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April 4, 2007

Delete Cached Files in Google Desktop for the Mac?

morerandomgobbledygook in Google Desktop cache

As frustrated as I've been with Spotlight and all that I think it should be able to do but just doesn't quite get right, I was interested in today's news that Google Desktop is finally available for the Mac. Finally, I can search my Gmail account from my desktop and use some more sophisticated search syntax. This could be quite handy and should really put the pressure on Apple to beef up Spotlight in its Leopard release.

But, as is usual with every useful new tool Google releases, this one comes with something that gets me a little nervous (beyond the anxiety associated with the fact that I've become increasingly reliant on Google for so much of my information storage and retrieval). I'm talking about this "feature," pointed out by The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

Thanks to the way that Google Desktop works, it can even search files that you have deleted from your system. Google Desktop creates a cache on your machine that holds information about the various files that it has indexed.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I delete a file, I generally want to delete it. There may be a few occasions when I accidentally or thoughtlessly delete something I'll actually need later, but I'm more concerned with others searching for sensitive material on my computer that I've already decided I want gone, and I'm sure others will find plenty of other reasons for not wanting Google Desktop keeping a cache of their entire file history.

That's why I was happy to find that the TUAW article goes on to suggest that you can actually turn off caching:

Luckily, you can tell Google Desktop not to keep cached copies of deleted files.

That would be great news, if it were true, but it turns out that what I assumed was insider information (based, perhaps, on communication with Google during prerelease evaluation) turned out to be just an ungrounded assumption. I decided to put this preference change to the test, going just just beyond where TUAW ended their own trial.

First, I did everything TUAW did, substituting "randomgobbledygook" (a word I was pretty sure didn't appear anywhere on my computer) for "tuawrocks" in their scenario:

I created a test document that simply said 'tuawrocks,' a phrase that was no where on my computer before I created this file. Both Google Desktop and Spotlight immediately found the file when I searched for the phrase 'tuawrocks.' I then deleted the file, emptied my Trash, and searched for 'tuawrocks' once more. As you would expect Spotlight informed me that there were no files that met my criteria, but Google Desktop had a cached version of the file that I was able to look at (much like Google's web cache that allows you to look at websites that have gone offline for whatever reason).

Looking at the "Search Results" area of the Preferences pane, I questioned the name of the "Display results for deleted documents" (emphasis mine) setting, which suggests that this preference is actually a display issue only, not an indexing or caching change. So, I unchecked the setting:

Don't Display Cached Results

Then, I ran the test again with a file called "morerandomgobbledygook," deleting it after I created it and confirmed that Google Desktop had indexed it. As you would expect, after I emptied the trash, it didn't show up in my search results. But all I had to do was go back into the Preference pane and re-enable "Display results for deleted documents":

Display Cached Results

Then, by gosh, running that search for "morerandomgobbledygook" brought that cached file right up:

morerandomgobbledygook in Google Desktop cache

Clicking on the search result opens the entire file (in this case, a text file) in your default browser, like so:

So, if all you're trying to do is unclutter your search results by getting rid of distracting cached files, you can certainly do that. But beware that you're not actually keeping Google Desktop from creating, keeping, and indexing those (deleted) cached files. I'm looking forward to that ability in a future release ... unless some enterprising hacker out there can give it to me first.

March 26, 2007

Picasa Data API

Take a peek at Google's new GData API for Picasa. In addition to providing RSS feeds for albums, tagged photos and user comments, you can use the API to add and remove photos, albums, comments and tags from your own applications. This might be a nice way to manage image data (and offload image storage) within a web app.

Resources:

March 14, 2007

Google for Music

Google Napster DJ Danger Mouse

The Amazon Web Services Blog reveals a simple search syntax to turn Google into your own personal (free) Napster:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana"

Just replace Nirvana with a song or artist of your choice to display a results page of indexes that contain downloadable MP3s.

P.S. Don't steal music.

Update:

In the comments, JLOCK84 adds:

The folks from I-hacked made a little site that does this for you, G2P.org. Finds music files, as well as ebooks, and can also work as a proxy.

Related:

Google Hacks, 2E

March 7, 2007

Mash Up the Hackszine Tag Cloud

Hackszine Tag Cloud

Love tag clouds? Check out this page, which displays the top 20 search terms that drive people to each O'Reilly domain, including Hackszine. As noted on that page, here are a few things to keep in mind about these visualizations:

The terms are organic, which means that these are terms that someone typed into a search engine (e.g., Google) and then followed a resulting link. (In contrast to a search term that someone entered into our own search box.)
While the keyword frequency does give some idea of what people are looking for, keep in mind that the word had to already be on our site in order for it to appear, and it had to be ranked highly enough for someone to find it.
These are raw search terms, so similar but slightly different terms will appear twice. For example, "web 2.0" and "web 2" may both appear.

Tired of tag clouds? We'd love to see how you'd process the data. Here's the data for Hackszine, formatted as JSON.

February 27, 2007

Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All

Hacks Authors' Feed

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

February 22, 2007

Google Apps

150X55-1
Google apps now have a fee version (well, free until April 30th) -- for $50 / year - the 10GB mail option is worth it for a lot of people I bet... Also, check this out -

The 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail is offered to organizations using Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Apps - Link.

Related:

Google goes after Microsoft with software suite - Link.
A Google Package Challenges Microsoft - Link.
Google to launch business software - Link.

The terms of use is like 20 pages, I'm going to try and read it later.

February 11, 2007

Custom Google News for Your Site

Testing out this Google Newsbar I saw on LifeHacker...

Make your own @ Google's AJAX search API - Link.

Tweak the Google with the CustomizeGoogle Firefox Extension

Make 320
I'm setting up a new computer all weekend, so that also means adding a zillion tweaks and add-ons to get stuff done as the week rapidly approaches. One of my favorites is "CustomizeGoogle". Check out the image above and the other search engine links, which you're looking for stuff and need to compare results it's super handy. The extension does *a lot* more - from removing ads to forcing a secure connection for docs and calendar. It's a Google world, we just live in it.

Make 321
If you use Firefox, check it out and post up your favorite extensions.

More:

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience -- Firefox Extension - Link.

Firefox Hacks @ the Maker store - Link.

Google Hacks, 3E @ the Maker store - Link.

February 9, 2007

Call for Hacks: Help the Hacks Team Collaborate

Google Docs

We at Hackszine are all about collaboration, and lately our geographically distributed team has been working on web-based and decidedly non-MS Office ways of doing so. We've been paying particular attention to the Google suite made up of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, and Google Calendar (and rumored to soon include a PowerPoint alternative), which have generally worked well but have caused some significant hitches as well. Once we all get together on the same document, things have moved smoothly, but it usually takes many failed invitations, foiled uploads, and redirects before we get there.

Ever since Google acquired Writely, the "Email to Google Docs" feature has consistently failed for me when sent from my work email address, requiring me to upload everything from the web interface instead of copying Google Docs with a message that I send to our group with a Word attachment, which would really speed things up for us. So, just getting a document started has been a tedious hassle. But the hassle hasn't ended once the document is online.

This week, Dale Dougherty sent this Google Docs/Calendar request to our group, which I've decided to share with our competent Hackszine readers, since I've been unable to find a workable solution myself:

I've been trying to share a Google Doc with the two Brians. When I use their O'Reilly email, they don't get the message. So I have to use their Gmail addresses. Should I be able to invite anyone with an email address to view or edit a Google doc? Bre sent me an invitation to his calendar using my O'Reilly address and it didn't work--it complained that it couldn't link his calendar to mine. My Google account is set up with my Gmail address. Can someone explain this set of problems--using a non-Gmail email address and your Gmail address interchangeably?

Gcal

Dale's message highlights a problem we've encountered with all of Google's services--namely, that when you're invited to join a document at one email address (that is, when the message actually makes it through spam filters), but the rest of your life is attached to another, you're out of luck. Since I maintain a Google Calendar (shared with others and including others' calendars) associated with my Gmail account, I'm not going to maintain an entirely separate calendar (is that even possible, or wouldn't that still require another Google account?) for collaborations with people who use my @oreilly.com address as their primary means of contact, and there doesn't appear to be any way to merge online identities within the Google system.

Tim O'Reilly puts a finer point on this issue:

The only hack I've been able to figure out is to get people to send me the invitation to both accounts. (I forward all my *****@oreilly.com mail to Gmail, but not the other way around, as that would create a loop, yet I use *****@gmail.com for calendar et al. The alternative would be to make *****@gmail.com my primary email address and forward to *****@oreilly.com.) Seems to me that this is a hidden (maybe even unconscious) power play by Google. There's a race on to get your sticky identity from one site to become your default identity.

This is a good point. Is Google attempting to keep their system closed, locking us into a single online identity associated with their services? If that's the case, it wouldn't be that much better for collaboration than being locked into the MS Office suite, the unfortunate de facto standard for most professional collaboration right now.

So, does anyone have any solutions to this tangled nest of questions? Any specific hacks to help out the Hacks team? In addition to these specific concerns, we'd also love to see any general hacks that help get you use other tools to get things done that would normally require MS Office. This is a hot space on our radar (especially with the launch of Google Apps for Your Domain), both behind the scenes and in terms of what we'd like to cover.

February 7, 2007

Howto: Download Youtube and Google Videos

Sometimes you want to save the videos that you watch on Youtube or Google Video. Perhaps you want to watch them later. Maybe you are hoping to transcode a video for playback on a mobile device. Or maybe you want to edit a clip into a podcast you are making. Problem is, you can only download a subset of the videos from Google and Youtube doesn't even have a download feature.

There are a few different ways to get at the FLV file that the video player application is downloading. Safari users can use the Window->Activities feature to locate and download flv files as they are playing, and Joshua Kinberg put together a couple nice Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that make downloading pretty simple.

I was looking for an easy solution that works cross-browser, and this is what's working for me: 2 javascript URLs, based on the original code from Joshua's Greasemonkey scripts, that you can add to your bookmarks list.

Google Video Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Google Video

Youtube Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Youtube Video

Don't click on those URLs here. Just get them into your browser's bookmarks. The next time you are watching a video on Google Video or Youtube, you can click the appropriate bookmark and a window will pop up that will begin downloading the FLV! The Youtube file will be named "get_video" after it is downloaded. Just rename it and add a ".flv" extension and you should be in good shape.

Related:

VLC - Video Lan Client (plays flvs nicely and it's cross-platform)
Youtube and Google Video Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox

February 1, 2007

Show All Messages and Events in Google Notifier

Google Notifier

If you use Google Notifier on your Mac to keep tabs on your Gmail messages and Google Calendar events but are disappointed by the limit of messages/events the Notifier shows before banishing the rest to a "View more..." submenu, this hack's for you. MacInformant points to this useful Easter egg divulged by David Phillip Oster, one of the official Mac Software Engineers at Google, to change the limit to any number you'd like:

Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You'll see a hidden settings editor.
Enter MaxMessagesOnMainMenu in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 20 in the Value field, then click Set.
Quit Notifier and start it up again.

Now, when you pull down the Notifier menus, you'll see all of your messages and events at a glance, without submenus. If you want to change the limit again, perhaps back to the default, just open the hidden settings editor and change the value to whatever you want.

Like the folks at MacInformant, I'm on a Mac too, so I don't know if this works under Windows. Windows users, does Command-Ctrl do the trick?

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

January 29, 2007

Map Your Books

Google Maps Books

The folks at Google have answered a great rhetorical question with an even better internal mashup of Google Books Search and Google Maps:

So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you'll find a map on the "About this book" page.

Though the service works for any books available in Google Book Search, it's much more interesting for novels or narrative nonfiction than with technical books like this one. Perhaps it will finally help me find my way around War and Peace, though what I really need for that book is a character map.

Related:

January 25, 2007

Return to "Classic" Google Image Search

New Image Search.jpg

As reported by Google Operating System, a couple days ago, Google gave its Image Search a "cleaner look." The new design uses JavaScript to hide much of the information (such as the domain, type, dimensions, and size of the file) that used to appear below each image (as shown in the screenshot at the beginning of this post, this information appears when you mouseover a particular image). Understandably, this change had its critics, with reasonable concerns such as this one from cenoxo:

The "classic" Google Images results are far better, show more information in a quick glance, and you don't have to mouse over each image individually.

Thankfully, it's pretty easy to get back the "classic" version of Google Image Search. Since the new version relies upon JavaScript, simply disabling JavaScript in your browser will return the same search with the old look, like so:

Classic Image Search.jpg

But chances are, you do want to enable JavaScript for other pages, so an across-the-browser solution likely won't cut it for you. To respond to this need, Google Operating System provides a hack to disable JavaScript on Google Image Search only in a variety of browsers.

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

Access Gmail Behind a Firewall

Without getting into the ethics of employers blocking access to certain sites on company machines (and without comment on the ethics of subverting those filters), if you need to access your personal Gmail account from an office that restricts access, engtech has a number of solutions for getting around the firewall. Check out the linked post for details, but here's a quick rundown of your options (the last of which I hope is entirely tongue-in-cheek, which might save it from being offensive):

Use different web addresses.
Configure your mail program to access Gmail (through POP).
Access Gmail through Google Desktop.
Use a web server with Gmail Lite installed.
Bribe the IT guys at your work.

If nothing else, this hack would help on days when the company email fails and you still need to reach someone urgently on professional business.

Related:

January 24, 2007

Automatically Ignore Entire Conversations in Gmail

Mute Gmail Conversation.jpg

Anyone who's a part of a mailing list has been party to email threads that just went on way too long. If you use Gmail, did you know you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox:

By using the 'm' shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention.

The muted messages you never see remain marked as unread and you can still find them with standard Gmail search syntax. There's even a special search syntax that returns muted messages only:

is:muted

If you later discover that some interesting talk has been going on behind your back, unmuting the conversation is as easy as selecting the conversation and choosing "Move to inbox" from the "More actions..." menu.

Now, what I really want to see is a way to mute conversations where my address is just on the cc line, for those many times when I'm copied on a message that never should have gone to me in the first place, or when friends or colleagues hijack a relevant message with off-topic chatter. Anyone have a hack for that?

(Via Mark Pilgrim)

Related: