Entropy

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Google has a hidden feature which allows you to sort its results by the date they were indexed, descending, allowing much more powerful search.

Just add this string &as_qdr=d to the address bar and hit enter. You’ll get a custom drop-down box that lets you re-order results based on date.

You’ll recognise it from the blog search - for more, read the article at LifeHacker

Microsoft’s Mesh went into beta last night, a new platform for synching files and folders between any Windows (R) device. Sign up for the beta here - its limited to 10,000 people.

Mesh lets you set up a virtual desktop online, and connect different computers to it. Put any file into a Mesh folder and it automatically syncs between the online desktop and every connected computer. Select a file or folder and you can easily share its contents—photos, videos, music, documents—with any friend or family member. You can also remotely control a connected computer from the Live Mesh desktop. Right now, this works with any computer, as long as it is running Windows XP or Vista. But the longer-term vision is to truly make this work with any device. Mac and mobile versions are coming later this year. And eventually, anything from Xboxes and DVRs to digital picture frames and printers could be connected through Mesh. Continue at TechCrunch…

. . . Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub, enabling:

Unified Device Management – Users will register their devices through a simple, web-based service. Once a part of a user‟s device mesh, whenever they happen to connect to the internet the devices “report in” to the service – e.g. for status, health, location, and to exchange/synchronize information. Mesh-aware device configuration/personalization will be done through the web, and full remote control of a device (e.g. remote desktop) will be available from anywhere.

Unified Application Management – Installation and management of “mesh-aware” applications on any or all devices, along
with their application settings and data, will be simple and transparent for the user. Individuals will now enjoy the centralized
cross-device purchase/deployment experience formerly available only within the enterprise environment.

Unified Data Management – Folders and files (e.g. documents and media) will be automatically synchronized and made available across any or all devices, as well as through the web. Because every folder can now have an extended web presence, even PC-based documents and media can now have a social mesh element to them.

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Every now and again you come across something on YouTube that you have to have forever. Up until now you had to download the video in the, now common, .flv format. Here’s a website that allows you to add a bookmarklet to grab the video. In case you are not sure what I mean by bookmarklet, it’s essentially a link that will sit in your bookmarks that executes some JavaScript allowing you to download the video. Alternatively, you could install greasemonkey and have it do all the clicking for you.

An interesting side-effect of YouTube’s recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser’s cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append “&fmt=18″:

You can find the full guide here.

iGoogle has allowed Gadget sharing for a while; but now it allows the content inside to be shared. For example, a sticky note can be shared with friends as read-only or as editable - allowing you to leave notes for each other.

For more information, check out the Official Google Blog, or LifeHacker.

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You may have noticed that you can’t change the order of the tabs on your iGoogle homepage; well now you can with a nifty little trick picked up from LifeHacker –

Google doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop method of reordering the tabs on your personalized iGoogle page, but you can manually move the tabs using an XML backup tool provided on the settings page.

For more information see Blogoscoped’s full guide.

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The Amazon suite of web services has been available for some time with an impressive uptake. The S3 product went down for a while earlier this year and made more obvious the role that they are playing in the newer generation web when looking at the amount of users that complained about the outage.

Google is now jumping on the bandwagon with an offering that may not be as flexible as the services offered by Amazon, but solid none the less.

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

You can read the rest of the article over at TechCrunch. It’s going to be interesting to see what comes next as both Google and Amazon try and differenciate their services from the disconcerning user.

UPDATE

TechCrunch have a new article covering the creation of their first app using the Google App Engine.

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CNET has a guide on how to GMail search like a real professional, with advanced parameters and a full explanation of how it works and what options there are. Check it out here.

The first app I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail. Even though I use the service’s labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail inbox to find the one I need. Then I discovered Gmail’s search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

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Ever wanted to run GMail but had too many mails on your current client? Now you can Import (technically, export to GMail) your mails into your GMail account with Google Email Uploader!

LifeHacker has a great post on setting it up with screenshots and more, or go straight to Google to get their Google Email Uploader.

Ever wished GMail had themes? Well it doesn’t, but now you can theme it yourself? If you like the kicking view to the left be sure to pay a visit to UserStyles for the GreaseMonkey script. LifeHacker has promised to include it (once done) in Better GMail so you can optionally wait for that.

Everything in the Gmail Redesigned interface is darker and a touch sleeker than the default Gmail interface, which hasn’t changed all that much since Gmail launched four years ago today. Right now the developer is issuing updates to this style almost every day.

Source: FlickrA black Google background would save 750 Megawatt-hours per year. This topic has been raised before and has even resulted in Blackle. Now Google Ireland has taken this to the max changing their homepage to use the energy efficient #000000 background, you can see this for yourself by visiting the site.

This is more than likely not a permanent change and is being used to raise awareness of Earth Hour. You can read more about it here

Thanks to iMod for bringing this to my attention.