When I was a kid my family put up the tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving (US), and took it down January 1, all as a family fun thing. I still do that.

These are also just fun:

• Wilby
• The Useless Web
• Marginalia Search

I also use Mojeek when I want a (serious) different set of results that I’m not getting from those pulling from google, bing, etc. It’s not the best but it’s getting better over time.

See if the command line utility “detox” removes it. I use it in a bash file that tidies everything up for me before I do my daily backup.

Go to the directory you want to clean up and type:

detox *

If you don’t want to clean up everything, you can limit it. For example, if I only want to clean up PDF files, I’d do:

detox *.pdf

Detox replaces all the ugly characters with underscores. I personally hate underscores for most everything and use dashes instead. So after detox runs I also run:

rename ‘y/_/-/’ *

Then, because I want every file named only with lowercase letters, I also run:

rename ‘y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

(edit to remove duplicate info)