Athena2. Gmail. Google Drive. The list of Harker web services is as vast as the seven seas. Here are a few tips to help you cut through stormy waters as you sail the Harker tech ocean.

Unsend Gmail Emails

Gmail supports a number of “Labs,” experimental features which users have the option of installing. One labs feature is Undo Send. This feature puts a delay on sending emails, allowing users to cancel the sending of an email.

To activate Undo Send, click on the gear on the upper right hand corner of the Gmail website. Next, select “Settings,” and then click on “Labs,” which is the farthest header to the right. Enable “Undo send” and save.

Once you have enabled Undo Send in the Labs tab and saved it, you can also set the time limit for unsending a message in the general tab of settings for it to work. The time limit can be decreased from the default 10 seconds to five seconds, or increased to up to 30 seconds.

Gmail has other customization options, as well: click the right-hand gear and choose the “Compact” view to reduce the spacing between emails in your inbox and see more at once.

Customize Athena2

While Athena2 has long been an essential program for students, many are unaware of the website’s adaptability. When a user is logged into Athena2 on their profile page or home page (athena2.harker.org/my), they can click the “Customize this page” button to enter a mode that allows for rearrangement of the grey blocks of Athena2 and also the reordering of courses. For example, moving the “My Courses” block to the top of the screen allows for easy access.

Athena2 also has a variety of themes available under “My profile settings,” which is in the Administration block under “Edit profile.” Twenty different themes are available, including “Fusion,” which used to be the default for Athena2.

Google Drive Desktop Client

With the Google Drive desktop client, you can share local files with other people and automatically back up all of your documents to the cloud. The advantage of the desktop client is that files shared with other people can be edited with a local program such as PowerPoint, and changes are synced in the background. There is no need to manually download the file and reupload it.

To download the desktop client from the Google Drive website, click the gear button in the right hand corner. Then click “Download Drive.”

In a similar vein, it is also possible to upload documents to Drive in addition to downloading them.

How to use WebPrint

With WebPrint, accessible from webprint.harker.org, users can access the Harker printers without installing printer drivers. Select a printer, input the number of copies, drag and drop files, and print. WebPrint supports a number of file types, including Word documents (.docx), PDFs (.pdf), Microsoft PowerPoints (.ppt), and rich text files (.rtf). Once the file upload is complete, WebPrint displays a queue listing the status of each document. Note that WebPrint can only be accessed through webprint.harker.org. Adding www. will break the link. In addition, it cannot be utilized without using a Harker WiFi network.

We ran a test to see how fast WebPrint actually is. Starting a timer from typing in the URL, it only took 29 seconds for the printer to begin printing pages. By the time you arrive to collect your documents, they will already be cool.

Harker Aquila RSS

Both the Harker Book Blog and Harker Aquila support RSS feeds, which deliver the latest news articles and book reviews in a condensed format and link back to the original article.

The user of an RSS feed can read the updates of multiple websites in a single program. Websites that support RSS feeds can be identified by the RSS symbol, an orange square with a broadcast wave inside of it.

To read RSS feeds, use a specialized application such as Feedly or Flipboard.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on March 13, 2015.