations from my clients, also through MS Outlook 2003.  A few weeks ago, I was on leave when a client sent me a meeting invitation and cc:'ed my Gmail account.  To my pleasant surprise, the meeting invitation format of MS Outlook 2003 was recognized by Gmail.  So I accepted the meeting invitation on Gmail and to my further surprise, my Google Calendar account automagically added the meeting!



My Google Calendar is set to send SMS alerts to my cellphone whenever a meeting is due so on the day of the meeting, I was alerted by my cellphone with the following message:

From: Google
Reminder: xxxxxx Meeting @ Mon Oct 15 10:30 AM in XXX Conference Room 16th Floor Main Building (Bernie Jxxxx)

This gave me a rather bright idea.  Whenever I receive a meeting invitation, I forward the invitation to my Gmail account.  Then I log on to Gmail to accept it and viola: my meeting is added to my Google Calendar.  I am now alerted of that meeting even if I am not in front of my office computer!

I am not sure if this will work with other email clients like Lotus Notes or even Outlook Express.  But the workflow is so slick, I can't resist sharing it here.

This lifehack is not entirely free.  I had to send an SMS to Google Calendar to verify my cellphone number but that's the first and only overseas SMS I had to send out (and pay for) to make this work.

Here's the customary screenshot gallery (click on the image to see full-size screencap):

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Ultimate Repurposing: Surgeons Used Cellphones as Operating Room Light

I'm sure a lot of us has done this one way or another: use a cellphone as an emergency flashlight. But this is more extreme -- surgeons in Argentina used the light from cellphone screens to finish an emergency appendix operation!

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) -- The light from the cell phone screens allowed surgeons to complete an emergency appendix operation during a blackout in a city in central Argentina, reports said on Saturday.

Leonardo Molina, 29, was on the operating table on July 21, when the power went out in the Policlinico Juan D. Peron, the main hospital in Villa Mercedes, a small city in San Luis province.

"The generator, which should have been working correctly, didn't work," a hospital spokesman, whose name was not given, told TN television news station.

"The surgeons and anesthetists were in the dark... A family member got some cell phones together from people in the hallway and took them in to provide light," he said.

source: CNN.Com

technorati tags:cellphone, repurposing, lifehack

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Quick Tip: No Sweat .PDF to .HTML to Text Conversion

Last night, I needed to convert a .pdf formatted file to plain text so I can use my Nokia E61i to read the file on-the-road. After googling for a few minutes, I found this nifty piece of tip:

To convert a .pdf to text, send an email to pdf2html@adobe.com with the .pdf file as an attachment. After a few minutes, Adobe's ADOBE ACROBAT ELEMENTS SERVER will email you back with your .pdf file converted to .HTML. To finally convert the file to plain text, I opened the attached .HTML file on my favorite browser, highlighted all the text on the file and did the usual "copy & paste" operation to my favorite text editor, saved it and copied it to my Nokia E61i.

So there! No need to install additional software, no complicated software hacks needed!

technorati tags:lifehack, adobe, pdf, ebook

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