4 Oct. 2007
The Chronulator mod that I built for Jared just made it onto Make zine and Boing Boing. Well, okay, really, the Chronulator made it on to Make and Boing Boing. But that's still a photo of my mod! I guess I'll have to post pictures to the art section later this week.
12 Sep. 2007
Er....okay, sometimes I scare myself when I get bored at work and decide to type in random search phrases. For instance, I would just like to know if anyone else finds it as disturbing as I do that U.S. intelligence analysts announce their names, what they do, every position they have ever worked in, and a list of all their associates to a public audience on LinkedIn?*
* Please note that it is possible to get names and positions from the example search I link to above; however, more creative searching turns up further details. For instance, try the name of any agency (i.e. NRO or DIA) to get past work histories, thus turning up the names of further agencies to try, as well as associates and coworkers. A person could easily automate this process and have virtually the entire intel community mapped out in one hour.
6 Sep. 2007
Okay, I've become bored already with Google Books, but I did want to post this one last item detailing a pseudo-hack I found. Mainly for entertainment.
So, here's the hack:
Type ** as your search term (or any other number of special characters like ; or ! or %...but not ".", which seems to crash the application).
You get a number that I am assuming (though I could be totally wrong) is all the results in the database. As of this posting, 4.16pm PST, that would be 9,230,597 results. If you do the search just on "Full View," you get 2,790,143. They have, however, craftily limited you to something depressing like only 3 pages of results (try clicking on result page 10 to see what I mean). If you do a real search, you are not limited in this manner (even if the "real search" turns up 3,670,600 results, as for the word "man").
Nonetheless, an interesting peek into Google's mind. I'm curious as to what makes the first 30 results the first 30 results in the absence of keywords. Popularity? Downloads? Links in? They all seem like pretty bland classics (bland in the sense of "unimaginative" or "obvious"). They weren't digitized on similar dates, or by a particular institution. Also of note is that this hack doesn't work on the Google Web search, so it seems they are using a fairly different backend, not just a different database.
The ** trick turns up surprisingly similar results on the OCLC worldcat site - including the number of full results but the limited ability to access them. Given that Google also links to OCLC on individual book pages, I wonder if they aren't running off the same backend?
10 Jul. 2007
Clever way to sift standard search results (ie google) against a known good result, thereby increasing relevance of final results.
Wonder if it would be possible to build front end to perform actions in one step - type in search, paste known good, hit go. Automatically calls script and performs actions in one swoop.
On Digital History Hacks, of course.