Category: Hack

Google Search Trick

A trick appeared in the Recommendo weekly newsletter on using Google Search. I have read about this, and recognize the reminders when I used Google Search and I still don’t use it regularly if at all:

An under-appreciated Google search trick is to focus your search by excluding all unwanted alternative meanings — you append a minus sign in front of the term(s), as in < dolphins -miami > for non football dolphins or < orange -color -telecom > for the fruit.”

Recommendo

I am going to go to Google search and search for Seahawks or Sounders and add “-football” and see what changes. The goal is to actually get my brain and fingers to be used to doing this.

ymmv

Tidy Up Your Electronic Devices to Start The Year

Apply the KonMari methods by tidying up your digital world and in so doing, make it a little faster and more secure.

Wirecutter (from NYTimes) posted 7 Steps to Tidying Your Digital Life this morning and following my principal doing at least one thing from articles and/or lists that resonate with me, I chose Step Two – Delete Apps I Don’t Use from My Phone, well most of them. I know I haven’t ever clicked MS Powerpoint on my phone, but it certainly is conceivable I might if my laptop was unavailable. Other apps were either aspirational or unused and best off the phone.

I know, I promise I usually only do one, but this time I also took a look at Step Three and my browser as during Christmas the Honey Add-On was popping up in annoying places. It may well be that you benefit from this extension, I like it, but I decided it and another couple could easily go.

That led me to think, I should try Step Four and I learned an entirely new section of Windows 10 commands under Settings -> Storage and found obsolete and no longer maintained software on my machine and cleaned it off.

I suppose it would be great to do this more often, but hey, I knocked it down today!

Simon Weckert: Performance & Installation, 2020

With its Geo Tools, Google has created a platform that allows users and businesses to interact with maps in a novel way. This means that questions relating to power in the discourse of cartography have to be reformulated. But what is the relationship between the art of enabling and techniques of supervision, control and regulation in Google’s maps? Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behaviour, opinions and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge? Maps, which themselves are the product of a combination of states of knowledge and states of power, have an inscribed power dispositive. Google’s simulation-based map and world models determine the actuality and perception of physical spaces and the development of action models.