Integrate Your Interests – from Mindhacker

I have been reading the book Mindhacker by Ron and Marty Hale-Evans. It is a collection of 60 tips, tricks and games to take your mind to the next level.

This blog article is about a Perl script developed by Ron to take two search terms at random from a  file of his “obsessions” then send a query to Google. Each line of text is a valid Google search term, for example, “mind hacks”.

I recoded the script in Python and made it available at the end of this post.   Update: A GUI interface version is now available. Read on!

You can run the script with no arguments (python ii.py) so two search terms are chosen, or you could add a search term to combine with one of your obsessions. For example python ii.py ELearning will fuse the topic of ELearning with one of your obsessions.

I created a batch file ii.bat which contains one line:   python ii.py %1 %2

I then created a shortcut to this bat file and placed on my desktop. I changed the icon to a world globe. Now I can double click this shortcut for some random Google search results on my interests and obsessions.

The GUI version shows a dialog box with text entry areas for the two arguments.

Enter one or more search terms then click the Google Search button. A new tab is opened in your browser with the results of the search.  In the above example, I entered Python and the program joined this search with Richard Dawkins from my obsessions file. Click the image below to view actual size.

I have a lot of fun continuously clicking the Google Search button then viewing the results. As I think of more areas of interests I update the obsessions.txt file. Enjoy this hack!

• The script ii.py – save with extension of py  (Command line version)
• The script iigui.py – save with extension pyw (on Windows) and update your short cut to run this script. Python on Windows will run the script without a command shell.
• Read this link if you are having problems installing Tkinter.
• The original obsessions.txt file from Ron. I will upload my file once I have refined the contents.