Using a Google search for any number of things:
Math: 2+4*10
Unit Conversion: 500 feet in furlongs
Currency Conversion: 20 dollars in euros
Not really a secret but Opera (the browser) has awesome features for everyday surfing. Key shortcuts (Z=back, X=forward), one letter shortcuts to certain websites for example: e [arg] will automatically search ebay for the [arg], or G [arg] will automatically take you to google and search for the [arg] that you specify. And the dial page which can hold up to 24 icons to whatever websites you want.
It’s mostly only useful for eBay, but doing “or” searches with all the misspellings you can think of will find some bargains. For instance, apparently no one who sells on eBay can spell “sequin”. Let’s pretend I like sequins and am shopping for shirts. As part of my shirt search string, I include “(sequin, sequins, sequence, sequense, sequel, squin)”, and any other near-miss I can think of or see used more than once. Not useful in places like Google or Amazon where they guess misspellings or often-confused words for you, of course.
Similarly, people frequently sell things that they are … confused about. For instance, I am IRL interested in Northwest (North American) coast art, as in Tlingit or Haida style stuff. Unless you already know about this kind of art, you are apparently likely to think it’s either “tiki bar” style, and maybe therefore Hawaiian or Australian or something, or, due to actual geographic proximity, “Eskimo” (or Inuit) style. Running searches for “tiki” or “eskimo” has found me some lovely things, like some Robert Davidson prints, won for a twentieth of what they would be if listed accurately.
And eBay lets you save complex searches and will even email you new listings that match, if you like.
spamavert.com is incredibly useful for throwaway email addresses. For example, I can register at a site with the email address blah@spamavert.com then read any email sent to that address here: http://spamavert.com/mail/blah.
Obviously it should not be used where security is required since you don’t need a password to read the email.
This site has tools to answer all time/date questions:
[ul]
[li]For times around the world: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/[/li][li]Calendars: http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/[/li][/ul]
Some websites have terrible search features, especially some businesses. It can be really hard to find one of their products on their own website, so I just Google the name of the company and the product, rather than try to navigate their sites. I know this sounds basic, but my wife thought I was a genius.
AnallogSignal, you can also just Google current time + city name.
Similar to Munch’s post, you can just put “X time” into Google and get a quick result. Works at both the city and country level. When you put in a country with more than one time zone it gives a main time and a list of main cities in other time zones.
Doesn’t do anything fun with “hammer time” 
Thanks, this is good to know for current time. But I have issues for work where logs show activity from Mumbai at specific times in the past and I want to convert those times to Eastern Time. Since Mumbai is 10.5 hours ahead of Eastern Time, the easiest way to do the conversion is:
Ok, you download this nifty program that you just *can’t live without *from a somewhat sketchy or otherwise untrusted source. You are diligent with your PC’s security, so if there were something nasty in that program, you are pretty confident that your security software will prevent any potential malware from catching you with your pants down. But in this case, you really want to be extremely confident that this program is as pure as the driven snow.
What to do? After downloading that file, (and BEFORE opening/running it!) you go here (Jotti’s malware scanner) and submit/upload that file to have it scanned by **20 different virus scanners **simultaneously. Now you may proceed, heartened by the fact that you have been truly diligent with your PC’s security.
Having used that site rather extensively, I have often come across files that are flagged as suspect by a majority of the scanners, but NOT by one or more of the popular scanners, which might just be the one you use and rely on.
My main weapon is NoScript (which works upon similar means to that of the various anti-ad software that’s been bandied about). Not only do I avoid annoying popup ads and other assorted nonsense, I very rarely have gotten infected by anything while on the web.
Since AdBlock Plus and NoScript have been mentioned, I’ll mention the other add-on that I consider a must, and that’s Ghostery. (compatible with most popular browsers)
Every PC that I ever touch (I’m the default tech support guy for almost everyone I know) gets at least AdBlock Plus and Ghostery. I run NoScript on all my own PC’s, but find it’s a little bit too much bother for the average user who just wants everything to work with one click without being presented with too many options and dialog boxes.
Bonus Tip:
Aside from browser add-ons, another thing that goes on every PC I touch is Spyware Blaster. It’s a small program that you only install once and update periodically (or pay for auto-update) that you run and it modifies your hosts file to block connections to all kinds of evil sites with bad intentions. The beauty of it is that it’s passive, so once you install/update it, it doesn’t stay running in the background using up system resources, yet it provides some constant and pretty solid protection.
My secret weapon isn’t much of a secret, but I love snopes.com. It’s a great way to check veracity of crap that gets circulated in email and Facebook.
I really don’t mind text or image ads. I just want a browser that blocks any advertising which moves, makes noise, attempts to open a new tab/window, or does anything on mouseover.
For that matter, I’d like a browser that won’t allow any website to make noise of any kind unless I explicitly give it permission. If I’m listening to iTunes while I browse, I tend to have the volume turned up, and I HATE having a website suddenly blasting noise over my music.
Aside from a couple of the tools mentioned (Google searches for unit/currency conversions, World Clock), I use www.pixlr.com a lot. They offer a robust online image editor that can do about 90% of the day-to-day stuff I used to use GIMP or Photoshop for, plus you can save pics directly to Facebook, Flickr, or Picasa after editing.
I use Google Docs, which isn’t really a secret weapon, but on aspect of it that has come in very handy are Forms - I can easily create a form from a spreadsheet, publish it, and easily capture data from my smartphone without having to edit the full doc - things like which of my kids has had Ibuprofen or Tylenol, and when. With four kids, this comes in super-handy during flu season, when we may be juggling a couple different meds and can’t remember what we dosed someone with and when.
This is fairly basic Google-fu, but there are plenty of people who aren’t aware that you can do this. You can do a Google search that returns results of only a specific file type by entering your search term and then filetype:[extension]
For example: kepler’s laws [noparse]filetype:ppt[/noparse]
This returns search results that are only powerpoint files. You can substitute other extensions in place of the ppt, like pdf, doc, xls, rtf, and others.
I am a teacher and so I am always scouring the web in search of powerpoints, worksheets, and other useful stuff that other teachers have created and posted online. Narrowing the search down by file type can really help.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:33, topic:610797”]
I really don’t mind text or image ads. I just want a browser that blocks any advertising which moves, makes noise, attempts to open a new tab/window, or does anything on mouseover.
For that matter, I’d like a browser that won’t allow any website to make noise of any kind unless I explicitly give it permission. If I’m listening to iTunes while I browse, I tend to have the volume turned up, and I HATE having a website suddenly blasting noise over my music.
[/quote]
Then you would like AdBlock Plus with the default “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” setting enabled.
Here are their guidelines for what is considered non-intrusive:
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:33, topic:610797”]
For that matter, I’d like a browser that won’t allow any website to make noise of any kind unless I explicitly give it permission. If I’m listening to iTunes while I browse, I tend to have the volume turned up, and I HATE having a website suddenly blasting noise over my music.
[/QUOTE]
Check out Stop Autoplay for Firefox or FlashMute for other browsers being run on Windows. Looks like they do what you want.
A couple of my regular “tricks”:
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You probably know that Google acts as a calculator and unit conversion. But it goes beyond that; it’s a calculator that takes mixed units, and returns the result in any specified unit. For example, to calculate how many seconds are in 1 day and 3 hours, just type “1 day + 3 hour in seconds” and it returns “97 200 seconds”. Or you can calculate how many minutes takes to travel 100 miles at 20 ft/s by typing “100 mile / (20 ft/s) in minutes”. Or find out how long it takes to back up a 1-terabyte drove with a 16 Mbps connection by just typing “1 terabyte / 16 Mbps”.
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On Wikipedia, each article has links to the same article in other languages (if they are available). This makes it an extremely powerful foreign language dictionary. Especially for technical terms, cultural terms (e.g. is there a Spanish term for “Goth”?), names for historic events (e.g. how do the Chinese refer to 9/11?), etc. It also allows you to look up the correct transliteration of names in other languages, the title of books and movies used in other countries, etc.