Alisdair McDiarmid has produced a walk-through for one of Quicksilver’s lesser-known but very powerful time-saving tricks—executing very fast web searches in Wikipedia, on Amazon, news sites or wherever.

I knew Quicksilver could do this, but hadn’t forced myself to experience how good it is until today.

By highlighting some text and pressing ⌘-E, you can copy text to Mac OS X’s shared find clipboard.

Then, by bringing up Quicksilver and selecting a web search bookmark (there are hundreds of pre-made ones to choose from for every imaginable query), you can search your web site of choice in seconds:

Now I can find books on Amazon, the latest news from the BBC on the rise and rise of Borat, definitions for obscure technical terms and acronyms on Wikipedia, words in the Oxford English Dictionary or software on MacUpdate in much less than a tenth of the time it took me yesterday.

And so can you.

[Props also to Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame whose walk-through on this feature seems to be the original.]

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Douglas Bowman at StopDesign has been using Google Calendar for months before its official release.

In a post on his site, he shares thirteen tips for getting the most out of it.

Many of the tips are Mac-specific, ranging from news that the Calendar will soon support Safari to how to smooth the font used for dates. All of them are useful.

If you are a Google Calendar user, you will want to check these out.

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I ran across two things for Gmail users today.

Adam Pash at Lifehacker has posted a tutorial of tips and tricks for getting the most out of Gmail. It even has video clips!

Among other things, he talks about some scripts for the Firefox extension Greasemonkey which add very useful bells and whistles to Gmail’s web interface.

Another Greasemonkey script promises to bring basic encryption to Gmail. It first encrypts the email into AES and then uses the RSA algorithm to encrypt the message again.

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Keith Robinson has written a piece at Lifehacker, offering “some tips about dealing with your e-mail and doing your very best to respond to every legit e-mail you get in a reasonable time frame.”

He covers the importance of making an effort, how to set up a file system (which looks wildly different from mine), and tricks for making sure that you get as close as dammit to the holy grail of an empty inbox every day.

He also features one of my favourite rules: “When in doubt? — DELETE. If you don’t need to keep something and don’t plan to respond, just trash it.”

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