Just a note to all Mainland China users who have adopted Google Apps as their mail client. By now, you may all have heard that Google has been in a rather messy situation with the government. As of today, they have stopped censorship and are starting to relay Google sites to the Hong Kong Google homepage.

If you are using Google Apps, as we are, be sure to have a contingency plan in place to ensure email delivery. Should Google Apps suddenly be blocked, simply go back to your control panel and revert back to the TeraScape MX records on file and enter back in your email addresses.

Last week, someone forwarded an email to me regarding an email they'd received from a company who wanted to use their site for advertising. This company was willing to pay them up to $100 to add a short paragraph. This paragraph would even be placed on an obscure page on the website. The company told them which page they wanted, what the text was, and what the links were. Sounds okay, right?

Edit: Changes in Google Apps apparently no longer let you use a .cn even through the control panel. If this changes, I'll update this article again.

Continuing from this article about setting up Google Apps from China, I'd like to go into details about how to set up Google Apps with a .cn or a .com.cn.

While we run our own servers & such, complete with email packages, we prefer the Gmail way of doing things and have outsourced our personal email accounts to Google Apps. However, we ran into a problem when trying to register for the service from here in China. Google Apps "isn't available in your country".

Yes, it's possible. First of all, you need a domain name. Take... sinopenn.com for example. Blogger software, blogger blog, google everything else, except for the posts. But it's not blocked in China.

How do you do this? First of all, you need a domain name. Domains cost no more than $10 from a place like Godaddy.com or around 200 RMB through a little known outfit called TeraScape.NETworks.

Someone on Shanghai Expat recently asked about how to change the language settings on Picasa. Their Picasa was in Chinese, but the user doesn't read Chinese, and didn't know how to go about changing the language. The Solution:

Go to Tools (2nd to last menu Item at the top)
Options (Last Choice of the tools menu at the bottom). Click on that.
You'll see 5 checkboxes & two dropdown menus.

Use the 2nd dropdown menu to change the interface language to your preferred language.