Posts filed under 'computer'
When I heard about Google’s Chrome browser yesterday, I was worried for Mozilla. Google is their biggest source of income and if Chrome became popular, there wouldn’t be much use in continuing that relationship. Now that I have tried it, I don’t think Mozilla has much to worry about at least for a few years.
There is much other browsers can learn from Chrome, but I think
Chrome is too simplified for most advanced users and those are the people who will most appreciate the big improvements. Having tabs in separate processes seems to be a very good idea. And being able to disconnect and reconnect tabs is convenient. Memory usage does seem pretty comparable to Firefox 3.
Popups and spyware problems are not improved much, if any, over Firefox 3. It does block some popups, but I still found plenty. One seemed triggered by Flash ads. I got one when clicking unrelated links on a hacker search engine. And I got one that seems to be a javascript redirect on a compromised blog that warned me I had viruses and is very effective. The same site twice convinced my mom that she had viruses. If you click anywhere on the site, two EXEs are downloaded automatically. With Firefox, only one was downloaded. The only thing Chrome did better was not allow the site to hide the browser window by resizing it and moving it to the corner behind the popup dialog. Firefox can be set for that too.
Chrome is missing an easy way to reopen accidentally closed tabs. You can do it from the Opera Speed Dial like home page, but why not from the context menu when you click on the tab bar? Having close buttons on each tab makes it too easy to close them. I set Firefox to show close buttons only on the active tab.
I didn’t do any official timing tests, but to me Chrome feels slower than Firefox. Loading javascript heavy pages might be faster, Gmail did load pretty fast, but loading regular HTML and images seemed slower.
The best part of Chrome is that it will advance web standards. Google’s Chrome comic explains how they test page rendering automatically on tons of the most popular pages found in their search engine. Any improvement they make will be able to benefit Apple Safari’s WebKit core which eventually works its way back KDE’s KHTML in Konqueror.
Chrome is an extremely polished beta, but if you use anything more than the back button on your browser, there is nothing really great about it that will convince people to switch. IE8 beta looks pretty good too, but I will be sticking with Firefox. Mozilla keeps actively working on Firefox. From past experience with Google software, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get board with the project and development stalls for long periods. Google’s Browser Sync was long neglected and is being discontinued. Google’s Picasa is finally nearing a beta for 3.0 but has not had a major update since June 2006 when 2.5 was released. Hopefully this one is better, but take a look at their Mac and Linux support if you are waiting for this browser on other operating systems.
Update: I gave Chrome another try after it was developed a bit more and started using it more and more. I love the speed improvements and use it 90% of the time now even though I miss a bunch of Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts.
September 2nd, 2008
In the last week I have had several hard drive problems. First was my external USB hard drive got corrupted so none of the thousands of photos over the last several months in the folder for my S5 showed up. Luckily it happened while I was copying them off to my ReadyNAS NV so more than half copied fine. I just had to make sure I could get the other half. I knew exactly what program to use. GetDataBack from Runtime Software. But I only had the version for FAT and this drive was NTFS. I downloaded the trial version and confirmed my photos could be recovered. So I paid $79 for the license. In the comments where it asked where you heard about the program, I mentioned that I bought GDB for FAT six years ago. They have a bundle where you can buy both the FAT and NTFS versions for a discount, but I assumed that was if you bought it at the same time, certainly not 6 years apart. A day or two later, I got an email saying I was only charged $50 (the difference in price from the bundle and the NTFS version). Even $79 would have been a deal to get my photos back. GDB has saved me a ton of data over the years that was not properly backed up. Runtime Software has great software and great people.
My second hard drive problem was with the ReadyNAS. I bought it when it was Infrant, now Netgear owns it. It is setup with X-RAID (eXpandable RAID) and one of the four drives died. That is what RAID is for though. One drive can die and you don’t loose anything. So I went hard drive shopping. I had four 400 GB drives in there which gives around a Terabyte of room (and nearly full). I couldn’t find any 400 GB drives locally and could hardly find any drives at all that were listed as compatible. So I made it all the way down to poor CompUSA. I didn’t realize they had started their going out of business sale already. I never really liked the store, but it was better than Best Buy or Circuit City and you could find most anything that the others didn’t carry (maybe that was their problem). For that it will be missed. The only compatible one large enough was a 750 GB Seagate drive, it was way more than I planned even with 10% off. Until I can replace the other three drives though, the extra 350 GB is just sitting there unusable.
December 22nd, 2007
Halloween is almost here. Time to decorate your computer’s desktop with some Halloween themed wallpapers. I have a number of photos that you can use. I created a Halloween Wallpapers set to hold some of ones that would make the best desktop wallpaper.
Here are a few examples:
Happy Halloween!!!
October 27th, 2007
On Flickr, a common thing to do is invite or award images you like to groups you belong to. Some people don’t like these images cluttering up their photo’s comments. I don’t particularly like lots of image invites and awards either, but if you don’t submit your photos to the aggressive award/invite groups you don’t get flooded with images. A few small images aren’t that bad, its when they get huge and blinking that is annoying.
I read someone who didn’t like these tried to hide them with Adblock but it wasn’t working well. It wasn’t the first time someone has found this problem. I had an idea. There is another Firefox extension that with the right rules can hide any image posted in comments. It is called RIP or Remove it Permanently.
Once you install the extension, here are three rules to import depending on where you want to remove image comments from. If you plan to delete them on your own photos I suggest only hiding them on the Comments You’ve Made page so you don’t miss deleting any.
Firefox’s Tools menu should now have a RIP Options choice. Select that and at the bottom left of the next screen there will be a button for Import Rip. Import the file you just downloaded and three new RIPs should show up that are named as Flickr {page name} Invite Image. Try them out and disable the ones you don’t need.
If you have problems using these I won’t be able to help much. I plan to remove RIP since I am not that worried about removing the images and I don’t like having unused extensions. I just wanted to see if it was possible.
Download Flickr RIP Comment Images
Update June 19: Its been several days and I haven’t removed it from on of my computers and I hardly even notice it. It is kind of refreshing not to see all the image comments. Mostly I only notice something odd when I use my laptop and all the image comments are still there.
June 10th, 2007
If you’ve ever tried copying and pasting more than one line at a time into a text input box on a website you probably noticed it is a pain. You have to copy it one line at a time because only the first line gets pasted. I kept thinking it would be so simple just for Firefox to remove the line endings and insert the whole thing as a single line. Well, it seems I am not the only one who realized this was an incredibly good idea. Lifehacker just blogged the simple Firefox tweak that will solve the problem, you just have to enable change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines. Check out their page for details.
June 8th, 2007
If you use the Google Notebook extension for Firefox, you may notice it takes up a lot more space than necessary. I have a number of other extensions that place icons in the status bar so wasting space with useless text bugs me. It would be nice if Google included an option to hide the text and only show the icon, but that seems unlikely. Luckily it is not hard to remove the text yourself by adding this rule to your userChrome.css file:
#gnotes-statusbar-lbl {
display: none !important;
}
See the Mozilla wiki for more info on userChrome if you need help.
November 7th, 2006
If there is anyone reading my blog, you probably were wondering if I got my new notebook on Monday like predicted. I did. I just have been so busy playing with it I couldn’t find time to post.
I really like the battery life. It is amazing compared to what I had before. I guess not buying an off the shelf, low end machine helps. I got the 8 cell primary battery and an extra modular 6 cell that fits into the DVD bay. Total estimated time seems to be between 8 and 6 hours depending on what I am doing. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t need to carry around the charger anymore unless I will be using the laptop all day.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can easily be turned on and off using the function key. I kind of wondered about that since some new HPs had such nice wireless on/off buttons and I wanted to be able to turn them off easily to save power. Volume, brightness, and the other usual stuff is also available with the function key. But there is a nice built in popup display that tells you the level or other status information when you use these keys. There is even a battery and wireless status popup. And these are not Windows popups so no drivers or EXEs running to provide them, they are built in to the hardware and appear as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
Speaking of EXEs and stuff running, there was a lot of stuff preinstalled that I didn’t want. There were 14 tray icons worth of things running and I have now cut it down to 7 of those though 2 are only hidden. I could probably even drop the ATI , but I will wait and see if I ever need to use it for a while. There is also a “protected” partition on the computer where they put recovery stuff. I would much prefer that be on CDs and not taking up space.
I am happy with Windows Media Center, it is very much like XP Pro with a few multimedia additions which aren’t really useful to me, but the $100 lower price was really nice. Hopefully they keep that up for a while.
The mouse touchpad is pretty good, it is a bit smaller than my old HP, but not too small. I am not so annoyed by the horizontally undersized right mouse button anymore. It isn’t that bad, but the size and surroundings of the mouse buttons is a problem. The small size of both buttons is less a problem than the sounding. The area around the buttons and under the touchpad is smooth and clearly to the touch separate from the rest of the surface. The size of this separate area is just about the size of my HP’s buttons. Sometimes I repeatedly end up pushing this border area rather than a button wondering why it isn’t working.
I didn’t want to get the glossy LCD screen so I went with the old fashion style which Dell was not offering. The texture on Gateway’s screen though seems to cause some minor lightness distortion. It seems that solid light grey areas are lightly textured when viewed at the slightest from perfect angle (as in the edges of the screen when looking at the middle). It is very minor and most people probably would never know, but I do a lot of photo scanning and editing especially of black and white photos.
What I really hate about this laptop is the keyboard. I thought the mouse was going to be the big annoyance in switching, but the keyboard is certainly as least as important (if not more) if you do anything more than just simple typing. If you frequently use Home, End, Insert, Delete, Page Up, Page Down, Print Screen, or the left Control key and know where they are on a regular keyboard, you will hate this keyboard.
They flipped the laptop Function key with the left Control key. That is horrible. I have been using this machine for over a week now and 90% of the time I want to press Control, I miss and don’t realize it at first. You might think you can get used to it, I have started to. But that turned out to be another problem, lately when using my desktop I can’t hit the Control key without looking first. Not because I ever miss it, I just hesitate unconsciously preparing to miss as I always do with the laptop keyboard. It is driving me nuts.
Print Screen can only be accessed by holding down the Function key and then pressing the Insert key.
Down the right side of the keyboard from the top are: Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End. Home being next to delete means I have to hit undo frequently. And with End where it is, I have started to avoid using it, the mouse is easier.
Keyboards were basically standardized long ago for a reason. Just because it is a laptop doesn’t mean you can’t try to get close to the standard layout. On this laptop there is a one inch border along both sides of the keyboard they could have used to spread things out and do it properly.
With all these complaints, would I buy it again? Probably. The extra modular battery, non-glossy screen, and lighter base model were all important factors in deciding on Gateway over Dell. I still hate the keyboard and probably will be extremely happy when I replace this machine in a few years, but it is a really good one otherwise.
June 20th, 2006
Wow, my computer is finally one the way. I guess Gateway either doesn’t update their order status page very well or they put these things together super fast with little testing. Just yesterday it said my order was still being processed. This morning it was on its way from Shanghai, China and has already arrived in the US. However, its current location is in Anchorage, Alaska. FedEx’s estimated deliver is Monday and the weekend should give it plenty of time to travel down here. I still want it now, but I can probably survive till Monday.
June 8th, 2006
It has only been three work days since my laptop order, but what is it still doing in “Order Processing?” The estimated arrival date is June 14. If I ordered a Dell today, the shipping date is June 15 with 3-5 Day Delivery. But with Dell, I know systems usually ship much faster than the estimated ship date. According to Dell, their order processing, only takes one day.
Now I am looking into desktops. My mom’s computer died. Maybe I will try HP this time.
June 7th, 2006
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