The Smorgasbord

You know, just when you thought that google had it’s hands in everything – this one comes up. Google has started their own completely free Directory Assistance phone hotline number 800-GOOG-411. It’s free, it’s quick, and it works. It’s weird too, because the cell companies like Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T are getting $1.75 or more per call for directory assistance. They’re making a killing on that, which is why so many geeks started using 800-FREE-411. But with that service you get 20 seconds of commercial crap and then if the the automated service can’t fetch your number you are SOL, because they no longer have live operators. So, once again – it’s google to the rescue! That number shouldn’t be hard to remember thenext time you need to look a phone number up!

[tags]google, free 411, information, directory assistance, cell phone tips[/tags]

You get all kinds of emails talking about scams, and most of the time I immediantly check Snopes to make sure it’s legitimate or not (and usually it’s not). There was one going around about a year ago in forwarded email that talked about watching when you filled your car up with gas because gang members were hiding under cars, and they would slit the back of your ankle with a knife slicing your Achilles tendon so you couldn’t walk – and then hijacking your car. This was a fraudulent story that never happenned, an urban legend. There was another one that gave some special code to use to dial 911 on your cell phone, and yet another code to use to give your cell phone more battery life – all fraudulent.

But sometimes the stories seem all to real, and more and more the spam emails prey on people that are expecting an email. Now they send out emails regarding bonus checks for people signing on to a new job, or worse from their retirement account or something. If you were expecting such a check, the spam email might seem real to you. This official article from the United States FDIC warns of such a ‘cashier’s check scam’. Even though the bulletin was from 2002, I’ve seen emails like it this year.

This article from the United States FTC warns or being way about ‘sweepstakes winnings’. Most people have enough common sense to know that you never pay for sweepstakes winnings, but I’m sure we all know a relative or friend that doesn’t. Geeks unite – warn your friends and family about such things, we are often their first line of defense! Have you been scammed or known someone who has? Comment now…

Staying on the topic of Linux LiveCD’s, OPHCrack is a tool that you can use to break, crack, or retrieve any Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista password quickly and effectively. Here’s the background….in our house friends and family know we work on computers and can fix and repair them. It seem like every month one is dropped off for on reason or another. Usually the problems are the same – the computer is slow because of heavy surfing on the web and has some kind of virus or trojan. But we got one the other day with a really simple problem – they setup a password to login and forgot what it was. The computer was a couple years old and Windows XP.

Seems like someone dropped a computer because of a forgotten or lost password a few years back, and at that time the only solution I managed to find after hours and hours of searching was a linux boot floppy with some tools to reset the password by editing the registry and some other file. My son found OPHCrack for this time around, and he managed to crack and reveal the lost password in just minutes. All you have to do download and burn the LiveCD, and then bootup using it on the computer with the lost password – then use OPHCrack to crack it and you’re good to go! There are some Linux tools out there that allow you to reset a Windows password (like the one I used to have), but this one just flat out cracks the password for you. It worked well for us, we were very pleased. The program is free and legal – just don’t be using it for illegal or illicit purposes! Bookmark the page, you might forget your own password someday!

We all use google, and most of us that would consider ourselves “power users” probabaly already know the more popular google ‘shortcuts’ and features. Like you can use google as a calculator and search “8 + 8″ and google will spit back “16″. You can search “100 inches in feet” and google will say “8.3333333 feet”. Google is pretty smart isn’t it? I wrote this guide of advanced google search tips to teach you how to save lots of time and be more productive!

Google Search Shortcuts You should know – but probably don’t

Google Package Tracking

You probably didn’t know though, that you can type in a package tracking number for UPS, Fedex, or United States Postal Service and google will automatically perform the query and the right web site, and give you results on where your package is!! What a time saver – who knew google would track packages? (sorry can’t give an example for this one – I don’t have a package to track!)

Google Vehicle Search

Did you know that you can also type any VIN number in google for any vehicle – and it will give you a carfax vehicle record? Click on the pictured example to try this search example now!

Searching by Price Range Using Google

You can search using a range of numbers. This is a totally brand new one for me…say you want to buy something and you’re willing to play between like amount or another. Like a hard drive, and you want prices between $50 and $100. Your google search would be like this: “seagate 100GB hard drive #$50…$100#”. Just be sure to start and end your range with the # sign and have the 3 dots in the middle. This really helps to get good results on exactly what you are looking for, and in your price range! Click on the picture example below to see this search in action…

Quickly find and search books Using Google

If you looking to buy a book, or find a book – just preface what you’re looking for in your search with the word “book”. For example, search for ‘book unix shell scripting’. Click the pictured example below to see what this looks like. Note I circled in red the options for “Limited Preview” and “Full View”. One is of course looking at part of a book, and full view is when the entire book is available online (for free). For this particular search, there are none available as full view (for free), but it’s good to know that some are. Click the pictured example to see a basic search for a book.

Now click on the first book result. This is really cool – you can see inside the book, the table of contents, a bunch of sample pages…notice my red circle in the bottom right corner where you can “search this book”. Awesome. Just above that you’ll see a list of places you can buy this book. Click the pictured example to see this book search.

The one last thing I wanted to show you (and possibly the coolest), is the link right above the “search this book” box that says “Find this book in a Library”. When you click on that, it figures out your physical location by the IP address on your computer, and finds the closest libraries listed online that may have to book. You can’t beat that. Click the pictured example to see this work live.

How to Use Google as a Phone Book

I use google to look up numbers all the time, and it’s pretty good at it. But I’ve learned that it can be even better. You can use google as a phone book, simply by prefacing your search with either ‘phonebook’, ‘rphonebook’ (residential), or ‘bphonebook’ (business). Click the pictured example below to see this in action!

How to use Google Movie Search

Like other special searches you can do with google – you can also search movies and movie reviews! This is where googles no-nosense clean style comes in handy. I used to look at movie reviews in Yahoo! Movies. But that page is just plagued by ads, garbage, and clutter. Google comes to the rescue again, and all you have do is preface your search with “movie:”. Click on the pictured example below to see this work live…

This is awesome! You get the movies under that name, the year they were made……but wait! There’s more! Click on the title of any movie and you get this example where you can see reviews, the avg review rating, you get frequently mentioned terms (to search by), you can search within the reviews, and you can find theatres by you by zip code! Click the pictured example to view this search now…

Get Historical News with Google News Archive Search

Google News is great for the latest headlines, but what I didn’t know is that google news has an archive you can search…and they have archived news that goes back decades and decades. And once you do a search you can arrange the results in a timeline. This could be very helpful if you’re doing research on just about any topic. Click the pictured example to do this this search…

Look at Dead Tree Catalogs the google web 2.0 way

Google is so big now, there’s just so many things I didn’t know you can do with them now (and I’ve been using google since 1998 – almost 10 years). This is something I simply didn’t know existed. Google has a catalog search, meaning “mail order catalog”. I kinda miss getting catalogs back in the day (some I still get), like Edmund Scientific, and do it yourself electronics catalogs. Google Catalog Search is in “beta”, so your favorite ones might not be available in there yet (but many are). This search is really cool, because they scan the entire catalog in, and you can browse the pages (quickly) as if the catalog were in your hands. You can even browse up to 6 pages at once, and search within a catalog. Click the image below to try the Sharper Image catalog search (6 pages at once)…

Use Google Notebook to organize clips and make notes

This is the last in the series of tips (and perhaps the best). Google has created an extension for the Firefox Web Browser called Notebook that you can download here. This is the firefox extension I’ve been looking for!! I’ve used a few of these clipboard like utilities before, and also ones that were firefox extensions – like ClipMarks. I didn’t like that at all. Notebook (like most google tools) is easy to use, and does exactly what I want. Basically, once installed – you can select text (or pictures), click ‘clip’ and what you selected is saved to your ‘notebook’. But (a feature I always wanted), you can manually add notes and ‘sections’ (categories) as well. I fired it up and added one ‘clip’ (see pic below)…

I was wary about this plugin at first, but then I clicked the “tools” dropdown (from the pic above), and you can click “go to my notebooks homepage”. This is a new part of your ‘google account’. Your google notebook page is where you store you clips, you can setup ‘sections’ to categorize them, and drag and drop arrange them, you make make new notes, you get a rich text editor, you can search your notebooks, you can “share” your notebook with other collaborators, you can share it as a public web page, but most importantly you can “export to google docs”. Woohoo!! This is a major, major time saver for me! Now as I read online and do research I can save all kinds of things for parsing later as I go without the need to have a text editor open. Everything is saved in my google account, and I can walk away and access it from any computer in the world. Out of all the things I learned about google today – THIS was the BEST ONE (for me)!!

How does Google Help You?

In this google tutorial article I keyed in on things I noticed that I never knew about before, things that directly benefited me the most in the ways I work on the web. What didn’t I list that you have learned and can share with me and others? To make this article even better, I would love for you to submit your feedback using the comment links below! If you would like to suggest a new article or guest post – please feel free to use out contact form.

I would also like to tell you about how I came across this information – as it may help you as well. I got all of these golden nuggets of information in a book, brand new for 2007 called The Google Power Tools Bible. This is definitely a very thorough reference of 32+ chapters and over 600+ pages. It covers all kinds of things that I didn’t have time to go into here, like google trends, google desktop, google office, froogle, and tons more! It’s definitely worth the money!

Google Power Tools Bible

If you are reading this article at any URL other than www.smorgasbord.net it has been scraped or stolen. Please Visit The Smorgasbord web site for the authentic version. Copyright 2007, The Smorgasbord, All Rights Reserved.

I came across something I just had to share that has changed the way I work quite a bit. I was doing StumbleUpon one day, and one of the first pages I came across was Portableapps.com. Now I’ve blogged about both Portable Firefox and Portable Opera before. These are web browsers you can install and run directly from your USB memory stick. But Portable Apps is different because it’s basically a menu driven “work suite” for your thumb drive. You download the PortableApps.exe file, and when you run the setup (either full or lightweight version) it actually fully installs working applications on your flash drive. And it can be any kind of external hard drive, memory stick, flash card, thumb drive, etc. It’s going to fully install the applications with no need to change your registry in any way, and no need to place or modify a single file on your computers hard drive. The applications are completely “portable” – you take them with you on the go wherever you take your external drive, card, or stick. Whatever computer you are at, wherever you are – everything is with you every time.This has quite a few advantages if you think about it. Do you have a policy at work where you can’t install any applications at all? Maybe they forced Windows Group Policy on you that won’t even allow it to happen. Can’t access your home email at work? Can’t IM at work? Using a work laptop on a trip? Using an Internet Kiosk? Are you at the Library, or a friend or relatives house? Do you have multiple computers in your house? You get the picture…

This post of part of The Smorgasbord Tech Reviews series!

So, no I’m going to describe how I use Portable Apps and you can apply it to best suit you. First of all, I needed a new thumb drive. You may have one already. I had several, but they were only a few hundred megabytes. I knew I wanted one at least 2GB or more, and I didn’t want to spend more than $20 or $30. I did what I usually do – I looked on Amazon. You could get one on eBay, but I didn’t want to fool around with that this time (waiting or an auction to end). I wanted my drive in a few days. And I didn’t do TigerDirect or NewEgg simply because I didn’t feel like paying $6 shipping on such a low cost item. I went over to The Smorgasbord Store, and I did a search for USB Flash Drive 2GB. Right away I found many in the $20 price range. I picked one I could get free shipping on and place the order.

Three days later I had my new 2GB thumb drive, a good Kingston one with a eyelet for my keychain. I plugged it in and installed the full version of Portable Apps. Once installed, there is an autorun file – so when you plug in the drive to your computer the menu should load automatically, but if it doesn’t just go to “My Computer”, find your thumb drive, open it, and click on “StartPortableApps.exe”.

Now, you’re going to get a menu that looks just like this one:

[photopress:portable_apps.jpg,full,pp_image]

Wow! Your own customizable start menu just for your portable drive! You get many applications pre-intalled (depending on which version you downloaded). You get Firefox, an IM client, the Open Office Suite, and more! Think about what you’ve got here for a minute. You can open and edit just about any version MS Office doc from your drive. You can use your own portable Firefox, take your bookmarks with you wherever you go, save your own password in Firefox Password Manager, you have your own cache, your own Firefox extensions, everywhere you go you have a customized browser just the way you like it! At work, at the Library, at your mom’s house, on any computer in your house – it’s all with you every time! You can IM using any messenger service with GAIM, and you’ll never have to worry about installing YIM, AIM, or MSN again! There is also a built-in backup function on the menu, so you can backup everything on your drive to your main computer anytime you want.

Be Organized: There are links on the menu to “Documents”, “Pictures”, “Video”, “Music” – and each link opens a folder on your drive that you drag and drop stuff into. Wow, you can keep your important docs on the go, pictures from your digital camera, your favorite mp3′s, or video clips! The bigger your external drive, card, or stick – the more stuff you can take with you!

Get More Portable Apps: In my opinion, some of the greatest portable apps you’ll need to add. On the menu, just click “Options” and “Get More Apps”. Download the ones you like, then go back to the menu “Options” and “Add New App”. You can remove apps the same way. Now, I maintain web sites, write code, edit video, audio, and edit graphics as well. So, I downloaded and installed “Notepad++ Portable” (text editor), “Nvu Portable” (web editor), “Gimp Portable” (graphics editor on a par with Photoshop), “Filezilla Portable” (FTP client), “PuTTy Portable” (SSH telnet client), “Audacity Portable” (Audio Editor), “MPlayer Portable” (movie and media player), “VirtualDub Portable” (Video Editor), “Sumatra PDF Portable” (PDF Viewer), “7-Zip Portable” (zip and unzip stuff), “Eraser Portable” (erase files securely), “KeePass Password Safe” (keep an encrypted password db), and last “Toucan” (an advanced backup utility).

Wow! So now, I can do web editing, graphic editing, audio and video editing, I can FTP or telnet, view PDF files, zip and unzip stuff, I can securely store all my password, securely delete files – and EVERY single program is COMPLETELY FREE as is PortableApps itself! You cannot ask for a better bargain!! I want to talk about “Toucan” for a sec too. Portable Apps has a backup function, but with Toucan you can schedule backups, filter out things to backup (just these kinds of files from these folders), you can compare folders, update files newer than a certain date, etc.

OK – that’s my review! I love Portable Apps and I know use it and my new 2GB thumb drive every day! It has saved me tons of time, and everything is with me everywhere I go now! Do you have an app that has saved you time? Do you know of other portable or thumb drive utils? Please, comment now and share with everyone!

Oh – and this is the flash drive I have and installed portable apps on – and I love it!

Kingston Data Traveler II Plus – Migo Edition – USB flash drive – 2 GB ( DTII+M/2GB ) (Retail Package)

oh – and you can get flash drives at very reasonable prices on eBay as well:

Here’s a resource page you need to bookmark – “45 Best Freeware Design Programs”. This guy really did his homework. I’ve read and even created many resource or “roundup” pages, but this is one of the best I’ve seen. If you work with web sites, or graphics, or you have a myspace or facebook page, or just like fiddling around with new software you should bookmark this page now!

First of all, everything on this page appears to be a genuine freeware, no bs, no “shareware” or ‘limited use’ programs. Each and everyone has a clear description and a screenshot. In addition, they are groups in categories like “Image Editing”, “Illustration”, “Authoring Tools”, “Animation”, “3D Modeling & CAD”, “Flash Tools”, and “Useful Tools”. Each and every description tell what the programs does, what the author’s experience with it was, and other miscellaneous info to give you a well-rounded opinion of whether or not the tool is for you. Check it out, this bookmark is a keeper!