Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you practical computing tips and information.

This week: Command the Web.

Earlier this week, Tech Insider blogged about the emergence of command lines on the Web, such as specialized Google search terms. (Click here for a previous Tip Thursday on Goggling better.)

Web site YubNub (the word means “Hooray” in the Ewok language) takes command line concept even further.

Creator Jonathan Aquino and others have crafted hundreds of Web commands. For example, say you want a random number up to a maximum value of 1,000. Type in random 1000 into the YubNub search box. Suppose you want to search a term in Wikipedia. Type in wp [search term]. Want a Google map? Use gm [location].

You can use YubNub as you would a normal search engine Web page. Even better, you can integrate it into the search engine box in the upper right-hand corner of most browser windows. (YubNub itself defaults to Google when you make a normal search query; it’s truly win-win here.)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 lets you chose which search engine you want as the search box default. It even has a handy Web page allowing you to directly pick some old standbys, such as Google and Yahoo!. Navigate manually to it by clicking on the arrow next to the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner. In the drop down menu, choose Find More Providers.

To add YubNub to the choices, paste in this url into Step 3 of the “create your own” box: http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=TEST. For Step 4, call it whatever you like. Finally, hit install.

You can then make YubNub your default search provider by going back to the arrow drop down menu, and selecting Change Search Defaults, and choosing appropriately.

Firefox users can make direct use of a plugin.

Other search engine users, see this page for instructions.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you practical computing tips and information.

This week: Check your computer for Windows vulnerabilities.

In all likelihood, you have some version of Microsoft Windows as your computer’s operating system. Windows, of course, requires regular security upgrades and it’s possible that you might have fallen behind. There’s no reason to, however. Windows should be set to automatically download daily updates. Go to Start, Command Panel, and click Security Center. Click on the Automatic Updates icon, and check the white box that says automatic.

But, it’s not a bad idea to check your current status, for which Microsoft has a handy analyzer that will scan your computer for vulnerabilities. You might want to check other computers’ vulnerabilities, too, for which you’ll need a machine’s Internet protocol address. The Microsoft Baseline Analyzer does require a software download.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: customizing Google.

As a follow up to an earlier post about simple tricks to make your Google searches more effective, we offer some basic steps to customize the search engine results and display.

Google automatically applies a search-return feature that they call “SafeSearch Filtering," which excludes sites containing explicit material. Google's default setting for SafeSearch is "moderate filtering." But maybe you want to decide what is safe. If you like that idea, here’s how to turn Google's SafeSearch Filter off.

On the Google homepage, click the tiny preferences link on the right hand side of the search box. SafeSearch Filtering is the third preference category down. Set it to your favored level of filtering. Note: For this to work, your computer must accept a Google cookie.

While you’re setting your filtering standards, you’ll see other preferences you can set in Google, too -- such as language. Maybe you only want Web pages written in Arabic. Go to Search Language and check off your favored languages.

Also, tired of clicking on the Google "O's" at the bottom of a search results to retrieve the next page of results? You can change the number of returns displayed by clicking on Number of Results and choosing 10 to 20, 30, 50 or 100.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: cookies.

By now most of us know that Web sites deposit little chunks of themselves onto your hard drive. So-called cookies aren’t executable programs (one less thing to worry about), but they track your surfing habits.

Cookies can be good, such as allowing an email provider like Yahoo! to deposit a cookie on your drive so that you won’t have to continually re-log back in. Cookies can go bad, such as when third-party Web advertisers place a cookie on your machine to monitor your Web surfing habits.

People have different tolerances for cookies. Set your own tolerance level in Internet Explorer by going to Tools, choosing Internet Options from the drop down menu, and clicking the Privacy tab.

Then, hit the Advanced button. Check the white box that says Override automatic cookie handling. If you always want to personally approve each cookie, choose the prompt setting for both the First party Cookie and Third party Cookie settings. Don't forget to hit OK.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: View your IP address.

As a follow up to last week’s post on anonymous surfing, we thought it would be useful to remind you that unless you cloak it, everyone online knows your Internet protocol address.

For example, click here to see it. Or here, which also helpfully informs you which browser you’re using.

You can also try looking it up directly from your computer. Activate the Run from the Start menu, and type in cmd. In the command window, type in ipconfig/all/. Your address will appear.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desk top.

This week: anonymous Web surfing.

From time to time, employers decide to block a Web site they have determined that their staff shouldn't read. Employers and agencies certainly have the right to block Web sites. But as a purely intellectual exercise, we wonder if an agency's blocking policies have been fully implemented. There may be ways around the blocking policies.

The concept of anonymous surfing is simple. If a user points a browser directly to a blocked URL, the local Internet gateway detects the URL as forbidden and stops the user from accessing the site. Using anonymous surfing, a user accesses a third-party Web site, which anonymously redirects to you the blocked URL. A system administrator can detect Web traffic to the third-party site but cannot detect where the traffic is being redirected. Administrators, of course, can block access to these free Web-based sites, which include Proxify, VTunnel and Anonymouse.

People who have software downloading privileges onto hard drives can download anonymizing software such as Tor (which is free) or Anonymizer (which is not, but offers a 30-day free trial). Torpark, a version of Tor, is designed to be accessed from a USB flash drive.

Web RSS readers also may not be picked up in an agency's URL blocking policy. A Web RSS reader, such as free ones from Google and other companies, allow users to sign up for certain blog feeds and read them by viewing individual postings through the Web RSS reader.

Every Thursday, Tech Insider brings computing tips and basic computing info you can put to use right away.

This week: introducing and remembering the OSI Model.

OSI is short for Open Systems Interconnection and is the basic reference for discussing how the Internet works; anybody who uses the Web should at least be aware of it.

Think of the Internet as a seven-layered cake (as opposed to, say, a "series of tubes"). At the bottom layer are the actual physical things enabling your connection -- wires and such.

At the very top are the protocols for things like e-mail and the Web; this is known as the application layer. These applications are not the same as applications as you probably think of them normally, things like Microsoft Word or Excel. (Computer scientists have an annoying predilection for using the same name to describe multiple things.)

Anyway, in between the applications and the physical layer are five other very important sections; from top to bottom, the layers are as follows: presentation, session, transport, network, and data link. Read more about them here.

How do you make all these layers stick in your mind? Try this handy mnemonic device:

How’s it work? Easy: Physical, Data link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application.

For a more detailed look at networking basics, see this Cisco paper.

Welcome to another edition of Tip Thursday, a weekly Tech Insider feature that offers useful computing tips you can apply right at your own desktop or laptop.

This week: Focus your Google searches.

Searching on Google seems straightforward: Type the words you want to search for into Google's query box, and hit return (or click on "Google Search"). Google returns results sorted according to a proprietary algorithm, which ranks sites according to popularity and relevance. But results often can be overwhelming. Google can return thousands, or sometimes millions, of results pages long.

How about narrowing the search down a bit? Start by excluding terms you don’t want to search for. You can do this by using a minus sign, followed directly (using no spaces) by the term you want to exclude. If you want to exclude a multi-word term, put the term in quotes.

Say you want to search just on a particular domain (.com, .gov, .mil, .org, etc.). Easy. You specify a domain by typing in site:[domain name here]. For example: site:.gov. You can get more precise by specifying the Web address, as in site:govexec.com.

Maybe you want to search just for cached sites, because what you’re looking for has been taken off-line. Type in cache:[search term here].

Needless to say, these tips are only a few ways you can fine-tune your Google searches. As a company, Google does a poor job promoting these search tips, but if you want more, go to their web page, which goes into more detail.

Look for more on Google in later Tip Thursday submissions.

Every day of the week has a media soubriquet: Tech Tuesday; Wednesday’s Child; Triple Shot Friday, etc.

Hence, it is with great pride that we at Tech Insider introduce Tip Thursday.

Every Thursday we’ll post a new technology tip. The audience we're aiming for is not computer geeks who tweak Linux for fun, but for the rest of us: People who deal with technology on a daily basis and wouldn’t mind a tip about how to do it more efficiently and easily; folks who aren’t engineers but still need to know what a T1 carrier line is. We’ll present useful shortcuts, helpful definitions and short explanations of technology concepts. We hope you like it, and also hope you send us your own suggestions. For our first tip, please read on.

This week: Remove that pesky “confirm file delete” dialogue box from Microsoft Windows.

If you’ve used Windows (and almost everyone of us has), any time you try to delete a file, up sprouts a dialogue box asking are you sure you want to send this file to the Recycle Bin?

As David S. Platt writes in Why Software Sucks, the question has become worthless. “You’ve seen it so often that it doesn’t register,” he says. “No one pays attention to it, even when it’s warning you of a file you really don’t want to delete.”

Of course, sometimes we do make mistakes, click the wrong file, or accidently slip the mouse pointer down a file. That’s where the real safety features comes in: Nothing is really deleted if it’s moved to the Recycle Bin; it’s just been moved to another portion of the hard drive. If you really want it, go into the Recycle Bin and retrieve it. To get rid of it forever, empty the Recycle Bin.

Luckily, you can get rid of this annoying dialogue box:

”Right click on the Recycle Bin, select Properties from the pop-up menu, and uncheck the 'Display delete confirmation dialog' checkbox,” Platt writes.

That's all there is to it.