The Times: Tech column - Blackberries/Google tricks
By David Rowan
THE Blackberry season has arrived early. Sales of the wireless e-mail device have more than doubled this year, meaning that 1.3 million people are now checking their messages neurotically whenever you try to talk to them. With internet-enabled phones and wi-fi hotspots providing diminishing opportunities to log off, we are rapidly losing that work-life separation. So do yourself a favour this summer holiday: leave the battery rechargers at home. You'll feel better for it.
Motorola has defined this always-on phenomenon as "the blurring of life segments" and, like much of the tech industry, is working hard to ensure that your life is as "seamlessly connected" as possible. Planning a drive? Soon the motor industry hopes to keep you online via Intel's "Connected Car PC". Listening to music? As you do so on the next generation of mobile phones, prepare for interruptions from e-mails as well as voice calls.
Yes, these developments can be useful if you are awaiting an urgent message. But they are also eroding that vital ability to switch off and keep "play" time to ourselves. If your boss asks why you ignored the e-mails he sent to you at the beach, explain that The Times advised that it would be better for your soul. Just don't mention that this column was written on a laptop in a remote Canadian mountain resort ...
* YOU PROBABLY know to put quotation marks around phrases that you want Google to search for. But have you discovered some of the more advanced search tricks?
If you can remember only part of a phrase, for instance, you can use an asterisk as a wild card: "A Nightingale sang in * Square" will tell you it was Berkeley Square. To find results within a numeric spread (such as a price or date range), put two full stops between the lower and higher numbers: "Hitler 1933 ..1938" will focus on the prewar years. You can discover a word's meaning by typing "define:" and the word; you can also make Google find the word's synonyms by preceding the term with the tilde key ().
Play around with the search engine's more advanced tricks if you want to be really clever. Type "intitle:" before a search term (without a space) and you will be given only web pages whose title contains that term. Do the same with "inanchor:" and you limit your results to pages that include the term in anchors, or links, to that page. So typing "iPod inanchor:bargain" will find you pages to which somebody has linked using the word "bargain" in the link text -a neat short cut.
Similarly, "inurl:" bvrings up only pages with the term in question in their web address, or URL.
Learning Google grammar will bring greater benefits than school French. A good place to start is an unaffiliated site called Google Guide (www.googleguide.com) - although Technobabble will continue to offer further mini-tutorials.
* A CODA to the recent item about Matthew Somerville, the web "accessibility" campaigner forced by Odeon Cinemas' legal threats to dismantle his far superior interface to its film searches (Technobabble, July 20). This week, plenty more alternatives to Odeon's site have been springing up in sympathy. Odeon's logical next step can only be to get the internet closed down. Why, it could be the summer's biggest blockbuster.
(The Times, August 3 2004)
THE Blackberry season has arrived early. Sales of the wireless e-mail device have more than doubled this year, meaning that 1.3 million people are now checking their messages neurotically whenever you try to talk to them. With internet-enabled phones and wi-fi hotspots providing diminishing opportunities to log off, we are rapidly losing that work-life separation. So do yourself a favour this summer holiday: leave the battery rechargers at home. You'll feel better for it.
Motorola has defined this always-on phenomenon as "the blurring of life segments" and, like much of the tech industry, is working hard to ensure that your life is as "seamlessly connected" as possible. Planning a drive? Soon the motor industry hopes to keep you online via Intel's "Connected Car PC". Listening to music? As you do so on the next generation of mobile phones, prepare for interruptions from e-mails as well as voice calls.
Yes, these developments can be useful if you are awaiting an urgent message. But they are also eroding that vital ability to switch off and keep "play" time to ourselves. If your boss asks why you ignored the e-mails he sent to you at the beach, explain that The Times advised that it would be better for your soul. Just don't mention that this column was written on a laptop in a remote Canadian mountain resort ...
* YOU PROBABLY know to put quotation marks around phrases that you want Google to search for. But have you discovered some of the more advanced search tricks?
If you can remember only part of a phrase, for instance, you can use an asterisk as a wild card: "A Nightingale sang in * Square" will tell you it was Berkeley Square. To find results within a numeric spread (such as a price or date range), put two full stops between the lower and higher numbers: "Hitler 1933 ..1938" will focus on the prewar years. You can discover a word's meaning by typing "define:" and the word; you can also make Google find the word's synonyms by preceding the term with the tilde key ().
Play around with the search engine's more advanced tricks if you want to be really clever. Type "intitle:" before a search term (without a space) and you will be given only web pages whose title contains that term. Do the same with "inanchor:" and you limit your results to pages that include the term in anchors, or links, to that page. So typing "iPod inanchor:bargain" will find you pages to which somebody has linked using the word "bargain" in the link text -a neat short cut.
Similarly, "inurl:" bvrings up only pages with the term in question in their web address, or URL.
Learning Google grammar will bring greater benefits than school French. A good place to start is an unaffiliated site called Google Guide (www.googleguide.com) - although Technobabble will continue to offer further mini-tutorials.
* A CODA to the recent item about Matthew Somerville, the web "accessibility" campaigner forced by Odeon Cinemas' legal threats to dismantle his far superior interface to its film searches (Technobabble, July 20). This week, plenty more alternatives to Odeon's site have been springing up in sympathy. Odeon's logical next step can only be to get the internet closed down. Why, it could be the summer's biggest blockbuster.
(The Times, August 3 2004)
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