Google Easter Egg: Change your language to Bork! Bork! Bork!

Just recently I was watching a video of Marissa Meyer talking about how Google goes about optimizing their site to incease performance and usability. One of the interesting things I learned from the talk was not about design, but rather about an easter egg. Seems like it was there from a long time, but I never bothered to change my language preferences.

Did you know that you could change the Google interface to look like something the Swedish Chef would say?

If you don't know who the Swedish Chef (from the muppets) is, check out the video below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_Yf4zz-yo or watch one of his hit songs called Pöpcørn.

To change the language, click on Preferences, and then on Preferences again on the top right hand side of the Google Search page. Then, choose Bork! Bork! Bork! as your language, and click Save Preferences.

Velcume-a tu a foony Google-a Seerch!

Thees shuoold meke-a yuoo loogh ifery teeme-a yuoo feesit Google-a!

By the way, if you ever want to send your friends an email in Swedish Chef, Elmer Fudd etc... Dialectizer seems to be a pretty good site!

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Other alternatives to Google?

Most of the time I only ever use 3 search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo. But I've always wondered if there are other search engines that are just as good or better for particular type of searches?

With new features like instant, and the ability to use the I'm feeling lucky from the search options, Google seems to be the fastest way to find web pages on "teh interwebs" (funny how Google doesn't show corrected search terms when you search for this term) so far. But what about the ability to search multiple search engines at once (but without being a "meta search engine"), and having improved privacy?

Enter DuckDuckGo.

Like Google, it's quite fast, and some of the new features that google has such as the ability to select a search result with arrow keys, and then pressing enter, also there. However, DDG has some great options and features to search for something quickly, securely, and anonymously. The goodies page is your friend if you're planning to give this a "Go".

Another one of my favourites, although not really a search engine but a "computational knowledge engine" is Wolfram|Alpha. It's perfect for random/interesting facts, computing integrals (although it does take a while to enter it), comparing two things (like stocks) and a bunch of other things. And interestingly enough, it keeps getting better. If it doesn't know the answer to your question today, try the same query some other time and you may be pleasantly surprised!

A few new and interesting ones include Yebol (this search even gives you a link to Beyond Teck's feed when you search for beyond teck!) and Kosmix, which helps you search through the "social" things on the web.

Finally if you think you'll probably not be trying something new and sticking to Google, Bing or Yahoo (and not even bothering to try Ask!), you should definitely check out BlindSearch. It shows search queries from all 3 sites, but doesn't tell you which one is from which site, till you choose the best set of results... you may be surprised to learn that the search engine you like the best may not be the one you pick every time!

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Reinstall Windows 7 bootloader/Repair Windows Installation without Windows DVD

Recently, I installed Ubuntu on a computer in a dual boot set-up. However, unfortunately, I had to remove Ubuntu because I needed some more space for my Windows 7 install to run a few more applications. Unfortunately this computer (it's a netbook) did not have a DVD drive. But turns out... you don't need a DVD drive to reinstall the Windows bootloader if you plan things right.

First, what you need to do is reinstall the windows boot loader, and only then remove the GRUB bootloader and the GNU/Linux partition along with it.

How do you replace/remove GRUB with Windows' bootloader (or load Window's repair feature without having to search for your repair disks, or remember a bunch of keys to press) ? It's quite simple actually, although it does take a long while:

1. Make sure you back up your computer. I've tried this procedure with Windows 7 Professional, but I'm not sure if it'll work on your version of Windows 7.
2. Start your computer and boot into Windows 7 (has to be Windows 7! This won't work with any previous versions as far as I know, may work with Vista, but I've never tried it.)
3. While Windows is booting, turn off your computer! That's right... hold down your power button for a few seconds and abruptly turn off your computer
4. Turn on your computer again, and boot into Windows
5. Windows should give you a message telling you that it did not start up properly... it should give you two options: "Launch startup repair" or Start windows normally... Select Launch Startup Repair
6. Now let Windows try to find problems. It most likely won't realize that what you're trying to do is restore the windows bootloader. Once it's done, it'll ask you if you want to restore your system using System Restore. You probably don't want this, so hit cancel on the Window and let windows "attempt repairs" (this doesn't do anything really... just tries to find things that are wrong with your copies of windows and nothing more). 
7. Windows should then give you a message that start up repair cannot repair the computer automatically. Simply close the window, and click "View advanced options for system recovery"  on the window behind the one you just closed. It should ask you for the keyboard layout, and your admin password.
8. Then follow the instructions on this page (essentially use the (type in) Bootrec.exe /FixMbr command), and use the command prompt window

Once you restart your computer, it should now boot up in Windows directly without showing you the grub screen. By using the method above, you've used the default rescue files that are installed with every Windows 7 instead of booting into a Windows DVD and choosing the "Repair your computer option".

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Opening a MHT or MHTML File on a Mac

You have this friend (or prof) that likes to use OneNote or Windows Journal a lot because they happen to have a tablet PC. Then one fine day they email you a .mht file.

You try to open it, but to your horror, it seems like your mac can't open it.

Then you do a google search and it leads you to this page.

Fear not. There are two things that you can do in this situation.

1. Get the Opera browser that has the ability to recognize the file format.

2. Just rename the file to have a .eml extension and then try to open it. Mail.app will recognize the file and open it for you. (Note: I have only tried this on the latest version of Mail.app on Snow Leopard, it may not work on older versions of mail).

So, it seems like you can open a .mht file on a mac without downloading anything after all.

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To-do: Learn How to give a good presentation

I’m sure you’ve had to sit through a lot of presentations and even more lectures that were horribly boring. I think it is very irresponsible of a person giving a presentation to just read off the slides. And given the nature of things, it may be the case that someday, you’ll be that speaker. So please, although I’ve said this before a lot of times (if you’ve been reading my blog for the last few years, you’ll realize that this is true), I think it’s worth it to repeat this again, in a recipe format.

Step 1: Best software for presentations

You have to realize that creating a PowerPoint slide is just a waste of time if all you’re going to put on the slides is a bunch of text. Please, just print out a few pages of that text and hand it out before your talk. Using PowerPoint as speakers notes is a crime.

If you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll be showing some meaningful images and need some kind of a presentation software, here are some good picks:

• Keynote (mac only): Simple, easy to use and has some really fancy animations. Don’t get carried away by these fancy animations though!
• PowerPoint: The thing that everyone uses…
• S5: Present from a HTML page (and the tell people to view it on your website after the talk!)
• Google Docs: Create your presentation online (great for collaborative presentations!)
• SlideRocket: Another powerful online alternative that has Keynote style effects
• Beamer: If you need to give research talks that involve a lot of equations (and know what LaTeX is), then Beamer is something that you should look at

Step 2: Create your slides

Some rules:

• 10/20/30 rules: If you’re pitching something, I highly recommend Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, and a minimum 30 pt font!
• More images than text… this’ll force you to know your presentation, not to read off the slides
• High resolution images
• A sensible theme (a dark blue background with white text doesn’t cut it anymore….). Please choose something that’s easy on the eyes.

Step 3: Rehearse, rinse and repeat

You can’t ever give a good talk without practicing. The more you practice, the more you’ll realize that the software is there mainly just to show a bunch of pictures. Having some text on the slide, and you reading it out is just useless and distracting!

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Fix broken dictionary app in Mac OS X Leopard

So, it seems like the Wikipedia update broke Apple's dictionary application, because some developer at Apple figured that they'd never update Wikipedia. If you change Wikipedia's MonoBook theme to something else, it stops working.

Nevertheless, there seems to be an easy fix for this (sort of). Here's what you can do for now (I think I read about this at smartassism a while ago, but I've tried to describe it a much simpler way here). The instructions pretty much tell you to revert to the older version of Wikipedia:

1. Go to wikipedia in Safari because Dictionary.app uses Safari to load Wikipedia
2. Log-in. If you've never done this before, you can create a new account by clicking Log-in/register at the top right of the page. While logging-in check the Remember me for 30 days box. This box will set a cookie in your computer, because you probably don't wan't to sign into wikipedia every time you want to use it from Dictionary.app.
3. Once you log-in click on My preferences at the top right again, and click the Appearance Tab
4. Set your skin to MonoBook and save your preferences
5. Restart Dictionary.app and Wikipedia, the most complete and reliable source known to mankind, will work perfectly again

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Psychotherapy with Emacs

What does a computer geek do when s/he has problems? Ask Doctor emacs.

Please, try it out for yourself (if you haven't ever opened emacs, try typing in emacs in a terminal window). Then press the Alt key and the x key (or M-x if you know what that means) and type in doctor.

Hello Dr. Emacs!

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