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Google tips: Search by Date

One of my biggest beefs with Google is that my search results are constantly tainted by articles that are way past their expiry date.

I always make the false assumption that Google is going to recognize that those how-to tips for OS X Panther should be pushed down for more recent how-to articles that focus on Tiger and Leopard.

Makeuseof.com has come up with a great article called “6 Ways to Search ‘By Date’ on Google” which will allow to always get the most up-to-date info on whatever you’re searching.

And I was just starting this thing…

Writer/blogger Paul Boutin is encouraging people to kill their blogs and use more current social media tools such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

He makes some good points, and caps it with this faux Twitter post: “@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”

Google adds RSS for search results, YouTube adds audio preview

A couple of interesting updates from two of our favourite web platforms:

Google: According to ReadWriteWeb, Google will soon offer RSS feeds for searches. So what?, you may ask. Well, if you work for a company or organization that likes to track its brand on the web, then you’ll appreciate being able to stream your brand-focused search results right into your RSS reader.

Of course, Google Alerts already does something similar by providing email alerts for news and blog searches, but RSS streamlines the whole process.

(Still unsure about RSS feeds and how they work? Watch this video.)

YouTube: The video sharing and social networking site has added an audio preview button to their comments section so that you can now hear your insane random utterances before posting a comment.

That’s right, now you can finally hear what “LOL!!! WTF! Your teh most retearded ever!!!!” sounds like.

Of course, xkcd has already addressed this:

‘That one’ enters popular culture overnight

Politics aside, presidential candidate John McCain’s reference to candidate Barack Obama as ‘that one’ during the second presidential debate was a stunning moment. One that will surely be sliced and diced by contemporary political pundits and future historians.

And of course the webherd didn’t take long to pick up on it. Mere minutes after the incident occurred it was posted to YouTube and Twitterers were atwitter. By the next morning (as I write this), it was all over the web.

Here are some interesting links:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNzA9LfMlmU
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/That-One-08/28186684673
Website: http://thatone08.com/

Analysis, with lively comments sections:

ABC News: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/10/debating-mccain.html
Huffingtonpost.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/07/that-one-mccain-calls-oba_n_132802.html
Newsbusters.org: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2008/10/08/networks-condemn-mccain-calling-obama-one

Other links:

crooksandliars.com: http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/manners-manners-mccain-refers-obama-o
Digg: http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/McCain_Refers_to_Obama_as_That_One

Click here for instant Google search of ‘that one’ >>

Run Steam and all your PC games from an external hard drive

My gaming console of choice is my Macbook Pro running Windows XP in Boot Camp.

Yeah, you serious gamers can stop your LOLing, I know it’s not a hardcore gaming machine but it gets the job done, even with modern games. And if you’re like me, it’s even less of an issue because you’re still playing catch-up with games from 2007. (e.g. I just downloaded and finished Portal a couple of nights ago.)

My MBP in Boot Camp set-up has one serious flaw aside from a very average graphics card: a lack of space on the Boot Camp partition. Unfortunately, when I built my the partition I only dedicated 18GB of hard drive space for Windows, a paltry amount for modern gaming.

Solution: External USB hard drive as a dedicated PC games server.

It’s easy. Buy yourself a cheap USB external drive to be your new games server, or do like I did and buy a more expensive and bigger drive and re-dedicate that old backup external drive as your new games server. The drive I’m using is a 2-year-old 250GB Kaser drive. Not the best quality, but this will just be used for loading games, not backing up family photos and important documents.

Format or defragment the drive to maximize its ability to read, and start loading that shelf full of games you’ve collected over the years.

Which is also easy of course. At some point during each game’s installation process, you’ll be asked where you want to install your game. Instead of going with the default C: drive, you can now choose your external hard drive, which for me is my G: drive.

I’ve tested this with about two dozen games, and they all work fine. And despite what I read on the web, I’ve experienced no discernible slow-downs or lags when the external drive is being accessed to load new levels.

The best part is that you can do this with Steam as well. Since Steam automatically downloads games to wherever the Steam client is located, it’s merely a matter of uninstalling your Steam client from your C: drive and reinstalling it on your external drive.

NOTE: If you’ve already downloaded Steam games and don’t want to have to reinstall them, then follow these steps:

1. Drag the “steamapps” folder out of the Steam folder to your desktop.
2. Uninstall Steam from the C: drive using the Add/Remove control panel.
3. Reinstall Steam to your new external hard drive.
4. Drag the “steamapps” folder from your desktop into the Steam folder on your external hard drive.

Games I currently have on my external hard drive include: Mass Effect, Half Life 2, Portal, GRAW 2, Crysis, Beyond Good and Evil, AudioSurf, Medieval 2: Total War, Oblivion, and many more.

PC gaming has never been better. I love being able to pick and choose my games with (almost) the same convenience and ease as picking songs in iTunes.

How to avoid being victim of an internet hoax

Well, you can start by reading this great piece from The Independent.

The story outlines internet hoaxes and the culture that surrounds them. Many examples are cited.

From a web culture standpoint, my interest in the story starts here:

“But there’s an equally strange phenomenon occurring on the web these days: a profound disbelief that things are what they claim to be. Wary of being seen as gullible, people simply assume that everything is fake.”

So true. And that fear of being gullible has led to a culture of skeptics who proclaim ‘Fake!’ in comments sections across the web, as the author points out.

“…we desperately want to be part of the savvy group who can look upon the poor, confused idiots who have been taken in with a degree of smugness and self-satisfaction. But that desperation has led to the cry of “Fake!” being heard everywhere.

The “comments culture” of websites these days makes it a piece of cake to accuse people of fakery, and you see it all over the internet – from videos of sleight-of-hand (“Fake!”) to first-person accounts of alien abduction (“Fake!”), and from previously unseen photos of terrorist atrocities (“Fake!”) to claims of astounding success on gambling sites (“Fake!”).

There’s very little you can do when someone shouts “Fake!” at you, other than say, “No, it’s true, really” – but by that time your detractor will long since have disappeared into the ether, along with his or her staunchly held beliefs. They don’t seem to have grasped that shouting a highly sceptical “Fake!” at everything doesn’t make them an independent, intelligent thinker – it actually means that they’ve lost the ability to be sceptical about voices of scepticism.”

It’d be interesting to know how this form of skepticism translates to everyday life. Do people yell ‘Fake!’ at the television for example? How about the newspaper?

The articles mentions, and I also recommend, snopes.com as one way to get to the bottom of internet scuttlebutt.

The Steve Jobs heart attack that never was

In what will surely prove to be a cautionary tale about ‘citizen journalism’, the web is atwitter this morning after it was reported on CNN site iReport that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was rushed to hospital after suffering a heart attack.

The only problem is the story is untrue, leaving the web to reexamine its love of open-source journalism.

My personal take is that the web has always had a caveat emptor disclaimer, especially when the product is information. In other words, we who digest our info off the web need to do our own research to get the facts. It’s the only way citizen journalism works.

ReadWriteWeb has a great overview of the story here >>

Further reading: Apple stock has heart attack [Valleywag] >>

Gender stereotypes confirmed!

If you’re looking to substantiate all those gender stereotypes you have about men and their itch to always be online, and women enjoying more sentimental things like family time, check out this Reuters story.

Here’s a few tidbits from the happiness study conducted by Australian researchers:

Both men and women — or 63 percent of overall respondents — picked relaxation as the activity that made them happiest, but that is where the similarity between the sexes ends.

Just over half of men said happiness meant surfing the Internet, playing online games or accessing social network sites such as Facebook, compared with only 39 percent of women.

Fifty-five percent of women said having meals and spending time together as a family made them happiest, compared to 45 percent of men. Women are also more likely than men to have been made happy by their pets.

Now, if you’ll excuse me ladies, I’d love to sit and chat over tea, but I have to get back to World of Warcraft.

Found via Gizmodo

Did Facebook just lose some of its street cred?

Valleywag is reporting that Facebook just hired Ted Ullyot, the former chief of staff of former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Ullyot is connected to some rather controversial issues during his time under Gonzales, including how he:

helped defend — or at least did not object to — policies established by the infamous “torture memo,” which argued for ways the Bush administration could forgo the Geneva Conventions in order to prosecute the War on Terror.

The announcement is already receiving some backlash from the Facebook crowd. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.