Tip #31: Custom searches from the Google Chrome address bar

If you are using Google Chrome, then by now you should have probably noticed that you can immediately begin a Google search by typing directly into the address bar (aka "Omnibox"), instead of going to www.google.com and searching from there. But did you also know that you can perform custom searches, i.e. search using other search engines or websites, from the address bar too?

For instance, I can search for an article on Wikipedia, just by typing "wiki", followed by the search terms into my address bar and pressing Enter, like this.

Tip #30: Use Wikipedia to find rare characters instead of using the Character Map

The Character Map hasn't changed much since
it was introduced.

From time to time we occassionally need to type a seldom-used character which is not on our keyboard, be it Greek letters such as alpha α, beta β, omega Ω for maths, or some weird symbols or letters for wonderful screen names like ––––•(-• ¥øµr ¯|¯îÞ Jã® •-)•–––– to put on MSN. The usual drill would be: go to the Character Map in Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools, look for the character you want and then copy and paste it whereever you need it.

But browsing through the grid of characters is quite a pain for the eye, and sometimes you might end up not finding what you need. There is a simpler way than torturing your eyes with the Character Map, and this is when Wikipedia comes to the rescue! Wikipedia has articles for so many things, they have individual articles for symbols like the therefore sign ∴ and even every single letter in the Roman alphabet.

Tip #23: More ways to create Wordles

If you can't get enough of those arty word clouds Wordle has been creating for you, here are some ways to make creating Wordles easier.

First of all, you might have noticed that Wordle treats each word in a phrase as seperate words, so long as they have a space in between. Suppose you wanted to create a Wordle of things to do when you grow up:

get a job, buy a car, marry someone, become your own boss, live on a golf course, retire early

To us, the commas make sense in that they divide the words into items or phrases. But when we try to create a Wordle by pasting the above text... we get this on the right.

Tip #22: Create fancy word clouds for anything

Tags on Your Tip Jar so far, created using Wordle.

Word clouds (like the one shown here on the right) are fun, simple and artistic ways to convey a message. Creating a word cloud manually though, isn't really fun, and does require a certain degree of artisticness as well as computer drawing skills to achieve. Luckily, I've stumbled upon this online tool, Wordle, which lets you easily create nice-looking word clouds (called Wordles) like the one I created here, without needing much effort nor artistic capabilities.

The great thing about Wordle is that word clouds created using it are free for any use, as long as you attribute it to www.wordle.net (meaning, if you use a Wordle on your blog, you should have a link back to the website like in the caption on the right).

Tip #21: Get Dropbox

1. You have more than one computer (e.g. desktop and laptop), and you often find it troublesome to move files between the two.
2. You are working on a team project, and you want to share files with group members and keep the files always up to date.
3. You want to share some files for downloading from your blog, using a public link like this, but your file is too big for certain online file hosts. (e.g. Rapidshare has a limit of 200MB per file)
4. You just want to store your files online so you can access them away from home.

If any of your needs look like the ones listed above, you need Dropbox. Dropbox is an online file storage service which gives you 2GB (up to 5GB via referrals) for free. You can use this 2GB to store any of your files, synchronise them among your computers (and iPhone), and share them with others who may or may not be using Dropbox.

Tip #16: Master the art of filling up forms

What if you could jump from field to field?

We spend most of our time on the Internet, and often we need to fill up forms online, especially when logging in to websites. Some websites' registration forms have tens, if not more fields for you to fill up. As mentioned in this previous tip, shifting one hand back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows you down. To be able to fill forms more quickly, we will need to eliminate this inter-keyboard-and-mouse switching.

This tip should apply to any browser on any operating system. If something doesn't work for you, please let me know so I can help you find a solution for it.

For you to follow along, I have created a dummy form right here for you to try out the keyboard shortcuts as you read!

Tip #15: Disk partitions, or "I have a C and D drive in My Computer"

A peek in My Computer...

Most Windows computers have two hard drives visible in My Computer, usually named C: drive and D: drive (or E: drive). Often, I hear them say "I have two hard drives" - this is usually not true, if your desktop was just purchased, or if you are using a laptop. In actual fact, there is usually a single hard drive, which contains two partitions, shown as two seperate drives in My Computer.

Imagine that we have a huge rectangular apartment with an area of 320 m² and has no walls, which we can both live in it and use as a store room to keep things. A room this big may be difficult to organise its contents and you certainly don't want to live among your pile of collectibles or junk. To make life easier, we could divide the room into one or more smaller rooms by using wall partitions. I could divide the apartment into two smaller rooms or "partitions", one that is 120 m² which I use as my living space, and the other which is 200 m² which I use as my storeroom (so I don't need to look at the mess all the time). How nice!

Tip #12: How fast is your Internet, really?

Have you ever heard broadband reseller agents (the people who stand at booths promoting Streamyx / P1 / Celcom Broadband etc) say that you can subscribe for "one megabyte per second" download speed? And when you bring the modem home and managed to get on the Internet to download something, you notice the fastest you can download is at around 100-120 KB (kilobytes) per second. Why, why, why?

If you look at the piece of brochure or promo material (the one on the right is taken from P1's website), you should see that the speed is quoted as 1 Mbps or 1 Mbit/s (note that the 'b' is not capitalised). The reseller agent was wrong for sure, to have said "one megabyte per second" - it is actually one megabit per second.

Tip #10: Add multiple-persona-disorder to Firefox

Firefox version 3.6 was released almost 3 weeks ago, but I just discovered one of it's new (probably the best) features - Personas. They're like themes, but simpler, since they only change the background of the menu bars.

Notice that I now have Totoro in my Firefox!!

Tip #8: Is your hard disk FAT or NTFS?

The first thing that you should do as soon as you purchase a new external hard disk, is to check what filesystem it is formatted with.

The filesystem can be thought of as the "format" of a hard disk. There are several filesystems currently in popular use: FAT (FAT32 to be precise), NTFS and HFS+. Usually most external hard disks nowadays come pre-formatted as FAT, but some also come as NTFS, and if the packaging of the hard disk specifically mentions "for Mac", it should be in HFS+. It is important for you to recognise some of the characteristics of these filesystems to avoid the hassle of reformatting your hard drive later on.

Tip #7: Understand bits and bytes

Ever wondered why, any storage media, be it a hard drive, pendrive or memory card which you own or buy, always seems to have less capacity than advertised? Suppose you buy a 8GB pendrive, when you get home and plug it in, you realise that in My Computer, it shows up as 7.44 GB or so only. Where did the remaining 0.56 GB disappear to?

Before we get to that, let's take a minute to understand how file sizes are calculated.

Tip #6: Play any file format there is

In tip #5 I showed you how to steal videos from YouTube and other websites, but I left out the part on how to play those downloaded FLV files. If you don't already have a play-it-all media player application or necessary codecs installed, here is a simple (and dirty) trick for getting those FLV files (and other multimedia files you have trouble with) to play.

Tip #5: Download videos from webpages

If you wanted to save an image on a webpage to your computer, you can just right click on it and choose "Save Image". That's easy. How about videos, or perhaps songs? And by that I don't mean links which you can click on to download them, I mean those which are streaming in a Flash player (like on YouTube and other sites). For this, you will need a thingy, called a "download grabber".