How to block image thumbnails in Google News search results

The problem:

Hmmm, not really adding a lot, are they? Nearly all news reports these days use shovelware stock photography or logos of some kind, or are occasionally grabby click-bait. These irrelevant distractions can be blocked with no loss, allowing you to focus on the headline, source and snippet.

The solution:

Block image thumbnails of news media pictures from appearing in your Google News search results. To do this efficiently and precisely, in the uBlock Origin browser addon, go: Dashboard | My Filters | then paste in these two lines…

google.*##[id^="news-thumbnail"]

google.*##[alt^="Story image"]

Then “Apply changes” and exit. Reload the Google News results, and the thumbnail images are gone. And gone in an elegant manner, without leaving behind an ugly block of ‘alt’ text.

Why two filters? Because while most Google News thumbnails have “news-thumbnail” in their id class, the top one per page does not. To also block this thumbnail you need the second cosmetic filter, which blocks any images with an alt tag which has the phrase “Story image” in it.

These two filters have the advantage of not interfering with thumbnail loading on Google Images, Google Books etc. Though if you do want to block book cover thumbnails on Google Books, for some reason, then add this line…

google.*##[id^="bksthumb"]

(I also have a post on how to block YouTube’s new animated ‘thumbnail previews’ of videos in its search results)

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GoogleMonkeyR fix – stop it running on Google Images

Here are some updated fix instruction for the latest GoogleMonkeyR UserScript, which many desktop power-searchers use to give their Google Search results a three-column multicolumn layout.

* Problem: the script breaks Google Image search results, by running on such searches. Specifically, the script appears to be preventing the central ‘slider’ div from opening up, when an image is selected from the Google Image search results.

* Solution: In your Web browser, access the raw GoogleMonkeyR script. For instance, in Opera this is done via: Extensions | Tampermonkey | Installed UserScripts | GoogleMonkeyR | Edit.

You then need to paste in a line of code that explicitly turns off GoogleMonkeyR, but only whenever the browser is running a Google Images search. To do this, add the following line to the header of your GoogleMonkeyR script, below all the // @include lines…

// @exclude http*://www.google.*/search?*isch*

Google Image searches have “isch” in their URL, so we can grab onto that and exclude such URLs. Save (click the disk icon) and exit. You should now be able to operate the Google Images results as usual, which still retaining your usual three-column layout for the main Google Search.

How to extract multiple zip files to a single folder

It’s surprisingly difficult to discover the right settings in .ZIP-file handling software to extract multiple .ZIP files into a single subfolder. Without making multiple subfolders within that new folder, one for each .ZIP file. That latter arrangement is not so good… if you have scans of 10 journals in 10 .ZIP files and want to visually pick out just five images from their combined 800 pages.

The popular 7-zip for Windows has what appear to be the right settings (“No pathnames”), but fails to respect this. I tried multiple configurations, but 7-zip always extracted each .ZIP into its own subfolder regardless.

The solution is WinRAR. Use its “Do not extract paths” setting when extracting…

How to enable keyword search for .ePub files in SumatraPDF reader

How to enable text search of ePub files, in the SumatraPDF reader…

1. Go to: top left corner icon | Settings | Advanced Options.

2. At the top of Sumatra’s config file you’ll see:

3. Change false to true. Save and exit.

Mostly you’ll be sending an ePub over to a mobile device, where it will be handled by better apps. But the choice of reader is limited on the Windows desktop where you may also be archiving the .ePub files, and where you may want to sometimes hop into one of the files to swiftly find a specific name or title.

I don’t yet know of desktop freeware that can search across and inside of multiple .ePub and .mobi files.

Persistent bookmarking for audiobooks in Windows freeware

I’m very pleased to find freeware for the Windows desktop that offers persistent and editable bookmarks for audiobooks and long podcasts. AIMP 4.51 (Ghacks review) is maintained and mature, has a well-designed interface, is genuine freeware, and the playlist and bookmarks system is both simple and robust.

AIMP’s bookmarks are stored in XML at C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\AIMP\Bookmarks.xml and can thus be backed up.

It also has a graphic equaliser, supports pitch shift and subtle speed changes of playback, and has many plugins including one for podcatching via RSS.

Tutorial: assemble non-overlapping tiles in Photoshop

How to capture zoomified image tiles and semi-automatically re-assemble them into a single image, with Photoshop. Even when there is no overlap between the tiles (which means you can’t use Photoshop’s Photomerge feature).

First, make sure your target picture is of an age and a state to be in the public domain and can legally be liberated. Also, note that the WikiMedia Commons has a de-zoomify advice page which offers various dezoomifying services and tips. These options may be quicker and more accurate than my method. But if the WikiMedia options don’t work, try this…

1. Install the Save All Images extension for Opera (or an addon with similar fuctionality that works in your Web browser).

2. Visit your target page. Zoomify the image and pan around until all tiles have loaded. Then capture all the loaded images on the page with ‘Save All Images’. As you can see, it’s quite sophisticated in its filters, though unfortunately you can’t save your settings as a repeatable preset for a particular website…

Ok, ‘Save All Images’ will pack all the loaded tiles up in a zip file.

3. Extract your saved .zip of images. View the resulting folder as thumbnail images. Delete all images that are not part of the tile set. Rename .jpeg files to .jpg if needed, with Winsome File Renamer or similar. Also rename to alphanumeric order if needed — tiles are downloaded in their tiling sequence, so a sort-by-date should mean that a 1… 2… 3… re-naming should be possible even if the filenames are obfuscated. You want to end up with a folder of image tiles in .jpg and with a logical alphanumeric loading order. Make a note of how many rows and columns make up the complete image (e.g. three tiles across, and four tiles down).

4. Get Paul Rigott’s Photoshop stitcher script File Stitcher.zip (mirror) and unzip it. This script can handle non-overlapped tiles by using an ‘alphanumeric load-order’ option.

5. Load Photoshop. Do not open a new image. Just go: File | Scripts | Browse and then find and load Paul’s script.

Set your numbers for the tiles across / down, and then point the script at your target folder. The images load and are automatically distributed across a newly opened image, with the script doing canvas expansion as needed. As you can see here, the result is not perfect, but 85% of the work has been done automatically. Most tiles have been accurately snapped together into the main image, but a few tiles have been assembled into strips and these remain as outliers.

Just multi-select a few relevant layers (Shift, select with right mouse-click, repeat to add the next layer to the group). Then snap the image together. More recent editions of Photoshop should help with that, if Snap is turned on.

WorldBrain for Chrome

WorldBrain for Chrome : “Full-text search of your Web browsing history and bookmarks. Find previously visited websites & PDFs in seconds.” Works in Opera too, and presumably any browser which supports Chrome extensions and addons.

On install it offered to import my last 90 days of visited URLs from my History, thought it fatally ‘hung’ at 2% and couldn’t get past that even in a few hours. However, that 2% was all I needed, since it was going through the URLs in reverse date order and thus had grabbed the last few days. I cancelled and was left with what I actually wanted: not 90 days’ worth of browsing, but just the last few days to start me off.

You can also Blacklist sites that don’t need to be cached locally, and Google Maps is blacklisted by default. One very important filter you need to add before you do anything is Google and DuckDuckGo searches, or hitting them all again in an automated fashion may cause you to be blocked by those services. Once the initial import is done, you can then unblock the main search-engines and they will cache naturally as you browse.

You’ll also want to visit the Privacy settings and ensure that some things are off/on.

It’s only getting the text, stripped of HTML. Therefore partial searches for filenames of pictures and .zips presumably won’t work, since they’re in the HTML code. Even so, one potential problem appears to be that there’s no rolling “delete page files after 90-days” setting. Presumably your local cache just goes on growing and growing, which may not be so good for those with over-stuffed hard-drives.

You also get a personal annotation and tagging tool as a discreet sidebar button. This also gives you a way to get to the Search interface, if you don’t want the creepy ‘staring eyes’ WorldBrain icon on your Bookmarks bar.

SWF to PNG freeware

Wrestling to view and export Creative Commons .SWF files, without an Adobe Flash installation? The wholly freeware Windows Free Flash Decompiler can open even early-version Flash .SWF files and save to .PNG images with scaling. ffdec_11.1.0_setup.exe is the installer Windows users need.

Useful where games have been made public domain and their art assets released under CC0, such as the Glitch game. Glitch was made and output in Flash 5, which is very old now, but Free Flash Decompiler had no problem with its assets.

Free Flash Decompiler was the only genuine freeware found, after an hour of searching, which could open such Flash 5 .SWFs. It only lacks a batch processing feature.

JURN and GRAFT on Itty.bitty

Introducing… JURN and GRAFT ‘in a link’. I’ve been experimenting with the Itty.bitty service, and am pleased to learn that Google CSEs can work with it.

The Itty.bitty link is the web-page, contained inside the URL itself. Here are working links…

JURN

GRAFT

You can of course drag these to your Bookmarks bar in your Web browser, if you wish.

Open Semantic Desktop Search – free desktop search for Windows

Open Semantic Desktop Search an “open source desktop search engine for full text search in documents”, that runs in SOLR on the Windows desktop through Oracle’s free VM VirtualBox. It’s been around since late 2015, and is actively being developed, but they obviously don’t employ a publicist to promote it.

It has a clean Web-like interface, supports the indexing of a great many file-types including .ePUB and .PDF files, even if they’re inside .ZIP files. Though it can’t yet index the Kindle’s .MOBI ebook files, so you’d need to do an overnight mass-conversion to .ePUB or .PDF using the free Calibre software, and your purchased encrypted Kindle files will still need to be searched using Amazon.

Despite being run in a VM (often slow in older Windows PCs), Open Semantic Desktop Search can work on…

“old standard hardware” and “The search engine works even offline or unhosted on a single laptop without need of a intranet or internet connection or a server.”

Though online comments suggest you’ll do best with a modern PC, and those with an over-stuffed hard-drive will need to clear 50Gb of disk-space to accommodate both the software and its resulting index. The disk-space needed may be less if you’re only indexing the folder containing the .PDFs and .ePUBs needed for your PhD or book research.

I haven’t installed and tested it yet, but it’s free and looks good. Apparently it can also auto-OCR inside PDFs that don’t have OCR text, a new feature added in a December 2017 update.

The search-engine software comes packaged in a 2.8Gb .OVA file that you download. This .OVA is a plugin module for the free VM VirtualBox (a 110Mb .EXE download), and the team’s Desktop Search page has instructions on how to plug your .OVA into the installed VM. It seems fairly simple to get it up and running.