Here is a list of 10 tips on how to use Google as more than just your regular old search engine. I’ve tried not to simply rehash different ways you can use the “Advanced Search” feature here. Google’s advanced search function is also very useful, and getting down it’s syntax will undoubtedly save much time and effort (ie. using “” to surround phrases, minus signs, boolean logic operators, etc.). However, in this list I want highlight features that while residing “in the search engine” are external to traditional “searches”:

1. Google as a dictionary

As a writer cum blogger, I am endlessly looking up the meanings and spellings of random words. I’ve found no more efficient way of doing this, for my workflow at least, than using Google’s “define: [term]” function.

Simply clack in any word that you want a definition to and Google will return a list of definitions from various sources around the net. If you’re not 100% on the spelling, just like with regular searches, Google will do it’s best to figure out what you reall mean. It can also find definitions for many slang terms and idioms as well: see definitions for “hoser“, “the staw that broke the camel’s back” and “bizzo“.

2. Google as a weatherman

Google's quick and easy weather forecast

Alright, in our widgetized world, most of us have some weather widget kicking around our desktop, but that doesn’t make Google’s handy “weather: [location]” any less useful.

Whether (ahem) you need the weather for your own city, or a city an ocean away, Google’s weather function returns the temperature, weather, wind, humidity and four-day forecast as fast as you can say “snow day”.

3. Google as a currency converter

As a Canadian living in China and often working in US dollars, this is a feature I use virtually every day. Simply type “[X amount] [3-letter currency code] to [3-letter currency code]” (see image above for example) and Google will give you a quick currency conversion. Sure, it may not be exact enough for your hard-core FOREX trader, but for an average joe like me, it’s more than suitable.

4. Google as a weights and measures converter

It’s not just currencies that Google can quickly convert – virtually any weight or measurement can also be converted from metric to imperial or vice versa. Simply query Google with “XX [unit] to [unit]“, ie. “5 cm to inches”, or “6 gal to liter”.

5. Google as a calculator

If you’re like myself and completely inept at all things mathematical, Google’s calculator function is a godsend. Sure sure, a calculator app has been a primary feature of most every OS since long before “googling” made it into our vernacular. But personally, in a tech-world where there are twenty ways to do everything, I prefer to funnel as much as I can into a few key tools. As I’m almost always online and “in browser”, using Google’s calculator just makes sense. Plus I like that I can string together relatively complex calculations visually.

6. Google as a clock

Google's World Clock

Presumably you know what time it is where your butt is pressing the chair, and if not, surely your OS has a clock. However, if you’re quickly looking for a way to find out what time it is in any city around the globe, Google’s time function is an excellent way to do that.

Simply google “time [city]” and you’ll be presented with the time of the most likely city you are looking for, as well as a couple secondary cities with the same name. Handy if you’re planning on making a transcontinental or transoceanic phone call.

7. Google as a stockbroker

Google stock quotes

If you like charts that look like mountainous landscapes, you’re going to love the fact that you can quickly pull up stock quotes with Google simply by throwing in the company’s stock ticker symbol into the search engine.

You are then presented with a daily summary of the stock’s value, as well as links to more detailed information. For example, if you search for “GOOG“, Google’s ticker symbol, you’ll be presented with results represented in the image to the right, and will also be given a quick link to the Google Inc. page on Google Finance. Google Finance also has some neat search query tools, but they’re a topic for another post.

8. Google as an air traffic controller

Google flight information

Fumbling around looking for flight arrival and departure information on airline or airport Web sites can sometimes be a bit cumbersome.

Fortunately Google takes the legwork out of the process by providing a simple way to get basic flight information. Simply google the airline and flight number and you’ll be given a quick summary on whether or not the flight is on time and what its ETD and ETA are. Unfortunately this seems only to work for flights originating in the US or Canada.

9. Google as a movie guide

If you’re looking for showtimes for a certain movie in a certain city, Google does that too. Simply query Google with “movies [movie title] [city]” and you’ll be presented with a short summary of showtimes for a couple cinemas in that city (with links for more). It also, conveniently, gives you the film’s length, rating, genre and links to a trailer and reviews. Similarly, you can simply google “movie: [movie title]” (ie. “movie: x-men”) to get a listing of movies with that title along with a star rating and links to reviews. Likewise, this works with “music:” as well.

10. Google as the Yellow Pages

Google local business listings

A great and growing feature on Google is the ability to quickly find local businesses (shops, restaurants, etc.). Tied in tightly with the most excellent Google Maps, this function allows you to simply type in a business type (ie. “plumbers”, “Thai food restaurant”, “computer repair”) followed by your city to get a listing of businesses fitting your criteria.

The results give the name of the business, the phone number and Google Maps directions to the location. Incidentally, if you happen to run your own local business, be sure to add it to Google’s listings and increase the likelihood of Google-savvy customers finding you.

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Well, there they are, 10 things perhaps you didn’t know Google could do. I guarantee that once you start using these Google tips, they will quickly become an integral part of how you find information. Even better, combining these Google tips with Google Chrome’s ability to search directly from its address bar amounts to even quicker usability – just CTRL-T (new tab), [Google query], ENTER and I’m there.

With all these ways to add to your Google experience, does it come as any surprise that Google also knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.

The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts&p=%s&lc=1&u=your_delicious_username, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.

Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.

Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.

Before you check out the video screencast, just think of a dictionary or thesaurus that you’d like to have added to your Mac’s Dictionary, and then Google around to hopefully find a free or open-source version of a Leopard-compatible dictionary. It would need to be a folder with the file-name “.dictionary”. Note that this manual method works only with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Or the third-party dictionary might come as an installer package (”.mpkg” file), which helpfully puts the new dictionary in the right place within ‘Dictionary’.

Once you’ve got the dictionary you want downloaded (see below for some links to get you started), you’re ready to see the screencast on how to add it, and get the very most from Dictionary.app on your Mac:

Additionally, here are some useful links (to free resources) to get you started in your search for an extra dictionary:

A German-to-English dictionary in the form of a plug-in, based on dict.cc site’s dictionary.
A medical terminology dictionary in the form of a “.dictionary” folder.
The OpenThesaurus German Dictionary plugin.
The BeoLingus German-to-English dictionary plugin
The CEDICT Chinese-to-English dictionary which is based on the open-source CEDICT project, which is occasionally updated. This is version 1.2.
The very large English-to-Chinese dictionary pack which contains four dictionaries (three of which are Traditional Chinese; one of which uses ‘Simplified’ characters).
An English-to-Arabic dictionary plugin.

There are more free and shareware dictionaries for Dictionary.app online.

And while they all work (most of them anyway) decent enough, none of them blew me away as a real solution for my file sharing needs. Then I was introduced to Dropbox. The free service offers a rather liberal helping of 2GB of storage, with it easily bumped up to 5GB through referring friends. If 2-5GB isn’t enough space, a premium service of 50GB of space can be got for $10 bucks a month (which, is comparable to Mac’s iDisk, but 30GB tastier).

Open Dropbox locally or through Web interface easily.

The beauty of Dropbox is that it syncs in the background. So, for example, if I copy “familyphoto.jpg” (or an entire folder of photos) to my local Dropbox folder (Explorer in Windows and Finder on Mac) it will automatically begin syncing with the Web storage. Then, booting up another computer I have Dropbox installed on, the folder begins syncing (downloading) the new files.

It’s a fantastic way to share folders and files between two computers (in my case my Dell desktop and MacBook), but its usefulness compounds with the ability to share specific folders with other Dropbox members, or non-members by way of public folders.

Dropbox Web Interface

Click the image to the right to expand the screenshot. The Web Interface breaks things down in a simple and straightforward management UI. (1) A list of the files in the current folder you are viewing. Everything is Ajax-ifed for easy drag and drop functionality. (2) Recent Event notifications allow you to quickly see what things have changed – ie. if someone uploaded some new files to a shared folder. (3) A to-the-point info box gives you folder information on how much space a folder is taking up and how many members are sharing it. (4) An auto-fill box makes it easy to invite members to share a folder. (5) A list of the members sharing the current folder.

Dropbox also tackles the fact that not everybody you want to share files with is going to want to signup for an account. By allowing you to send them a direct link (via e-mail, IM or whatever) to a file you’ve put in one of your “Public” bins, you’ll be able to share files with anyone you want.

What’s more, Dropbox (for the moment at least) is sweet on speed. Being that I live in Asia, this is always a problem for me, as the majority of file sharing services I’ve used in the past are deadly slow here and simply time out with large files. I’ve yet to incounter any similar problem with Dropbox, and that all downloading/syncing happens in the background makes it all the more seamless.

In the screencast, we also suggest three great sources of icons for use on your Mac. You’ll need some such icons, in ‘.icns’ format, ready to modify the appearance of your folder, app, or hard-drive icons. Here are the links to those great resources:

Guipulp – a daily updated round-up of great icons (and other customisation resources) from across the web.
Pixel Delicioso – another good-looking source of icons (as well as wallpapers)
Deviantart – direct from the digital artists themselves. Search by ‘newest’ or ‘popular’ across time.

All set? Now you’re read to mod your icons with our screencast:

The idea plays to the strengths of the Mac, with it’s huge and detailed icons. In any Finder window the icon can go as large as 128 x 128 pixels (note that the 512 pixels size for icons is reserved only for in the ‘CoverFlow’ view, and only in Leopard), and most of the shelves require you set your icons as 128 x 128 (or, for two of the shelves, 64 x 64) so that the icons ’sit’ exactly on the shelf, and the icon’s name appears on the thick part of the shelves, as you can see here:

Titles appear on edge of

Before I review all the shelves and give you this links, here’s a quick tutorial on how to set the shelves: right-click within a Finder window and select ‘Show view options’. A small options window appears. Under ‘Background:’ select ‘Picture’ and then pick the shelves image that you’ve downloaded. Lastly, you just need to adjust ‘Icon Size’ and ‘Grid Spacing’ so that it matches this:

Use these icons settings with most shelves

How awesome is that? So, here’s where you can snag all the shelves that individual designers have made so far; all of them are free. Hit the links to the artist’s page to download them:

1. Five very funky shelves with themed backgrounds which are: Dark Metal, Leather Brown, Starry Night, Cinema, and Blue. Looks great inside either ‘Applications’ or indeed any folder that has some customized icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

2. Wooden Shelves with wooden panelling and spotlights that will look especially good for the ‘Applications’ folder. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.

3. Studio wood-and-metal shelves looks particularly gorgeous and was designed specifically for the ‘Movies’ folder so as your movies and TV shows will be appear to be arranged on your shelf. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

4. Two “iShelf” versions in graphite or white are super smooth and can be used as a background inside any folder. The white version works best with colourful and high-contrast icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

5. Dark 3D Shelves contrast a wooden shelf against a very dark background, with some perspective on the left-hand side to make it look as though the shelves are fixed to a wall. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.

Those five links give you 12 great shelves to use within Finder on your Mac, created by excellent designers from all over the world, who offer them up for free for the pleasure-of-use of fellow Mac users. Enjoy!

Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted – over the last 10 years these ideas have changed – if not virtually reversed.

Though there is an “official definition” of what open source is; simply put, open source is any software or webware which has been released with its code available for review, modification, adaptation and improvement. Oh yeah, and it’s usually free.

Here is a list of what I feel to be the best or most notable open source applications:

Browsers / Mail / Office Suite

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser, which is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Firefox is a standards-compliant browser which uses the Gecko layout engine. It includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system. Its strongest feature, however, is that it can be infinitely expanded through countless additional add-ons created by third-party developers.

OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages (as of v3, it can even read MS Office’s Docx format). It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Like it’s browser cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. A full featured e-mail client, it easily replaces Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and through the use of add-ons, is quickly gaining ground on the power of MS Office’s Outlook

(see how to add full appointment/calendar functions to Thunderbird).

Google Chrome: Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but it’s isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast and secure alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

Multimedia / Audio / Video

Miro: Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply “subscribe” to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.

VLC Media Player: VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols – basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.

Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use cross-platform audio editor and recorder. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more. With the proliferation of home recording and podcasting, Audacity is a program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.

Songbird: Though still under “active” development, Songbird is a promising open source music player. Features included (or to be included) are library management, multi-language support, media importing, album art display, meta data management, customizable UI and automatic updates. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a project to be watched.

MediaCoder: MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding.

HandBrake: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Basically, it’ll rip any DVD (or DVD-like) source into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM. It also supports the ripping of subtitles (burned into the video).

Graphics / Design

GIMP: GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Like it’s commercial counter-part, Photoshop, it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.), and it’s streamlined interface makes it easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Paint.net: An alternative to GIMP – or commercial apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It offers support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Blender: Blender is a full-featured open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. I don’t know the first thing about 3D modeling, but one look at the Blender Gallery and it’s easy to tell this is an impressively powerful free program.

OS / Utilities / Misc

Ubuntu: Deriving its name from the Zulu word for “humanity”, Ubuntu is a free, open source, operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Generally considered the most popular Linux distribution, and there are a lot of them, Ubuntu does pretty much everything your OS should – what can we say, it’s an OS, not inherently interesting. It’s decently pretty, damn simple to install and use, and has an extremely active community of users/developers.

Pidgin: Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It supports [deep breath]: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr. About the only big IM it doesn’t cover is Skype, because Skype’s protocol isn’t open.

Filezilla: If you have reason to connect to a server via FTP, FileZilla is the FTP program of choice. The FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It also supports drag and drop transfers, resumption of upload/download, configurable speed limits, keep-alive scripting and automatic upgrades.

7zip: A fantastic replacement to Windows’ default ZIP archiver, 7-Zip is open source software that offers a 2-10% compression increase over PKZip or WinZip. It also packs and unpacks 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR files; while also supporting the ability to unpack RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS files. Additionally it fully integrates with Windows and offers localizations for 69 languages.

Know some great open source applications that haven’t been mentioned here? Please share them in the comments below.

On top of the organizational and customizational benefits, the Vista Start Menu’s developers have taken into account the human brain’s cognitive abilities and limitations – particularly that your brain is darn good at using visual memory to find stuff.

h/t to Tekzilla for the tip.

Twitter search for “Godaddy” + “Promo”: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=godaddy+promo

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for that search result as well.

However, with just a tad of javascript you can correct this Chrome shortcoming.

Simply drag the following link to your Google Chrome Bookmarks bar:

Delicious Bookmark

Now, when you want to bookmark a page on Delicious, simply click the bookmark. Easy, huh?

Sadly, unlike Firefox’s plugin, this does nothing to integrate Del.icio.us bookmarks with Google Chrome’s bookmarks, but hopefully a fix for that is not far away.

Tip credit to Ninja Plan.