Thursday, April 22, 2010

How to Connect to Telstra Remote Working Solution (TRWS) on a corporate laptop.


This short guide shows how to setup VPN connection using a laptop configured to use Telstra Remote Working Solution.

Before going through this setup, the following pre-requisites need to be satisfied:
  1. Your laptop has the TRWS installed and is running Windows.
  2.  The connection is intended to use your laptop to connect to your home wireless network. The TRWS software will then provide a VPN tunnel through your home WiFi network, into the public internet, and securely into your corporate network,
  3. Your home WiFi network is already setup and you have these information: WiFi SSID, WiFi Security Mode and WiFi password.
  4. RSA SecureID token Device. This device is on all the time and a number is displayed, which changes after a certain amount of time.


The following steps will help setup the connection for the first time. The login steps below need to be done each time you login again.
1.    1.      Switch on Laptop.
2.   2. Look for the physical switch for the WiFi on the actual laptop. Its location is different for different laptop  models. Ensure this is switched on.
3.    3. When the laptop booted and is ready for work, then open up the TRWS application  either by:
i)                    Start – All Programs – Telstra – TRWS; or
ii)                  Click on the TRWS icon on the desktop.



4.    4.   From the TRWS, click Settings – Login Information.
5.    5.   In the Login Information, fill in the Username, Password, click Save Password and select the relevant country. Click OK.


6.      6. Go back to the TRWS dialog, click Settings – Connection Strings.
s


7.   7.   In the Connection Strings, click on the WLAN.
8.   8.   Under the WLAN tab, select the Device for your WiFi hardware on your laptop. Then click the Add button. The Add Personal Network dialog appears.



9.  9.    Fill in the SSID box and the Security box with the WEP, WPA or WPA2 password. The type of Security would depend on how your home WiFi is configured.
10  10.  Under the SSID, there is a checkbox called “Non-Broadcast”. If your WiFi Network is usually hidden, then please tick this checkbox. Click OK to finish with the Add Personal Network dialog.
11  11.  Going back to the WLAN tab, your WiFi network should be listed (not necessarily connected) in the Personal Networks box.
12  12.  Put a tick in the “Display all WLAN networks” box.
13  13.  At this stage, if the home WiFi is hidden based on SSID, make sure it is set to Not Hidden or Unhide. It can be set to Hidden again at the end of this guide. You may need the help of your home WiFi administrator for this.
14  14.  Click OK to finish with the Connection Strings dialog.

15  15.  At the TRWS main dialog, your home WiFi network may appear in the list under Phonebook – Available Networks. Double click on your WiFi network in the list.
16  16.  If it does not appear in the list, then under the menu, select Bookmarks – select your WiFi list under there. If it does not appear here either, then check that the WiFi network is Not Hidden.
17  17.  Also, to check that the WiFi adapter hardware inside the laptop is working, under the Phonebook – Available Networks, there should be a list of WiFi networks possibly from your neighbours. This just shows the WiFi in your laptop is working.


18.  If the previous steps have been successful, that just means that the laptop is connected to your home network. To establish a VPN (Virtual Private Connection) to your company,  the following extra steps are needed. A dialog to establish a VPN appears. Click OK. Go to step 21.

     19.  If the above dialog does not appear automatically after 5 minutes of connection, then go to the Taskbar in Windows and look for a yellow padlock icon. Double click on this to open up the VPN client connection status.


      20.  In the VPN client status dialog above, double click on the connection entry, eg “cbamras”. This will open up the dialog in step 18. Click on the network option and click OK.
      21.  Another dialog appears to login to the VPN. The user name is “r” plus your normal username in the company. The password is your normal password in the company plus the numbers in the RSA Secure ID token. These instructions may differ for different corporations.
22.  At this stage you have connected to both the internet and your corporate VPN.

      23.  Some other notes:
       -  to browse the internet, you may need to give your corporate username and password, if it a corporate web proxy is used.

24. How to Reset Network password
On the occasion that your user password has been changed at the network, and your laptop password is out of sync, here are the steps to change the password on the laptop:
- Switch on the laptop and boot until the Windows login prompt.
- Login to Windows using the old password.
- Connect to the office network using Telstra RAS as described in this article.
- Once the laptop has established connection with the office network, the press Ctrl-Alt-Del and Lock the computer.
- Unlock the computer by   Ctrl-Alt-Del  and then enter the old password.
- Then press again Ctrl-Alt-Del and Lock the computer.
- This time, unlock the computer using the new password on the network.
- The laptop should now have the same password as the network.


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Monday, April 12, 2010

On Cloud Computing

This post is a collection of interesting links on the subject of Cloud Computing (CC). Please feel free to add your links by submitting a comment.


U.S. Department of Energy Asks, Is Cloud Computing Fast Enough for Science?
With cloud computing gaining acceptance in the business world, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if cloud computing can also meet the needs of the scientific computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has launched Magellan, a cloud computing testbed to explore this question, with facilities that will test the effectiveness of cloud computing for scientific projects..........



Virtualization and cloud security modeled on NAC - introduces the use of Network Access Control to address security issue in CC.
      Network Access Control - a method of controlling network security.

Australian Cost of Data Breach report released - "PGP CEO Phillip Dunkelberger told iTnews that organisations operating in the cloud incurred higher costs because of issues to do with territorial jurisdictions, and additional investigation and consulting fees."  


Cloud computing putting data at increased risk



"Hacking attempts double in two years, says latest PwC report. Nearly two thirds of companies have detected attempts to break into their networks in the past year, double that of two years ago, according to the latest biennial Information Security Breaches Survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)."

A list of Cloud related technologies, providers,etc
http://www.cloudsigma.com 
http://gridspot.com 
http://www.profitbricks.com 
https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/billing#time_granularity_instance_pricing 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine 
“50% of the time the site is down in seconds, even when we’ve contacted site owners 
and they’ve told us everything will be fine. It’s often an unprecedented amount of traf-fic, and they don’t have the required capacity.” Stephen Fry, actor and widely followed 
Twitter user, London, U.K.; http://tinyurl.com/StephenFrySeconds 
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/servers/techdetails/ 
http://www.gogrid.com 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine 
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/newsletters/2012/08/14/august-2012/ 
http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ 
https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/billing 
Greg D’Alesandre, Google App Engine; http://tinyurl.com/D-Alesandre 
https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/ 
http://tinyurl.com/cloud-price-war 
http://openstack.org 
James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services, slide: “Amazon Cycle of Innovation”; 
http://tinyurl.com/james-hamilton 
http://spotcloud.com 
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/ 
http://www.cloudsigma.com/cloud-computing/what-is-the-cloud/171 
http://www.cloudsigma.com/about-us/press-releases/242 
http://tinyurl.com/6fusion-CME 
http://docs.dotcloud.com/0.9/faq/ 

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Online Scan - Websites

Infected websites can be sources of driveby infections or hijacks. You only need to go to those infected websites without clicking anything else and your PC will get infected. There are online scanning tools that check websites if they are safe or not. I suppose none of the scanning tools is 100% accurate so it may be good to scan using a few such website scanning tools.

This page aims to list a collection of useful online tools that is able to scan websites, given a specific URL / website address. These scanning tools are useful when you need to check if a website is safe from malware, hijacks, or other types of infection. 

If you are looking for free antivirus that provides online scans of your actual computer / PC, rather than websites, then go to Online Scan - Antivirus

The website helps to decide that a website is safe to visit and share information with.

https://retire.insecurity.today/   EXCELLENT
Check your site for javascript libraries with known vulnerabilities, especially Cross Site Scripting.

Unmask Parasites
This is a from another article ..... Basically the four links are:
*** replace www.example.com with your website


---------------
Detect If Your Web Pages Link to Infected Sites or Serve Malware Themselves
WRITTEN BY AMIT AGARWAL ON NOVEMBER 26, 2008
http://www.labnol.org/internet/detect-webpages-that-serve-malware/5597/

Find Security Holes in your Website
1. Scandoo Google Search – Scandoo is a wrapper around Google Search that adds visual hints in search results so you can easily know if the target page is safe or not.

Here’s how you can use Scandoo to detect problems with your own site. Just type site:domain.com in the search box and it will show the safety rating of every web page on your site. So if I were the owner of warez.com, this is what I would see on my screen:



2. Live Webmaster Tools – You can add your site to Live Webmaster and then use the Crawl Issues section to find out about all pages on your site that are possibly infected with malware. The tool will also help you learn about external links on your site that point to pages hosting malware.



3. McAfee Site Advisor - Type in the address of your website and Site Advisor will prepare a very detailed report of possible issues. You will know if that site points to some bad neighborhood or if there are any links to executables and zip files that are infected with virus or spyware. This tool was developed at MIT and later acquired by McAfee.



4. Google Safe Browsing – Add your own website URL to the Safe Browsing diagnostic page and it will tell you if Google has classified that site under malware. If the site is flagged as suspicious, the best option it fix the pages and request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools.



While Google will only tell you if the site is infected, you really need to verify the site with Live Search in order to find out about all the different web pages that are infected or may be linking to bad content.
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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Tools for Windows


Below is a list of Windows tools. Please let me know if you find other useful ones.

Also here are some sites which feature collection of useful software:
100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick (for Mac and Win)
PortableApps.com - features a collection of program fitted onto a USB stick.
ROEMware - a categorized minimalist set of applications for OEM builders.

System / Memory Scanner - online tool. This is not restricted to Windows. Just go to the website and it will scan your memory configuration and system statistics.

Process Explorer - "Task Manager on steroids". It can replace Task Manager or run side by side with it, but either way it's an absolute must-have for technically savvy users. When you launch Process Explorer, you'll see a tree view of processes; they're nominally organized by which process spawned which, but you can click on the column headers to change the sorting as you please. The top portion of the window has four graphs: CPU usage, commit history, I/O bytes history, and physical memory history. Click on one to bring up a full-sized window view that's akin to the Performance tab in Task Manager -- but with a level of detail and insight into what programs are doing that Task Manager doesn't even come close to providing.



System Information for Windows - lists application license keys, probes installed hardware, fetches device temperatures, catalogs installed multimedia codecs -- the list seems endless.








BlueScreenView - When a BSOD occurs the results are, whenever possible, saved into a dump file that can be examined later. BlueScreenView scans your system for these files and produces a report from them, which you can read within BlueScreenView itself or save to HTML for separate analysis. Each line in the report describes the BSOD's crash code, the time and date of its occurrence, any parameters that might have been passed with the crash (useful for debugging), and a slew of other minor details. The results are searchable, so you can hunt for a particular crash code, driver, or DLL that you think might be present.





Autoruns -- probes your system and dumps out lists of programs and system components that start automatically, without user intervention -- from apps in your Startup folder to scheduled tasks, from services to device drivers, from Sidebar gadgets to codecs. By default it dumps out data pertinent to the current user context, but the program's User menu lets you switch contexts. (You'll need to run the program as Administrator, though.)






 WinDirStat - generates easy-to-understand graphical reports about disk usage, allowing you to see at a glance which individual files or folders hidden deep within a directory tree may be gobbling up dozens of gigabytes.




 Unlocker, Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.
OpenedFilesView Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.

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Thursday, March 04, 2010

How to Secure your Computer

The following list various methods and software*** that can be applied to secure your computer.

1.Use a Firewall - see Firewall Testing (Hardening)
Software: Comodo Firewall, Zone Alarm
To configure firewall, it is useful to know the port numbers of common services. This can be found from IANA in:
www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers
Your own IP address can also be discovered using: http://whatismyipaddress.com


2. Use Anti-Virus software
Software: Avast, Avira, AVG
Testing of antivirus software can be performed using the following tools:
- EICAR - www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm - Provides a standardized test file for signature based virus detection software.
- Spycar - www.spycar.org - Spycar is a suite of tools designed to mimic spyware-like behavior, but in a benign form.

3. Use Anti-Spyware
Software:  Spybot Search and Destroy, SuperAntiSpyware

4. DNS Routing and protection - setup your DNS to be routed over a DNS provider with filtering and protection.
OpenDNS

5. Use a password manager to manage multiple passwords
Software: KeePass
Testing passwords can be accomplished using these tools:
SecurityStats - http://securitystats.com/tools/password.php

6. Browser Plugin Protection
Software: Web of Trust, McAfee Site Advisor

7. Encrypt your files on your computer.
Software: TrueCrypt

8. Securing your websites.
Using SSL: How to implement SSL in IIS
Testing Tools:
Goolag Scanner (www.goolag.org) provides one more tool for web site owners to patch up their online properties. It is powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. By typing in a domain name it may return site vulnerabilities. The tool makes “it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific Web sites or broad Web domains.” The tool uses the Google Custom Search engine and has a detailed specification (http://www.goolag.org/specifications.html) on how it works.


9. Disable Autorun to prevent attack from infected USB or other removable drives.

Click the Start button, then Run and enter “gpedit.msc” without the quotes
Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System
Scroll down to “Turn off Autoplay” and double click on it
Click on the “Enabled” radio button, then for “Turn off Autoplay on” select “All drives”

10. Use portable Linux which runs entirely from the CD or DVD without accessing the hard drive. The distributions are:

Google Chrome OS - developed by Google. Intended to run on Netbook and allow user to interact with web applications. The standalone DVD is available to use as a standalone OS without installation

Lightweight Portable Security (LSP) - developed by the USA's Department of Defence, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.

11. Check various alert service websites:
Stay Smart Online

12. How to Lock Down Linux - short article with a few basic essentials to secure Linux.

*** This article, writer and blog does not recommend the use of the software above and is not liable for anything. The list of software is represents the authors personal opinions.

13. To check suspicious behaviour, there is a range of tools, collectively called Sysinternals, which is now available from Microsoft. Here is a presentation on how to use Sysinternals by its creator Mark Russinovich, entitled:
Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools
Date: June 12, 2012 from 3:15PM to 4:30PM

14. Security on USB.

Ghost USB honeypot (http://www.honeynet.org/node/871)
This is currently a research project to identify malware on a PC that tries to infect any connected USB. Here is a description from its website.
----------------
"Ghost is a honeypot for malware that uses USB storage devices for propagation. It is able to capture such malware without any further knowledge - especially, it doesn't need signatures or the like to accomplish its task.
Detection is achieved by emulating a USB flash drive on Windows systems and observing the emulated device. The assumption is that on an infected machine the malware will eventually copy itself to the removable device."

15. Social Network
For Facebook and Twitter and perhaps some other social networking sites, there are profile scanners available to scan links, newsfeeds, messages, such as the free one from Eset https://socialmediascanner.eset.com/.




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How to Capture Picture Perfect Photos

This is a summary of the article from PCAuthority, Mar 2010.

1. Turn off flash for indoor photographs, otherwise the subject will look artificially bright. An alternative is to use a flash filters.
2. Turn on flash outdoors, so that the surrounding lights will not overwhelm the light on the subject.
3. Try out the scenes modes. Most modern digital cameras come with various pre-configured scene modes. Experiment with it a little to see which suits the conditions.
4. Edit the photo with software. The two highly recommended software which are free, are:
     - Paint.Net : http://www.getpaint.net/
     - GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

The following combination of steps in photo editing helps improve most photos.
a) Levels and Curves
    GIMP: select Colours | Levels.  Adjust the Input Levels Histogram.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Levels.
b) Color Adjustment
    GIMP: select Colours | Hue-Saturation. Adjust the Saturation to 10-20.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Hue-Saturation.
c) Sharpening
    GIMP: select Filters | Enhance | Unsharp Mask. Try 0.1, 1.0, 0.0 for Radius, Amount and Threshold respectively.
    Paint.Net: select Effects | Photo | Sharpen.

There is a whole list of effects available in most editing software, but try the ones above first to make the photo look really good.


Added 20 Dec 2014

 Photo editing tips for photos taken with bad lighting
1. Use Unsharp Mask or similar feature
2. Then choose Gamma Correction for either underexposure or overexposure
3. If there is no Gamma Correction, or no good results, choose Brightness/Contrast instead.
4. Color Balancing used to fix colors problems like skin tones.
5. To reduce pixelation, use Noise Filter - Edge Preserving Smooth
6. Then increase Saturation to restore vibrant colors.

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Monday, February 22, 2010

On Google technologies

This is record of some interesting technologies by Google.



Google BigQuery 
Note: Currently, BigQuery is available by invitation only and users must be added to the service before they can interact with the BigQuery API, the browser tool, or the command-line tool. If you are interested in signing up for BigQuery, please fill out this form.


Google BigQuery Service allows you to run SQL-like queries against very large datasets, with potentially billions of rows. This can be your own data, or data that someone else has shared for you. BigQuery works best for interactive analysis of very large datasets, typically using a small number of very large, append-only tables. For more traditional relational database scenarios, you might consider using Google Cloud SQL instead. You can use BigQuery through the bigquery browser tool, the bq command-line tool, or by making direct calls to the REST API. Learn more.



Google Cloud SQL 
Google Cloud SQL is web service that allows you to create, configure, and use relational databases with your App Engine applications. It is a fully-managed service that maintains, manages, and administers your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services.


By offering the capabilities of a MySQL database, the service enables you to easily move your data, applications, and services into and out of the cloud. This allows for high data portability and helps in faster time-to-market because you can quickly leverage your existing database (using JDBC and/or DB-API) in your App Engine application. 


To ensure that your critical applications and services are always running, Google Cloud SQL replicates data to multiple geographic regions to provide high data availability.


The service is currently in limited preview. We will publish pricing soon





Why Google+ will become Google's only productOr: How Google+ will crush everyone with 'featurization'
By Mike Elgan

"Computerworld - I finally understand Google's überstrategy for dominating the future of online everything.
Here it is: Coalesce all of its best products into a single super product that marginalizes smaller rivals to the point of irrelevance and clobbers Facebook with total superiority.
That single super product is Google+.
Why features beat products
The most important distinction in Silicon Valley is this: Is it a product or a feature?"

.................
"And that's how Google plans to dominate the future of the Internet. Many of the product categories for online services will be marginalized as Google makes these technologies mere features of Google+."





Google Fusion Tables
http://www.google.com/fusiontables/public/tour/index.html



Stumbled upon this less publicised technology called Fusion Tables. I was looking for some online database where I can store numbers that can be accessed and used by a web page. Basically, I was looking for something to replace MySQL or similar databases. I'm trying to avoid DB administration like having to create DB, Tables, fields or logging into a DB to update data etc. I was looking for a simple table interface with the power of a DB. And it looks like Google Fusion Tables is just that and more.


In particular, Fusion Tables can visualise the data and integrate with maps and so on.
https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/stories




Here is an extract from Google:
"How is Fusion Tables different from spreadsheets? The goal of Fusion Tables, as with other database systems, is to manage larger amounts of data than spreadsheets typically do. This size difference leads to a focus on a different set of functionalities.


For example, Fusion Tables focuses more on bulk operations on the data (filtering, aggregation, merges). These operations are typically not necessary for smaller collections of data stored in spreadsheets.


In contrast, spreadsheets preserve complete flexibility in managing data -- you can put any value you want in any cell and work carefully to format your spreadsheet to make it look nice. Fusion Tables requires that the data be tabular with column headers and types for each column.


Sometimes there are more effective ways to look at your data than rows in a table. For example, when your data contains geographical locations, viewing the data on a map or as an intensity map (where each country is colored according to some attributes) may reveal patterns in the data that are otherwise very hard to see. Fusion Tables offers several visualizations that will help you explore your data more effectively. You will see them in the "Visualize" menu.


Finally, Fusion Tables allows you to combine data owned by different parties to make a new table. The visualizations and queries on that table can incorporate any or all of the data seamlessly."









Google Plus or Google+ 
https://plus.google.com/


The Facebook challenger has finally arrived! This is quite an exclusive club at the moment so it is by invitation only that you can get a Google+ access.


So what is it? It is Facebook and much more. The Google+ site will explain much more. 



But as a quick summary:
  • Google+ Circles - like Facebook friends, but you can control which group of friends can see which content you publish.
  • Google+ Streams - like Facebook wall, where you can publish your comments, pictures, videos
  • Google+ Hangout - like online group chat. You can invite people from different Circles.
  • Google+ Sparks - this will collect content from the web including articles and videos that you like and let you read or watch whenever you want.
Also here is a YouTube clip on Google+ 


10 ways Google+ can boost your brand
http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-tech/10-ways-google-can-boost-your-brand-20110831-1jkz4.html


Links to 63 Google+ Google Plus resources


 

Google TV
http://www.google.com/tv/




Getting Started With Google Voice

The basics: Google Voice gives you a local number with tons of rich features that becomes the one number you’ll use. You configure Google Voice with all your other phones — smart or dumb cell phones and landlines, at home or work – and, based on who’s calling, have Google Voice route the call directly to voicemail or any of your phones. If you don’t know where you’ll be — say, work, home, or mobile — Google Voice can ring all your numbers; you pick up the one that’s handiest.




Five Really Handy Google Command Line Tricks
"With the right commands, you can turn your favorite command-line text editor into a distraction-free Google Docs app, add new events to Google Calendar, upload images to Picasa or video to YouTube, backup your Google data, and more. Here's how it works.

On Friday, Google released GoogleCL, a saucy command line program that interacts with Google services from any *nix-friendly command-line prompt (on Windows, Mac, or Linux). We spent the weekend playing around with it, and now we're sharing a few of the coolest ways we've been putting it to use." ............




Tips on using Google Attachments


The link above contain tips on how to use some neat features in  Google Gmail regarding Attachments. In summary the tips are:
1) Drag and Drop attachments when writing email using Gmail. Currently works with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browser.
2) Multiple selection of attachments is possible
3) Forget to attach a file to your email? If the contents of the email has any words like "attachment" or "attached", then Gmail will pop-up a prompt to remind you about adding the attachment.
4) Attachments can be downloaded or viewed online, eg in PDF format.
5) Find attachments in old email. In the "Search Mail" text box, type:
   has: attachment.pdf  or filename:file.txt










Google offers encrypted search with 'https' site








Google promises private browsing via SSL page.
Google has launched an encrypted version of its web site which it said will offer users more control over their online activities. The 'https' URL has not yet gone live in the UK, but is expected to do so shortly.


Evan Roseman, a software engineer at Google, said in a blog post that https://www.google.com/ will let web users surf in a "secure channel".







Google leaps language barrier with translator phone

"GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages." ..............


Google Web Search
Tips on using Google Search


Here's a summary of the 10 tips:









  1. Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site. 
  2. Use Google as a spelling aid. 
  3. Use Google as a calculator. 
  4. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world. 
  5. Get quick currency conversions. 
  6. Use the OR operator. 
  7. Exclude specific terms with the – operator. 
  8. Search for specific document types. 
  9. Search within numerical ranges using the .. operator. 
  10. Area code lookup.

Another 9 tips from the same source above:
http://webworkerdaily.com/2010/05/03/9-more-simple-google-search-tricks/


  1. Use quote marks to search for exact phrases. 
  2. Use the wildcard operator to fill in the blanks.
  3. Track a package. 
  4. Track a flight. 
  5. Get a stock quote. 
  6. Get quick conversions of pretty much anything. 
  7. Find out what movies are showing in your city. 
  8. Use Google’s cache to retrieve the previous version of a page. 
  9. Get the weather forecast.

Various things  you can do via Google Search

Here is a summary of the features:









• Cached Links
View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
• Calculator
Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
• Currency Conversion
Easily perform any currency conversion.
• Definitions
Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.
• File Types
Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.
• I'm Feeling Lucky
Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.
• Images
See relevant images in your regular web search results.
• News Headlines
Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.
• PhoneBook
Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.
• Product Search
To find a product for sale online, use Google Product Search.
• Q&A - New!
Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
• Search By Number
Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.
• Similar Pages
Display pages that are related to a particular result.
• Site Search
Restrict your search to a specific site.
• Spell Checker
Offers alternative spelling for queries.
• Stock Quotes
Use Google to get stock and mutual fund information.
• Street Maps
Use Google to find U.S. street maps.
• Travel Information
Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.
• Weather - New!
Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.
• Web Page Translation 
Provides English speakers access to a variety of non-English web pages.
• Who Links To You?
Find pages that point to a specific URL.


GoogleSharing
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Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV.

5/20/2010 10:00:00 AM
"If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers. ....................."


http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv-tv-meets-web-web.html
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