What is eating your disk? -> % du | sort -n

My sweet sister (happy b-day!) read my blog and suggested the following entry. How do to tell what is eating up a hard disk drive on a Mac. Well here is my solution that uses a simple "unix-style" command in the "Terminal" utility window. One way to get to the Terminal window is to search for it by going to the "spotlight" found at upper right corner of desktop. Once your Terminal window is up and running simply type in "du | sort -n ". Translation: du lists all files with the size of file in each line. We | "say pipe" that output to the sort command. The end of the final output will be the largest files and directories in your system. Now delete those directories you no longer need.

When you just need a table of results -> Google Squared

Keeping up with different search engines and search methods is a challenge. Google has a new application called "Google squared" that will build you a table of search results. Sometimes it gives poor results, but other searches work quite nicely, particularly for topics that have obvious lists.

Here are some examples where GS produces good results:
1. reality TV shows
2. fire island accomodations
3. blues musicians
4. sports cars


Here are some examples where GS produces poor results:
1. english rugby clubs
2. united states senators
3. ohio farmers markets
4. graphic artists

Twitter Searches -> Google Reader or Blog

Recently my son put up a tweet in which he complained about poor internet service by Cincinnati Bell. He soon after received a message by a company representative pointing him to customer service support. Follow-up messages were also sent to him. So apparently people/companies are following twitter carefully. So I wanted to try it myself. Here is my solution to get easy updates:

1. go to search.twitter.com and type in a keyword to follow, such as "Cincinnati"
2. at the top right of the results you will see a link "Feed for this query"
3. add this feed to your Google Reader or to your Blog (as you will see on right, I did this by adding an rss gadget in blog layout) and then follow what people are saying on Twitter.

Update: after speaking to some high-school students it appears that Twitter is not all that popular among young people, as compared to say Facebook. Whether spam will eventually kill Twitter is still an open question. I think filtering spam from Twitter may be a harder problem than filtering webpage search results.

Computer Myth #1

Myth #1. Security and Antivirus Software Is The Best Defense Against Computer Viruses

The Facts: Security software is often out-of-date and it provides a false sense of security to users. A better approach is to be a "virus-aware" computer user by following these simple steps:
1. always update your operating system software using Windows or Mac software updates.
2. avoiding suspicious websites that do not "look right"
3. deleting suspicious emails - if you don't recognize the sender you probably don't want it.
4. when your suspicions are raised but you are just not sure, you can check and search websites like snopes.com that list well known hoaxes.

Bing versus Google

Inspired by David Pogue's recent article, I decided to check out BING. It’s easy to compare it side-by-side with GOOGLE, by going to bing-vs-google.com. It is a nice way to surf the web where you are shown search results from both Bing and Google, on a split screen. Works great on 17" screens. And here is the link to DP's positive BING review.

Update: after several rounds of bing-vs-google searches I would say that BING search results are quite comparable, and its layout and visual design is better.
Google uses more page real estate for sponsored links (bad) and Bing uses more more for related searches (good).