How to Disable Profile Pictures in Gmail

How to Disable (Other) Profile Pictures in Gmail

A short while ago changed Gmail to display the profile photos/pictures of the people who send you email and whom you chat with. I don't like this feature, since sometimes I receive emails from online services, and when it shows up with a random person's face I've never met, it is unsettling. Here is how to disable the "People Widget" in your Gmail.

Go to: Gmail -> Settings -> General -> People Widget -> Hide the people widget.

Simple huh? Well, it is subtle and took me some time to find. Heck, I was able to google it a few weeks ago but then today I couldn't find the answer on Google no matter what I tried. I wouldn't have known the option was there if I hadn't already found the solution.

What they really need is a whitelist option, since there are a few people I actually would like to see this People Widget used for, but for 95% of all the email I get, I really never want to see these people.

(On a personal note, I hate Facebook's outright oppression of anonymity online. I just hope Google never goes that route.)

Google Talk Audio Fluxuation Problems

Overview

Fixing (randomly changing/auto-adjusting) audio levels for Google Talk (Google Voice) microphone in Linux.

Problem

So I started using Google Voice chat a lot in the past few months. But just this passed week, I noticed the microphone volume was automatically increasing itself, until it became too loud for others in the conversation. I don't know why it suddenly started, but here is the solution to the problem. (I recently upgraded to Firefox 12 and this might be the change that caused the problem.)

Solution

Google Talk voice chat has an configuration file called 'options' in the folder '~/.config/google-googletalkplugin'. You want to edit this file or create it for yourself.

Make a backup '~/.config/google-googletalkplugin/options'. If the file does not exist, don't worry. Just create one. Edit file and add this line:

audio-flags=1

If you need help editing a file in Linux, see this article.