Peter's Blog - Nodes for desktop

Finding old verions of files with Google Desktop.

This is an interesting tip for finding old versions of files you may have knocking about on your hard disk. Assuming you have Google Desktop up and running, if you run a search and select the option to 'See nnn desktop results in a browser' (where nnn is the number of results) you see a typical set of google search results, all the files found, ok that's to be expected and nothing special. However, if you then look at the number of 'cached' entries for each listing you may find that google desktop has kept copies of older versions of your favourite files. If it says '57 cached' then there are 57 older versions and you can click on this number and get a timeline of all the various versions of the file.

Ok, your fancy formatting may be lost but if you just decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to rewrite your memoirs from the perspective of your cat then the previous version may still be there somewhere.

Outlook vs Thunderbird

I'm back to using Outlook for two reasons:

the journal feature may be useable as a desktop notetaking tool. Being integrated into the email program means fewer apps running and a leaner and meaner system (ha). It does look like a half decent note taking tool, entries can be formatted, pictures pasted in etc.
was reading how hackers can carry packet sniffers on memory keys and became paranoid about my unencrypted password floating around the ether(net). I looked into setting up ssl authentication on the exchange server but it involves messing around setting up an ssl certificate server and I couldn't be bothered.

I've given up on using folders to categorise my email: I leave it all in the inbox and rely in searching to find stuff. I have google desktop search to speed this up but that still thinks I am still using thunderbird and tries using that to display messages. How to persuade it I have vaccilated back to the evil ones?

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Desktop Searches

Taking over someone else's pc I decided to install Google Desktop Search again as a new version had just come out. It still has some of the problems I had with it last time, mainly that by showing the results in a web browser you are pretty limited in your options: you can open it, you can open the folder it is in but if you right click you don't get a comprehensive context menu as in windows explorer (or Microsoft's Desktop Search). What I miss here is the choice of editing python scripts or running them.

The google thing does have a new sidebar to display rss feeds and stuff on your desktop all the time but I'm not sure I really need that kind of thing always there at a glance. When my boss buys me a 22" widescreen monitor I'll reserve the right 2" for google.

I installed it on my own work pc but after a while it annoyed me again: if I leave the pc long enough gds seems to gobble up all available memory, pushing everything else out to swap. I then have to wait a couple of minutes for everything to get swapped back in. The other pc I was using had win2k and 512Megs of ram, mine has Windows XP in 256M and swaps a lot anyway.

I tried blinkx as the 'smart folders' feature looked a bit like thunderbird stored searches for files instead of email messages. However, I was disapointed that the folder view again only gave the 'open' option, no context menu. Apart from this the interface was kinda annoying, tiny fonts, didn't index source code, mixed search results with obscure web search results from blogs, couldn't index thunderbird (as gds can), I uninstalled it in less than half an hour.

Maybe the latest Microsoft search thing will shutdown with windows without hanging? If there is an extension for it to handle thunderbird I might go back to that.

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