Tech and life

Almost without thinking we all go straight to Google – which is great. I’ve been using it for years. But there’s a myriad of really great search tools out there.  I’ve grabbed all my bookmarks for search engines on Delicious and compiled them into an A to Z of search. It’s not possible to cover every search category so I’ve concentrated mainly on search in the tech and social networking fields. Have a look through this list. It might throw up some surprises – or serious omissions – let me know!

Search aggregators (meta search)

Collecta: search blogs, Twitter, Identica, Flickr etc

searchmerge: search Google and social sites at the same time

keyboardr: search Google, Google Blogs, Google Images, Wikipedia and YouTube at the same time

Sputtr: select whichever search engine you would like to use and it redirects you to that site’s engine automatically

Sperse: search multiple engines

whonu: search multiple engines

Search alerts

ByTagg: get alerts on new search results; free software download

Alertpedia: email alerts

Search Amazon

Amazanian: find Amazon.com products eligible for free shipping

Search anonymously

Ixquick Metasearch

Yauba

Search blogs

Technorati

Twingly

Google Blog Search

Search books

Google Books

Search for books

100 Awesome search engines for bibliophiles

Google Books

Search – case sensitive

http://case-sensitive-search.appspot.com/

Search colors

Google Image Search Color Filter

Search comments

BackType

Search comparison tools

Unified Search (Google, Bing, Wolfram, Wikipedia, Delicious and Stumbleupon; Firefox add-on)

Triplify (Google, Yahoo! and Live Search)

Google-Bing Search (Google and Bing)

Wolfram Alpha Google (Wolfram and Google; Firefox add-on)

Search: computational knowledge

Wolfram Alpha

Search conversations

WhosTalkin

Search for definitions

definr

Search Delicious

del.izzy

Search for direct download links

Download Any Stuff

Search documents (online pdf, doc, presentations, and spreadsheets)

Brupt

PDF Database

DocJax

DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)

WhereIsNow (latest versions of documents)

DocShare

Search for domain names

Domain Typer

Domainr

Search for eBooks

PDF Search Engine

ManyBooks

eBook Search Queen

Search faces

Facesaerch

Search FAQs

Snappyfingers

QueryCAT

Search for feeds

Feedmil

Search for files

File Snatcher

Search Hacker

Find that File

Search flickr

Compfight

Flickr Storm

PiciShare

Tag Galaxy

rgb80

Multicolr Search Lab (search Flickr by colour)

Flickr Related Tag Browser (search Flickr by tags)

Search Forums

BoardTracker

BoardReader

Omgili

Search for free photos

EveryStockPhoto

Search Google + twitter

twootles

Twoogle

Search Google + Yahoo!

SearchBoth

Search health resources

OrganizedWisdom

Search: human powered

Mahalo

Search for icons

ICONLook

IconFinder

Iconlet

Search for images

Ginipic (on web and your desktop; download to use)

EveryStockPhoto

Compfight (Flickr search)

Stockvault

FreeFoto

Search for images – by sketching

retrievr

Search for images – by colour

Multicolr Search Lab

picitup

Etsy

Search image galleries

Kalooga

Search – International directory of search engines

Search Engine Colossus

Search for keyword trends

HotWords

Search for keyword suggestions

Wordtracker

Search libraries

WorldCat

Search Linux

Google – Linux

TuxFinder (search for packages and documentation; search distributions)

Search local area network (LAN)

LAN Search Pro (free download)

Search for lyrics

Lyrster

mp3zy

Search for manuals

The Manuals

Search medical

TextMed

Search microblogs

Twingly Microblog Search

Search mp3s

Beemp3

mp3zy

SkreemR

seeqpod

Wuzam

SSMunch

Seekmp3

Search multimedia

Searchme (search web pages, videos, images, music tracks, Twitter posts)

Search multiple social sites (simultaneously)

Popixy

Search music

Jogli

MixTurtle

vastfm

fizy

Search music videos

Cleepr

YouTube

Search: niche

Accredited Degrees: Here’s a collection of 50 niche search engines

UNData

Search for pdfs

PDF Search Engine

Data-Sheet

PDF Database

PDF Books

DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)

Pdfgeni

Search people

Pipl

123People

Yasni

snitch.name

ZabaSearch

ZoomInfo

Search periodically

Alertpedia (email alerts)

Search for personal information

eJustice Blog: Who knows what about you: 25 free tools to find out

Search phrases and acronyms

MetaGlossary

Search for plagiarism

Viper

Search Rapidshare

Rapidshare Search (Firefox add-on)

Search real time

Scoopler (twitter, flickr, digg, delicious, etc)

Search semantic (knowledge-based)

Yebol

hakia

True Knowledge

Search for similar images

TinEye

retrievr

picitup

Pixolu

Google Similar Images

Search for similar music

mufin (download player)

Search for similar websites

SimilarSites

Whoislike.it

Search social networking

Whoisi

SocialMention

snitch.name

spy

WhosTalkin

Identify (Firefox add-on)

Search social profiles

Folowen

Search for songs

Songerize

Midomi (search by humming song)

Search stock photographs

PicFindr

Search suggestions

Soovle (more search suggestions from your keywords)

Search tag cloud

Adds a tag cloud to Google and Yahoo! search results

Search Cloudlet (firefox extension)

Search for tutorials

TutSearch

Howto.fm

Search Twitter

Search Twitter

TweetDeck

Twazzup

Collecta

Scoopler

MicroPlaza

Search for videos

MetaTube

VideoSurf

CastTV

Search visual

Viewzi

RedZ

searchme

Spezify

Veesual

oSkope

Search for website information

BuiltWith

Dataopedia

Website Grader

XinuReturns

Search a website

In your preferred search engine, use the following format:

site:domaintosearch.com your search terms

Search Wikipedia

Navify

Search wikis

Qwika

Search for words

WordWaldo (Scrabble, crossword puzzles, etc)

Search YouTube

Jogli

If I’ve missed any important categories or missed a search engine you find really useful, please let me know in the comments and I”ll add it to the list. Hope you discover something useful from this post.

I’ve always had a problem cooking rice the way I want it. Always turned out sticky, mushy and in clumps. I prefer it light, moist and fluffy and with the grains separate. Right I thought, the internet will surely solve my problem. Sure enough, trusty Google identified a number of sites explaining how to cook rice and all giving much the same kind of advice which can be summarized as:

First choose a quality long grain rice, for example, Basmati. Then wash the rice in cool water in a bowl. Swish your hand round until the water becomes cloudy, drain off the water and repeat two or three times until the water becomes clearer. Cover the rice with cold water and let it soak for about half an hour, then drain. Then boil twice the quantity of water to your quantity of rice, add the rice, bring back to the boil, cover tightly and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand for a further 10 minutes with the lid still on.

Effectively you are steaming the rice in this process. This worked great for me the first time but was a bit inconsistent after that. I couldn’t rely on it for perfect rice.

Enter the electric steamer. Initially, we bought this to steam vegetables, but the instruction book said it would do rice as well. Right, I’ll give it a go.

The first steps of washing, and soaking the rice were the same. But then I added the rice (we find that 1/2 to 3/4 of a mug of rice is enough for 2 portions) to the steaming basket along with just about enough lightly salted boiling water to not quite cover the rice. Then add enough boiling water to the steamer to steam for about 30 minutes. (Time saving tip: If you don’t have the time to soak the rice beforehand, you can actually just part-boil the rice in salted boiling water before transferring to the steamer.) That’s it. When the time is up, check the rice is cooked by tasting a spoonful, fluff the rice with a fork and you have a fantastic basket of light, fluffy rice which goes beautifully with a curry or is great when cold as part of a salad.

How do you cook your rice?

I’m not one to be checking my blog stats on a daily basis, just happy to have some loyal readers who are getting something from my posts.

I added the Feed Statistics plugin a couple of months ago and was pleased to find I had 7 loyal readers then. To my utter amazement, I went back to check my feed stats a couple of days ago and it is now hovering around 400! That’s really exceeded all my expectations and a big thanks to all who have taken the time to subscribe to the RSS feed. I’ve just added the subscriber count below the RSS button on the top right of the blog.

For those who don’t know, subscribing to an RSS feed from a blog allows the content to be pushed to an RSS reader like Google Reader. It’s well worth doing and means that rather than having to visit blogs looking for new post, the posts are actually sent to you in your reader saving you loads of time. Just click on the RSS feed icon (like those shown above) and add the feed to your reader.

I’ve been blogging in my spare time for just 10 months now with 49 posts up – not a lot, but I hope there’s something for everyone in the content so far. I generally have 2 or 3 posts in various stages of readiness and I’m pretty happy with the next 2 or 3 in draft. Hope you will be too. Check out the recent posts on the right and click through some of the categories which might interest you or visit the archives. If you like what you see, subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already done so.

Once again, thanks for subscribing and hope you’re enjoying reading my take on tech … and life.

Image credit: Chesi – Photos CC

Photo credit: k40s

So you’ve installed Ubuntu and given it a quick test drive. What next?

For the first in our Useful Links series, I’ve chosen to gather together some recent ‘things to do after installing Ubuntu’ type posts which I’d bookmarked on Delicious. You’ll find there’s a bit of repetition in the tips probably because good ideas get passed on from post to post so that’s probably some kind of recommendation. And yes, it just goes to show how many of this type of post are floating around the net. Anyway, here’s the list:

10 tips for after you install or upgrade Ubuntu – Tombuntu

Top things to do after installing Ubuntu – Jam’s Ubuntu Linux Blog

9 things you need to do/install after installing Ubuntu 9.04 – Make Tech Easier

List of services you can shutdown for better system performance – Noobs on Ubuntu

5 things to do after installing Jaunty – Help for Linux

Ubuntu 9.04 post installation guide – My-Guides.net

19 things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux – eackouye

10 things to do immediately after installing Jaunty – OMG! Ubuntu!

To do list after installing Ubuntu and Linux Alternatives Applications – The Indexer

Five things I do with every Ubuntu installation – Linux Fanatics

10 things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux – Ubuntu Linux Help

How to setup the perfect 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope desktop – ChrisJohnston.org

Hope you find them useful. Any good tips I’ve missed?

I’m sure many of you have pdfs galore scattered throughout your PC hard drive. Just like your photos. But you can organize your photos into albums with programs like Picasa or Faststone Image Viewer so what about your pdfs? Well here’s your chance to organize them under a neat interface. Adobe Digital Editions is a free program for Windows OS for organizing all your eBooks (EPUB format) and pdfs onto digital bookshelves. I’m indebted to instant fundas for bringing this free app to my attention. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Elements but for pdfs not photos, and with just the managing and viewing function. I don’t have an eBook reader yet so will concentrate on the pdf management features here as I really wanted a way to organize my pdfs just like my photos.

I already had most of my pdfs in folders in a separate directory but thought it would be neat to be able to view them all in one place as thumbnails, place them on bookshelves and read them all from within one app. Well with Adobe Digital Editions you can do just that.

However, before you plunge in and import all your pdfs, there’s a couple of things to note. Unfortunately, the thumbnails aren’t displayed with the file name below them, but with title and author metadata held within the pdf. So, for example, if the title metadata had been filled out incorrectly, the thumbnails won’t display in the order you want. So how do you check and edit the pdf metadata? Well, I’m grateful to gHacks for pointing out one free utility for doing this – BeCyPDFMetaEdit. With this app, you can load up your pdf, edit and save all the metadata just the way you want them without affecting the text and layout in the pdf itself.

Now that you have your title metadata correct, when you load the pdfs into Adobe Digital Editions, they will all initially go into the All Items shelf. You then have to drag them to the bookshelf of your choice or make a new one. You can’t put them directly onto the bookshelf you want.

You can of course click on and view your pdfs within the program. Single or double page layouts are supported. You can search within a document, and bookmark pages. Unfortunately, you can’t view all bookmarks on a bookshelf at the same time which would have been nice. The bookmarks for each document only show when that document is being read. You can highlight text and save it as text notes. Like other aspects of this program, I didn’t really find it intuitive enough but eventually worked out that you click and drag to highlight text, then press Ctrl-B to save it as a bookmark. Not ideal, but well it’s a free program and doubtless all these shortcomings will be ironed out in updates if people shout loudly enough. At the moment, I’m enjoying reading the free Full Circle (Ubuntu) Magazine in this interface.

So if your pdfs are languishing all round your hard drive, here’s a neat way to organize them on digital bookshelves and view them all in one spot … just like your photos.

I’ve been playing with Ubuntu for a few months now and it’s running on my netbook and an old desktop PC. Many things are done a little differently in Linux compared with Windows so there’s a bit of a learning curve. I’ve been looking at Ubuntu blogs to try and get familiar with the way Ubuntu works, applications I should install and so on. I’ve already blogged about how I discover great new Linux and Ubuntu content online, and yesterday I came across a great blog for Linux beginners. NixTutor is a relatively new blog by Mark Sanborn – it’s being going since February and there are about 20 posts up at the moment. I went through a number of these yesterday and learned a lot about file naming conventions, directories, keyboard shortcuts and finding files. It’s well worth going through all these posts – they’re all written with beginners in mind.

So I thought I’d list the best of the Linux/Ubuntu/beginner blogs I’ve added to my RSS feed. I haven’t included Linux help sites and there’s a great list of these at Going Linux. I’ve just picked out the beginners’ blogs but I think some verge on intermediate skill. Anyway see what you think:

Ubuntu blogs:

Noobs on Ubuntu

I’ Been to Ubuntu

Jams Ubuntu Linux Blog

Learning Ubuntu

OMG! Ubuntu!

Tombuntu

Ubuntu Linux Help

Ubuntu Linux Tips and Tricks

Works with U

Linux blogs:

Begin Linux Blog

From Windows to Linux for the Average Joe

gHacks (Linux tag)

Linoob

Linux on Desktop

NixTutor

Non-Geek’s Linux Handbook

The Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide

Some of these blogs haven’t been updated in about a month but they do have a useful archive of posts so I’ve included them. If there are any good Ubuntu/Linux blogs you know of which I haven’t included please let me know in the Comments below and I’ll add them. I’ll try and keep the list up to date as a resource for beginners. Add the blogs you like to your RSS feed so you keep up with the latest posts.

Please tweet, Stumble, Digg this post to get the word out on these great Linux and Ubuntu blogs. Thanks.

I’m also trying to uncover good Linux and Ubuntu podcasts for beginners and hope to do a post on that in the future. If you can recommend any please drop a comment below.

Image credit: 123 Chroma Pixels

After 20 years in front of a keyboard, I finally tackled a pet hate this week – the Caps Lock key. I don’t think in those 20 years I’ve ever needed it once, and it causes havoc when pressed inadvertently. When it’s on, not only do you get sentences in block capitals but you may be left scratching your head when passwords don’t work – because their case sensitive.

Anyway, I searched for Caps Lock on Delicious and quickly found the answer I needed at JohnHaller.com. By downloading and double clicking a file on that site I was able to remap the Caps Lock key to the Shift key so it acts just like a Shift key when accidentally pressed. But as this modifies the registry, I backed that up first using the program System Restore Point which I mentioned in one of my first blog posts. After a reboot, the 20-year annoyance was permanently gone. You don’t have to remap the Caps Lock key to the Shift Key – other choices are also given on Haller’s site.

I also came across a simple fix for the same problem on a Linux system at Peterbe.com.

Give it a try and rid yourself of a real annoyance.

I came across a really useful blog post recently at Online Tech Tips on transferring your TweetDeck settings to another computer. It’s well worth a read if you are using TweetDeck on say a laptop and desktop and basically it involves copying two important files from your TweetDeck folder under Application Data to the same folder on the second PC. On my PC, the files are:

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\preferences_techandlife.xml

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\td_26_techandlife.db

However, it occurred to me that this method can also be usefully applied to restore your TweetDeck groups should you accidentally delete a group which you have spent a lot of time and effort defining. If for some reason you close a Group column, there is no way back unless you have backed up and can restore these two files. The file td_26_techandlife seems to be the important one containing the Group data.

The scrolling arrow and the remove column button are pretty close together in TweetDeck and not very distinctive so it is possible to select to delete a column when scrolling through your tweets:

Admittedly, if you chose to delete a column you get a warning that this is irreversible, but it’s nice to know that if you do mess up, your hard drive dies, or you decide you want to restore a deleted Group, it can be done.

So I suggest you add these two important files to your regular back-up routines and restore them to the above folder should the need arise.

How do you discover great new blogs and content online? Well of course you can use your RSS reader, Delicious, Stumbleupon, follow links in tweets, or recommendations that a friend has emailed to you. But what about one-off posts from smaller blogs that may be of interest but which you’re missing? You could search for the keywords you’re interested in on Twitter. I blogged about this earlier. Or try subscribing to your topic of interest on Digg. I discovered this recently and it’s a great way to discover new content.

As some of you know, I’m starting out with Ubuntu at the moment and am trying to learn as much as I can from reading content online. I’ve subscribed to a number of Ubuntu and Linux blogs in my RSS reader but I’ve found it’s also really useful to subscribe to upcoming diggs in the Linux/Unix topic under Technology. There’s a button in the top left (not shown in the figure below) which allows you to subscribe to this category in your reader.

Many bloggers submit their latest Linux posts to digg and you’ll find a wide variety of content here ranging from how-to’s to reviews of Linux applications. A lot of it doesn’t get picked up by the larger tech blogs or by Twitter so it’s worth doing. Of course, you don’t have to subscribe to upcoming Linux diggs – pick whatever takes your fancy and add it to your RSS reader.

So how do you discover new content? I’d love to hear about it. Drop a comment below.

When you click on a link in your browser, it will either open in a new tab in your browser or else it will open in the same tab depending how that link has been set up on the web page. Personally, I prefer if a link opens in a new tab. That way I can close that tab when I’ve finished reading there and return to the previous page which is still an open tab in my browser, rather than having to click the back button and reload the page which will take more time.

Turns out you can force a link to open in a new tab by pressing the Control key as you click on the link with your mouse. Or if you have Firefox, just click the mouse scroll button on the link. That’s it. Hope you find that quick tip useful. If you come across a link opening in the same tab give this tip a try and see what you think.

Here’s a couple of sites with great lists of keyboard shortcuts:

Web Browser Keystrokes That Are Good To Know

It Takes only 7 SHORTCUTS to Become a Lightning Fast User