Project : Comboble
As a user of twitter, google reader, picasa, youtube, and blog writing, I was initially intrigued about the concept of Google Buzz. It is basically an aggregated update about what google thinks makes up my online ‘life’. Photos of me, articles I like, random twitterish thoughts all can be pushed to people who subscribe automatically. Then they can comment directly on them or pass them on to their subscriber list. (more…)
Google is generally the company who does things right. Features you want are there, or you’ll change what you want to match their features (hooray for gmail labels!) Things are organized cleanly and logically. Performance is generally pretty good, or some things like mail can be scaled down if you’re mobile or bandwidth handicapped. Their search has become the verb for searching. I’m not sure why its the best, or if the search part of google is all that great (lots of room for improvement IMO), but google is .. google.
When chrome came out, I tried it, and wasn’t too sure it was really even necessary in the browser market. It looked pretty similar to firefox, internet explorer with slight rearrangement. The performance could be better or worse but comparing half a second or a full second is hard for me to judge, especially when my internet connection could be attributed to any delay.
I switched back to firefox because of some features (plug-ins) that I found it hard to go without. FoxyTunes to control my music, and volume is fantastic. Greasemonkey lets me do some advanced script things on certain websites. FireFTP has become my ftp app of choice which is quite bizarre because firefox doesn’t really have anything to do with ftp. FireFTP is just an application inside of a browser I guess? It isn’t perfect but its there , and quick.
But here I am writing this blog on Chrome, so why did I abandon my old foxy browser? It was boggin me down. Too often firefox would take forever to close, or take forever to start up. Could this be due to my plugins? very likely. Also on some evil website with heavy multimedia or scripting usage, my firefox grinds to a halt and crashes too often.
What is google’s solution? Tabs are separate tasks, and don’t crash each other. Also, a few nice features I had in firefox, like a 9 panel multipage preview screen, is built in. The download manager I love in firefox (popup windows are so 2003) is built in chrome, and probably even better.
But the biggest thing is that Chrome is just better on my underpowered laptop, it doesn’t hog giants amount of memory to slow down my games on my desktop, its just less intrusive. I never have to scream “bah Chrome is acting up!” like i do with firefox. I never (not yet) have to go in task manager and kill chrome from doing whatever startup or shutdown crap its doing. So, all in all, I’ll have to find new way to use FTP (using a cygwin shell is more fun anyway) and also to control my music I’m starting to use the magic buttons on my keyboard more, or the taskbar miniversion of WMP11.
I hope some new features get added into chrome, I saw a sky blue browser and i want it painted black! (and some music control would be nice again…)
Blizzard is the master of april fools. This video is just plain awesome
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/moltencore/
I however am not a master of april fools, this is what happened to me…
I have used net send in the past, its a nice nifty built-in way to use instant messaging from the command prompt. However it is disabled in SP2 for XP. At work, most people have SP2 if they have a new computer, but plenty do not.
Today at work I tried to net send to someone who had it disabled. I wasn’t completely sure my net send was thwarted so I specified the domain ‘workgroup’ when I sent it to the one person next to me in the office. But no, it didn’t go to him again because he had it disabled.
Instead, a puzzling/alarming message from me went to everyone with a slightly old not-updated pc in the whole company.
Message from SheridanT to Workgroup: “somebody set us up the bomb”
A window similar to the below picture, popped up on the screen of dozens of people I’ve never met, amused fellowe geeks, confused artists, and bosses, lots of bosses.
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I use a RSS reader all the time and I mark a few things to be shared on the left little block titled “You might like…” but really, I don’t imagine its very noticeable. Well I want this item to be noticed because really it is a wealth of information, tips and tricks for using a computer smarter. I love lifehacker and this is a compilation blog post.
So I brought my big beefy beast of a pc with me on the airplane, with a $40 overweight charge no less.
But I haven’t used it yet, other than to make sure it turns on. Why you might ask? Well I dont have a monitor yet and haven’t urgently needed one. Some time ago when my pocketpc got smashed I decided to look for another secondary computing device. I was browsing ebay for cheap small monitors which then turned to cheap small laptops which landed me looking at these dell x300s which I directly compare to the new macbook air which is all the buzz.
