(no subject)

Today's useful tip for Internet Explorer: how to change the character substitution for custom searches.

Say you set up "wiki", to take you to a wikipedia article. But you find that going to "Deal or No Deal" actually takes you to "Deal+or+No+Deal". Turns out that the substitution is set in the registry, under e.g. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\wiki for our "wiki" keyword. The format appears to be [before]=[after]. So just change " "="+" to " "="_", and it works!

(no subject)

Why, oh why, do the internets hate me so?

I *had* set things up so that typing "search whatever" would search for whatever on google. This was done by the simple method of installing the Google toolbar, and clicking the box labelled "search from the address bar using Google" (or words to that effect). This was all fine and dandy, and ocassionally failed because rather than actually use Google, IE6 tells MSN search that it wants to use Google, and MSN search says "ah, Google's over there". Apparently, as best as anyone can guess, this is some mystical anti-browser-search-engine-hijacker system.

Now, (as best as I can tell - Googling for any hint of documentation turned up vague references and out-of-date hints) someone at Microsoft has fiddled with the code and made it so that this no longer works. Instead of Google, I get Live Search. Which looks suspiciously like Google, right down to the positioning of sponsored links and the tendency to show extra indented results.

Riiiiiiiiiight.

Bloody computers. My desktop has already bluescreened once today, and my laptop twice. I swear, software and hardware used to actually *work*.