Google just released a Custom Search Engine Creator that lets you make your own search engine with a customizable list of sites that will be included in the search. I went through the initial set of options and had my own search engine up and running in just a few minutes. There are only a few sites that I added to the search list but it is open for volunteers that want to contribute more URL’s.

Some people are taking it even further, like this technology search site, by making custom pages for the search engine. You can do the same by going into the Control Panel after you have created your search engine. Once in the Control Panel you will be given several options that you didn’t have before and one of those options provides the necessary code to add the search to any page you would like.

You may even decide to make a little money off of the search engine by adding your Google Adsense account information. That way you can make some cash on the side if someone clicks on some ads while performing a search.

This is a great idea and a lot of people seem to be excited by it, but I think it will wear off very quickly. People will not want to clutter their bookmarks with multiple Google Search Engines. The only way that I can see people using this a lot is if Google added some sort of “filter” for people to use directly on the main Google Homepage. Otherwise these search engines are going to quickly be forgotten.

News Source: Official Google Blog

Sponsored By: Professional Gaming PCs : BEAST Computers Build Gaming Rigs for Serious Gamers

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ryan


reBlogged

on Oct 24, 2006, 1:20PM

Originally by Ryan from CyberNet Technology News on October 24, 2006, 3:20pm

Time Saving Tuesday

Computers would not be nearly as productive as they are if they didn’t have the copy and paste commands available to use. Think about how often you copy and paste text, files, images, and more throughout the course of your day. I do it so often that it seems like my fingers naturally rest on the Control+C keys on my keyboard.

Today I want to focus on tools that extend the functionality of the Windows Clipboard to make it easier to use and allow you to get tasks done much more quickly. Here is the software that I managed to find:

–Clippy (Homepage)–

Clippy is one of the coolest clipboard utilities that I have to present to you. It lets you perform common operations to any text that is currently located on the clipboard.

There are a ton of different things that you can have Clippy do and you will really see it shine in certain situations. This is one of those situations that we would have all liked to have this:

How often have you needed to extract text from your emails, only to find the simple, menial task to take more time than it should. You’ll have many ‘>’ characters appearing at the beginning of lines because your email has been replied to, back and forth, countless number of times. Often, you’ll also need to painstakingly reformat the text to make it appear readable.

Now with Clippy, you’ll be able to remove ‘>’ characters and reformat your text with a single click of a button.

You can add individual “tasks” for Clippy to complete or you can create your own “Clippers.” The Clippers are a group of tasks that you put together so that the program can perform multiple operations on the text with just one click. I like to think of these more like macros.

–Ditto (Homepage)–

Ditto is a free open source program that extends the Windows Clipboard to have even more features. The number of configuration options that it has is absolutely insane but don’t let those distract you from its primary purpose: copying and pasting!

Here are a few of the great features that Ditto has:

• Search and paste previous copy entries
• Keep multiple computer’s clipboards in sync
• Data is encrypted when sent over the network
• Accessed from tray icon or global hot key
• Select entry by double click, enter key or drag drop
• Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries
• Display thumbnail of copied images in list

–Auto Copy (Homepage)–

When you highlight text in a web browser it is often to copy it so that you can use it somewhere else. There is an extension for Firefox that will actually copy the text to the clipboard anytime that you highlight some text. There really isn’t much more to it than that but you may be surprised at how useful the extension is.

–Overview–

Those are the clipboard utilities that I currently use or have used in the past. They all have some unique features that can save a bunch of time and hassle if you frequently copy and paste things like I do. If you know of any other great clipboard utilities please let me know because I am always looking for things to improve the standard clipboard’s usefulness.

Sponsored By: Professional Gaming PCs : BEAST Computers Build Gaming Rigs for Serious Gamers

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ryan


reBlogged

on Oct 24, 2006, 11:00AM

Originally by Ryan from CyberNet Technology News on October 24, 2006, 1:00pm

Weekend Warrior

I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for some good blogs to add to my feed or my list of bookmarks as the not to miss, “must reads.”  In fact, sometimes I find that blogs have more accurate or up-to-date information than a newspaper or other online news sources.  So in keeping with the weekend traveling theme, I went out to find some of the best travel blogs out there. In the process, I came across TravelPod which is a rather large collection of travel blogs including blogs for just about every country or island possible! It was released in 1997 and is a great way to gather some tips, tricks, and photos of your travel destinations.

One of the first things you will notice when you go to TravelPod after clicking on destinations is the map of the Earth that is clickable.  By clicking on a country, state, island, etc., you’re able to view the blogs that have been submitted for that particular location.  People post everything from past experiences, maps, photos, thoughts, and some even post live updates while they are on their trip.

After viewing the large map of the Earth, I decided to pick a location to see just how TravelPod works.  I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, so I clicked on Australia. From there, I was taken to the results page with all of my information.  They use tags for things such as popular cities or tourist attractions so that if you’re only interested in a particular place, you can narrow your search results.

The results that it pulls up shows thumbnails of  travel blog photos that have an Australia tag to them.  It will also pull up a search box so that you can search for deals on airfare, hotels, and cars.  Additionally, they include videos and MP3 Podcasts that might be beneficial in planning a trip. Then they give you the list of travel blogs available for the area.For Australia, the list was lengthy so I had a good choice in what I wanted to read.  I narrowed my search to Canberra, the nations capital and got equally impressive results. The blogs were all unique and generally gave me a good idea of what to expect, or at least some interesting or funny traveling stories. The smaller countries or less traveled destinations typically have a smaller search results.

There are other features that you can expect from TravelPod such as an active forums that’s updated regularly.  There are topics such as travel tips, “how to”, and general travel information. They also provide a tab specifically for finding tours that you might want to take while you’re visiting a certain destinations, as well as a search for hostels, and information on travel insurance (hey, ya never know what can happen while you’re away from home!).

If you’re looking for some great advice, they have a list of top travelers that’s updated daily.  This is calculated based upon the number of visitors to their blog, number of forum posts, number of photos, and number of entries to TravelPod.

 I always like to know exactly where I’m going and what I’ll be doing while I’m traveling.  I like to call it being prepared.  TravelPod is a great resource for finding pictures and blogs that pertain to the specific location that you’re traveling to.  They receive visitors from those who have travel blogs just as much as they do from people who are looking for some good advice on a destination.

You don’t need a membership to browse the website or the blogs, although a membership is free anyways.  They offer unlimited uploads of photos, and will notify up to 500 friends and family members of updates to your blog.  They’ve changed a lot since 1997 when it all began! If you’d like to check it out, visit www.travelpod.com Even if you’re not interested in actually visiting some of these locations, you can certainly just look!

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ashley


reBlogged

on Oct 14, 2006, 11:00AM

Originally by Ashley from CyberNet Technology News on October 14, 2006, 1:00pm

A few months back we were exposed to the Google GDrive online page and now it looks like Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped actually got his hands on the client application that Google employees use. The current codename is Platypus as you can see in the lovely screenshots but Philipp, who couldn’t login with his Google Account, was quick to note that:

Gdrive, from what it looks like, is not a product for general release, but a way for Google employees to store and share files.

He has also placed a copy of the HTML help pages on his site that are available for both Windows and Linux users. There are two interesting points in those files:

Can I help make Platypus better? I have some 20% time built up.

Yup! We’d love your help with engineering, interface design, or marketing. Email Justin if you’d like to volunteer your time. You can also make Platypus better just by using it and reporting bugs.

What data should I keep in my Platypus share?

We encourage you to keep all of your files with us, including your Office documents, photos, and personal notes, except for sensitive data (including electronic protected health information) and other files inconsistent with the internal user agreement.

So they are obviously trying to gear the service to hosting all kinds of files for people but they make it sound like there is no team dedicated to working only on this project. They want people to use some of their “20% time” that Google employees receive to work on any project that they would like. That essentially means that they have one day out of each week to make the next big Google app…and hopefully GDrive will be it!

Philipp then went on to post the configuration file and that appears to limit users to 500MB of storage, or they may just be using that configuration file for testing purposes and want the ability to try different limitation sizes. The thing that is really funny, and you knew there had to be something, was what I noticed in the configuration file. If you take a look at the URL for a forgotten password it points to here. Guess that is something they still need to implement.

The last bit of news that Philipp shared was an image that showed a listing of all the files that the application contained:

It is a little disappointing to think that Google isn’t going all out trying to release the GDrive that we have all been craving. Maybe Google leaked this on purpose though! They could have done it to throw competitors off and make them think that Google hasn’t really done much work on their file backup/storage software? Hey, I’m trying to be optimistic here!

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ryan


reBlogged

on Oct 14, 2006, 3:39AM

Originally by Ryan from CyberNet Technology News on October 14, 2006, 5:39am

I just decided to try out the Remote Desktop in Windows Vista and it is actually pretty nice. I have two computers that currently have Windows Vista RC2 installed and they are both located on my local network. I made sure to specify in the Remote Desktop that I wanted all of the graphical goodies for the machine that I was connecting to which happened to be my laptop.

My desktop is able to handle the Aero theme which allows for the cool transparent effects but my laptop, which was the machine I was connecting to, doesn’t have the WDDM compatible drivers so I’m forced to use the Vista Basic theme. To my surprise the remote connection let my desktop computer do the graphical processing so that I could see the Aero theme “on my laptop.” You can see a screenshot that I took above of this in action.

One thing that is still disappointing is that the computer being controlled will still log the user off in order to give you full control. I really like being able to connect to machines without logging a user off, especially if I want to show someone how to do something. Oh well, maybe in the next version of Windows.

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ryan


reBlogged

on Oct 13, 2006, 10:33PM

Originally by Ryan from CyberNet Technology News on October 14, 2006, 12:33am

The new Google Reader is pretty nice but Google still needs to integrate it into many of their other services. In the mean time you may want to check your news at the same time that you are checking your email. You can do so with this amazing Greasemonkey script that will show a link for your feeds in the sidebar of GMail. It will also show you how many unread feeds you currently have and when you click on the link it pulls up your unread articles! Pretty nice!

The person that created this script is the same person that made my favorite Greasemonkey script called GMail Conversation Preview. Using that script you can right click on any message in your Inbox and it will show you a popup window with the contents of the message. It saves me so much time and lets me quickly read my messages.

Honestly, GMail should have a feature similar to Google Reader where you can click on article’s title in the collapsed view and it will expand it without the need to take the user away from their Inbox. That would make reading emails a lot quicker but until then I will be using GMail Conversation Preview. It would also be cool if Cooliris was compatible with GMail but it doesn’t seem to work.

Thanks to everyone who sent in this tip!

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Originally
from CyberNet Technology News

by Ryan


reBlogged

on Oct 13, 2006, 8:55PM

Originally by Ryan from CyberNet Technology News on October 13, 2006, 10:55pm