Info Zone

Searching for stuffs with Google is really easy. All you do is just type in the search keyword or phase but there are more to it to fine tune your search to get specifically what you want. This is why I want to show you the power of the colon :. It might be old stuff to some people but hey there are people who don’t know yet.

Say you want to search for specific file type, the syntax goes like this

 filetype: extension search term
 eg. filetype:doc how to blog

The above example brings out files with .doc extention relating to a topic on “how to blog”

The next syntax let you search for specific search term on a particular site you know of

 site:URL search term
 eg. site:www.addhen.org social bookmarking

If you want definition of a word

 definition:word
 eg. definition:blog
       or
 define:word
 define:blog

Being specific on the search term, just add double quotes to the search term

 "search term"
  eg. "How to blog"

Okay that is it. These are what I know. If you know of others please include them as comments.

Today I discovered you could chat within Yahoo mail as you could with Gmail. It might be late news to some people but for me, I just discovered it. Yahoo is not my primary mail so I barely login to my inbox. I always use pidgin to chat with my yahoo’s buddies.

Upon seeing that dialog box floating in my inbox after login, saying something like “Do you know you can chat within Yahoo mail” ( can’t really remember the exact wording ) with a catching big button captioned “Continue” below it. My curious life got me to click on that button and with some few minutes of waiting, I saw a list of my buddies who’re online in a pane which is sitting left bottom in my inbox.

I quickly clicked on one of them to initiate a chat with him to see how the chat goes like and how different it is from the Gmail one I’m used to.

Well, it looks good with eye-candy features, works as it’s supposed to, packed with features of a normal IM client but I really didn’t like the stylish callout that displays the messages and the avatars that displays at the ends of the callout, they just takes space and sometimes doesn’t show all the messages typed to the receiver especially when they are long. Some of the characters get hidden to the right. You can’t even break to new line as I normally do with “Ctrl+Enter”. I must say, the whole thing is bloated and fat. If you really want to know want I mean, just check it out youself, remember to switch your mail to the beta. It works with it.

It’s really nice to have Yahoo IM access within your mail but I guess most people will appreciate it much if Yahoo could keep it simple and lightweight. It is great though but just too fat for my likings.

This is going to be a good news for students especially those who can’t use Yahoo’s IM client in their school labs. Worry no more you can still keep in touch with families and friends right in your Yahoo mail but might not be a good news for students with Yahoo access blocked. Sorry for those of you in that soup.

Thanks Fiifi for the background work on the image

A colleague of mine at the office had his CDMA mobile phone locked. He was thinking of going to decode it by these phone repairers but Google rescued him from sparing some hard earned ₵ ( cedis ).

All he did is a google search with “unlock LG CDMA phone” as the search term and ka boom, this post here showed up with the solutions.

The solutions are:

1. Enter the last four digit of your phone number. If it doesn’t work try the next
2. Enter 1234. or
3. Enter 0000. or
4. Enter 1111

What worked for my colleague is the “last four digits of his phone number” solution. I must say Google do help find solutions to problems.