I have been a Mozilla Firefox fan for many years, but during that time I have tried a couple of others, such as Opera and Google Chrome. Previous versions of Chrome just didn’t cut it for me, as it didn’t have the Extensions like Firefox does. I like to use certain Extensions/AddOns to make my Web Browsing experience more enjoyable, but now that Google Chrome has Extensions it’s time to try it one more time.

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Installation was nice and easy and my Bookmarks and Site History copied over easily. It was like I hadn’t changed browsers, at all.

To make Chrome similar to how I used Firefox, these are the Extensions I am using :-

• Mouse Gestures – I discovered this when I started using Opera a long time ago, and once you get used to it, you’d wonder what you did without it. It works by holding down the Right Mouse button and drawing a pre-determined line that is assigned to do a task. I have mine set to : Draw an L to close a Tab, Draw a vertical line up to open a new Tab, While sitting over a link Draw a vertical line down to open a link in a new background Tab, and Draw a line left or right to go forwards or backwards in your Tab history.

  The biggest benefit is for a laptop user, I guess, but it’s just awesome to not have to move your mouse pointer to an X at the top of the screen to close etc. when the little fella is at the bottom of the screen. Just hold the right mouse button, draw the Mouse Gesture, done. Extension name : Smooth Gestures

• AdBlock – This wonderful extension keeps those pesky Porno site ads etc. in check, by giving you the option to hide them. Interestingly, but predictably, the Chrome version of this extension doesn’t work too well on the Google owned YouTube, as it hides some of the videos along with the ads. On Firefox, it works perfectly. I used to wonder what people were on about when they discussed YouTube ads, and the reason is because Firefox and AdBlock were doing such a great job of blocking them. I now have AdBlock disabled on Chrome for YouTube and the Ads aren’t overly intrusive. Extension name : AdBlock
• Search Box – One of the things I dearly love about Firefox is the Search Box/Bar that is at the top right of the window. I would have different Search Engines in there, such as Google, eBay, Wikipedia, YouTube and a couple of others. Google Chrome doesn’t come with this as standard, although you can search directly from the main Address Bar. With a very handy Extension called All Search, a magnifying glass icon is added to your toolbar that, when clicked, opens a small window to give you access to the Search Engines that you have chosen. Brilliant! Extension name : All Search
• StumbleUpon – The ultimate in time wasters. Add the Extension, sign up for an account, choose the categories you would like to see web pages about, and Stumble away! Each click of the StumbleUpon button will give you a new random webpage to look at. Check it out at http://www.stumbleupon.com/, and don’t blame me for the time you waste Stumbling! Extension name : StumbleUpon

With these Extensions added, although I am trialling a couple of others to see what they do, I am enjoying my experience with Chrome and have now made it my default browser. Yes, it is that good. Try it and see how you like it. http://www.google.com/chrome

Ultimate Laptop Buying Guide – Reviews by PC Magazine.

I’m a bit behind on my Laptop knowledge and found this article to be very informing.

My usual advice is to ask the person asking what laptop they should buy, “What do you want to do with it?”. If the reply is, Internet, word processing, accounts and basic games, then I’ll tell them to set a budget of AU$1000 and they’ll definitely get the speed and features they want. I don’t game on my PCs generally, and for all of the above my laptop is perfect. My Acer Aspire 5720z laptop cost AU$700.

If people want to play hardcore games I ask them if they really need a laptop, as a desktop will end up being a cheaper, more configurable option as bigger, better games come along. Laptops suitable for gaming are going to generally be over AU$2000, but that’s nothing compared to what a laptop used to cost.

After saying I didn’t want to change and a mostly fun time with Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve installed Windows 7 on my laptop to see what all the fuss is about. And I must say that after Vista, Win 7 is a big improvement… It feels lighter and faster! And after Ubuntu it’s so nice to be able to play YouTube videos without flickers etc, and although I haven’t tried yet, I am expecting to enjoy being able to control my laptop with LogMeIn again.

I have had no driver issues and everything is working as expected. I have grown a liking for some of the Open Source programs that were included with Ubuntu and have installed them onto my Windows 7 laptop. The Gimp (image editor) and Open Office (MSOffice alternative) are the most notable, along with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and I am sure I will find others. VirtualBox to run a Virtual copy of Linux perhaps…

So, to summarise, for the basic stuff I have been using it for Win 7 is very cool and I’d recommend for people to upgrade if they get the chance. It seems to be ‘friendlier’ to my system, not stealing all the resources just because it can…

Four months of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope and I am still running it without any ‘real’ want to change to a Windows environment.

The main issue that frustrates me currently is the Flash Player. For some reason, sites that use a Video Player like the one on YouTube flicker, yet others will play the videos smoothly. If I keep moving the pointer over the video while it plays, the flickering is reduced. The same issue is encountered with certain Flash Games.

Another wish, which is a possibility due to the number of people requesting it, is for LogMeIn to be able to control a computer running Linux. I have wondered if a Virtual Machine running Windows XP on my Ubuntu flavoured laptop could be controlled from the internet. Not a high priority for me, but it would be nice.

It’s nearly been a week since I put Ubuntu on this laptop, and I must say, it has been pretty much a joy. I still wouldn’t call it an operating system for the masses, but once it’s set up and all you wanted to do was your web browsing, email, documents etc., ie. what most of us do, it is very good.

My issues have been with the networking and handling of certain files. The networking is pretty much sorted with the fix mentioned in the last post, not as friendly as in Windows, but it works as expected as long as I know the IP Address of the computer I want to connect to. The handling of files issue, and most are already supported on startup, is when you click on ‘Open With’, you don’t get the familiar list of programs you can use, you have to guess where to find the programs.

It might sound like I am bitching, but I am genuinely impressed with this version of Ubuntu, and ultimately I am having less dramas than I have done with Vista. Everything that I require on my laptop has just worked, except those couple of slight issues mentioned. Actually, the only other thing I haven’t set up is my networked Canon printer. That could be interesting…

Well, my curiousity got to me so I decided to set up my Canon Pixma MP450 printer that is shared from my XP based PC. It turns out that to set up the printer is the same as the Windows Shares, as in I had to enter in the IP Address followed by the printer’s Share name. So mine was smb://192.168.0.10/CanonMP450… There was no driver for this particular printer, but the MP170 driver seems to work well.

An ongoing issue with my Acer Aspire 5720z laptop has been the poor sound quality when playing flash movies, like YouTube. Actually, it was ANY sound, because even the Windows Vista startup sound was distorted or echoing.

Other issues with Vista, this is the 64 bit version by the way, included a lack of drivers for my Bluetooth dongle and the amazing amount of heat that was created by my laptop. This wasn’t all the fault of Vista of course, as I recently cracked open the bottom of the laptop and cleaned out a good wad of dust and crud from the fan. This dropped the running temp of the dual core processor by more than 10 degrees Celcius.

I initially decided to try Vista 32 Bit, but had dramas getting it installed and thought to myself, “Bugger it, lets see what Ubuntu Linux can offer nowadays…”
So, 700mb or so later I had a copy of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) downloaded to install on my willing laptop.

For those new to Linux, it is an open source (see free) operating system that can be used on all sorts of computers, and is actually brilliant in some forms to make your old, what you thought to be slow, computer into a speed demon for browsing the ‘net or completing your general computer tasks.

Linux comes in many forms, or distributions, but for every day computing I have had the most success with Ubuntu. One of the biggest beefs new users have with Linux, is that not everything works out of the box, not that Windows is that great at times as I have found with my Bluetooth. This was one of the reasons I gave up on Ubuntu when I tried it before, the other being that it was more difficult to use the Windows specific programs I was used to, ie. PhotoShop.

Now, Ubuntu does not have to be installed on your computer for you to try it out, because it is what is called a Live CD. This means that it runs from the CD you created without modifying your computer at all. Great for those people who just want to see what its like and whether it will work with their system how they want, before taking the leap and installing.

Okay, I’m not going to make this too in depth, I just want to give my opinion of how the install went, so have a look at Lifehacker Australia for their review.

After setting up the hard drive partitions to accept Linux, the install was a breeze, so fast! One thing I noticed while in the ‘live CD’ version was that my Broadcom wireless card wasn’t picked up. Thankfully, once installed to the hard drive, Ubuntu found the Wireless card and installed the required drivers without a drama.

So I’m thinking this is pretty awesome, lets try something else…

I use Mozilla Firefox as a web browser, another open source program, mainly for it’s potential security advantages over Internet Explorer, and it just happens that Ubuntu uses Firefox as it’s default browser. Bonus!
I had backed up my Firefox profile before wiping out Vista, and once I had unhidden the correct directory I copied the profile over and it worked just like it was in Vista, with all of my settings just how I left it.

One of my addictions is a flash game called Farm Town on Facebook. I thought everything was working perfectly with Firefox, videos and sound work great, but a couple of the screens in Farm Town didn’t work correctly, ie. the chat screen would let me see messages but not send, the shop screen had no scroll bars and the Preferences screen had no check boxes. After ensuring the latest version of Flash was installed I found the simple solution was to make the game go into full screen mode… Always takes forever for me to find the easy way.

For email I use Mozilla Thunderbird, again open source and I had backed up the profile, just like Firefox. All of my emails were back. Great stuff! Of course, it might not be quite as easy for you to get your emails from Outlook, but there are Import/Export options for these programs, so it isn’t a great drama.

A summary of how it has been for me so far, 24hrs.

Acer Aspire 5720z
T2310 1.46Ghz Dual Core Processor
2.5GB RAM
160GB SATA Hard Drive
Broadcom Wireless

Ethernet – Great
Wireless – After initial startup the drivers were found and installed. It works with my WPA-PSK Wireless Network perfectly.
Web Browser (Firefox) – Flash movies great, sound great, general look and feel is just how I want it. Just the glitch with the Farm Town flash game, but the developers are looking into that.
Email (Thunderbird) – Great
Bluetooth – This is a no-name Bluetooth dongle from DealExtreme.com and just worked. Awesome!
Sound and Graphics – Just worked. The screen has a little flicker after being idle for 20 seconds or so, but in use it is great. There is no annoying glitch with the sound. Yaaay!
Heat – The processors are running at 45 deg Celcius, like Vista generally did, but the fan doesn’t seem to work anywhere near as hard to maintain the temperature, and the keyboard isn’t hot like it was with Vista.

When all is said and done, I am happy with the change over to Ubuntu 9.04, but I haven’t done anything very taxing yet.
Definitely worth having a look at the Live CD if you are curious!

Addendums
I’ll keep adding my learnings here…

I totally forgot about Network Shares and it isn’t going as well as I’d like, yet. I can list the network shares on my Windows XP machine, but no interaction as yet. Getting through to the NTFS Windows Data partition on the Ubuntu laptop’s hard drive also took a tweak but now works as expected.
Hmmm… so by using Firefox with an address of smb://192.168.0.(10 in my case) I can browse my Windows XP computer and watch the shared videos while in Firefox. Not quite there, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Okay, so this work around solves my issue for now…

Originally Posted by nsew View Post
I decided to try going to Places -> Connect to Server -> Service type = Windows Share. Filled in the details, and now I have the folders mapped, and appearing under Places.

Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress · Dagon Design.

I’ve been looking for a way to index the blog posts I have made over the years and Dagon’s Sitemap Generator fits the bill well! If you have a WordPress blog I recommend you check it out.

You can see the Site Map that was created for my blog here.

Photoshop: Learn a New Photoshop Trick with VunkySearch.

I’m always on the lookout for good Photoshop tutorials/resources, because I am a wannabe photoshopping King. The above story shows Vunky Search, as well as links to others in the comments.

You suck at Photoshop is still my fave for picking up tips while having a good laugh though!

Best Brands of the World – vector logos, brand, logo, logotype, photos.

Just one for the geeky memory bank. I always seem to be looking for logos of some description and this site seems to have a very large number if not all of the logos I have wanted or could want.

Ages ago I somehow destroyed the gallery I had set up for my wedding photos and had vowed (pun intended) to resurrect it to its former glory. Last night was the night to do it and while I was at it I thought I would sort out my server space by deleting some of the unused crap that I had accumulated with my various experiments in web design. What a mistake that was…

Happily going along deleting things using FireFTP (Firefox Addon) I mistakenly clicked on the directory for this blog. DELETED, GONE, thanks for coming… The next four hours or so were spent browsing websites attempting to discover a solution to stupidity. Thankfully the database that stores the actual posts wasn’t deleted, just the WordPress front end, and eventually I discovered that if I add the user from my witenvy.com blog, after re-installing WordPress to my blog directory that everything was restored just as I had left it… well, as it was before I deleted it.

After recovering my blog I finally got back to the initial task of fixing my wedding album… That went to plan. Pheww! I’m sure you would be thinking, “Get a grip, its only some text and computer geekery.”, but I enjoy going through my various rants and musings from over the years. What can I say, small things amuse me, which some females would tell me is ‘lucky for me’.