I have always been a big, huge, giant, enormous fan of Firefox. I have often pushed and teased until I got someone to switch from IE to FF. Now I may do the same with Chrome. But for those of you reading this, you may want to know that I’m basing most of my comparison and feature love off of my already beloved FF.

The Good

It’s fast. Really fast. We have a small Acer Aspire One that our family uses primarily for web surfing on the go, and we have always used FF for the surfing. Unfortunately, when you open a new page, the mouse cursor freezes while the page loads. You can’t just skip down and read while you wait for the photos to load. You’re losing precious seconds while you wait for the cursor to come back. The other tricks like the space bar, arrow keys. and Pg Up/Pg Dwn buttons are also useless. Chrome loads pages lightening fast and that’s one huge plus.

Simple, slim, and sleek. The design is really minimal, as you can see if you visit the Chrome site and watch any of the videos. Some may not like this, but I do. Less is more in my opinion. Especially when you’re trying to read big web pages on tiny monitors.

There are tons of other features that I can mention here (like the one box for everything), but mostly I think you should check it out for yourself. If not by installing it, then watch the videos.

The last thing I wanted to point out – and have been trying to point out to my husband so we can use Chrome for our children – is the Application shortcut feature. Basically you have one or two clicks to turn any page into a short cut on your desktop.

Let’s say you do this for Google Docs.

When you double click the desktop application, it launches a new window without any tabs, address bar, or other buttons. This gives you (or your child) a distraction free web application that looks very much like a desktop application.

I see this beneficial for webmail/gmail, google docs, and some online games like Runescape where you’d want to run it full screen.

The Bad

Don’t get too excited here. There isn’t that much that I can complain about. However, my number one issue with using Chrome is that there are very few add-ons (if any) to help you browse/work smarter.

My favorite add-on for FF is Xmarks which will sync bookmarks across multiple computers. This is great if you have one computer for work, another for play, etc. I often bookmark homeschool sites, then need them when I’m at another computer. Right now Chrome can’t sync like this. However, I’ve heard that they will be doing this soon through Google Bookmarks, so theres there.

Anyway, for me Chrome is perfect for 99% of what I’m doing online. Give it a shot!

So for Windows machine I am particularly happy to show off this delicious piece of programming pie.

John’s Desktop background switcher

It has many options for switching your desktop backgrounds, but my favorite is the RSS feature that pulls photos from my favorite Flickr photos. Every 5 minutes I get a new set of photos:

Anyway, if you’re looking for something new, you may want to check this out. It’s free for all you Windows lovers out there.

I use Audacity for all of my podcasting and music mixing. There are other free options out there, but for the sake of this blog we’re going to record sound using Audacity.

First, double-click the volume control icon found in your top panel. In my install it is on the top right of my main screen.

Go to Edit > Preferences and make sure you have a check mark by the following: Master, PCM, Line-in, Line-in Capture, CD, CD Capture, Microphone, Microphone Capture, IEC958 Output, PC Speaker, Mix, and Duplicate Front. I’m not sure you need all of these, but this is how I got it to work.

Next make sure that you have unmuted all of the options except the PC speaker. Increase the volume as well. Here’s how mine looks:

Next click on the Switches tab and check Mix as well as IEC958 Output and close the window. Again, not sure if you need IEC958 Output, but this is what’s working.

Next you’ll want to go to System > Preferences > Sound. Change all of the devices to use ALSA – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture except the Default Mixer Tracks. That one should be VIA 8237 (Alsa Mixer). Click Close.

Now one final step before you can test!

Open Audacity and click on Edit > Preferences. You should see two options for the Audio I/O. Make sure that the Playback device is ALSA: default and Recording is ALSA: VIA 8237: VIA 8237 (hw:0,0) and click OK.

Now you can test! The easy way to test this is to fire up your music player and play a file from your computer. Open Audacity and click the Record button. You should see the blue line jumping up and down as it captures sound.

Hope this helps someone out there. I know I may need to come back to this blog should I ever rebuild or need to help someone else.

Yesterday I made a discovery of some new software that seems to have no one but me all excited. Go figure.

I was looking for a better way to handle my Gmail accounts since I don’t really like having tabs open with email, calendar, and reader. It’s also a pain if you are composing an email and want to use ALT+Tab to switch between email and the web. I started using Thunderbird to help keep Gmail in and my calendar in another window, but as most Gmail users with Thunderbird know, keeping the Calendar and Contacts synced is a pain. Of course wonderful Mozilla has already thought of another way to do things that I love.

Enter Prism.

Luckily for me, they have a download for Linux. So I downloaded Prism and had a look around. It’s pretty easy to use right out of the box, but you can also download some of the extras that give you the links to Gmail, Calendar, Reader, etc. (See how Mozilla rocks by incorporating Google stuff?)

As for those of us using Google Apps, I just opened Prism and put in my webmail URL, gave it a name, and a desktop shortcut. Simple as that. I opened my Gmail by double-clicking on the desktop icon and signing in.

Now I have my email in a separate window. I did the same for my Calendar. I modified the shortcut icon to use the appropriate icons for the apps (the red M for Gmail) and then added them to my Cairo-Dock. Life is much easier now.

I was so excited about this yesterday, but Jer didn’t really share my enthusiasm. I tried to explain to him how wonderful this would be for our kids’ computers since we can limit where they go on the web as well as make things easier for them to find by setting up several of these shortcuts. We do use a firewall and monitoring system which doesn’t let the kids to very much on the internet, but this would allow us to control the freedom just a tad bit more.

This would also be great for businesses where the employees are easily distracted by web surfing all day. Give them a few shortcuts and let them go. I’m sure that I could figure out a way to surf the web through this window, but it sure isn’t easy.

Here is a screenshot of my Gmail in Prism. I’ve blurred out all the good stuff for fun.

So I know… You can’t see anything different right? It’s what you don’t see that’s so cool. If you look at the bottom, you will see a grey bar with a little icon on the right. You have a similar bar at the top which allows you to maximize/minimize/close the window and that’s it. It’s simple. It’s not distracting. It’s perfect.

I searched several places on how to turn this option off, but I didn’t seem to find anything. I dug down into the Contact and Comment modules and nothing. Finally I started looking into the Mime Mail module that I use to send the actuall emails. That’s when I noticed a little piece of code that was causing my issues:

functiontheme_mimemail_message($body,$mailkey=null) {
$output='<html><head>';
$output.='<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />';

// attempt to include a mail-specific version of the css.
// if you want smaller mail messages, add a mail.css file to your theme
$styles=path_to_theme() .'/mail.css';

As it turns out, the Mime Mail module allows you to create a style sheet called “mail.css” and style your emails. If it doesn’t see that lovely file, it pulls the tags from your main style sheet. In my case it would pull the body tag which looks a little like this:

body { background: url(bodybg.gif) repeat; color:#555; }

I now see that’s why the emails had that background. I could have changed the module to exclude  the html output, or the CSS files altogether, but I really hate to hack a module and then when I upgrade I forget about it (and the hack I made), or just break it altogether. My down and dirty fix was to create a file called mail.css in my theme folder. I left the file blank until such a time that I decide I’d like to style my emails.

So there you have it, just a quick little reminder to myself and anyone else who may run across this problem.

First, I maintain several sites and this one always seems to fall behind. It’s that whole “last but not least” theory I suppose. Over the weekend I dusted off my SQL skills and cleaned up my comments. I had some where in the neighborhood of 50,000 spam comments and I really wish I were exaggerating. I didn’t want to delete my older comments, so I had to use several SQL statements to pick out the junk and delete the items. I think I have it all gone, except for a few that are not published which can be deleted with a few clicks in my admin panel.

I also made a few graphical changes to my site, including the sheep thoughts and the extras on the right nav. I integrated Last.fm to show my latest tracks, as well as my shared items on Google Reader.

Next is organizing data on my computer. I have a pretty old machine as far as computers go these days. I purchased this computer in late 2003 and have only added a bit of memory and a better graphics card to keep it humming along. As I mentioned before, I got the bright idea to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. When I did the partition, something failed and I lost the ability to boot to Windows at all.

No worries, I’m using Ubuntu (Hardy Heron version) and loving it. So far there isn’t anything much that I’m missing. I’ve traded in PhotoShop for Gimp, iTunes for Banshee, Office for Open Office, Outlook for Thunderbird, and I was able to keep my wonderful Firefox just fine. I’m loving the ability to think boy I wish I had an application that would help me keep track of my notes and then I just Google it and find one for free. One big giant reason to switch to Linux is the cost. It runs on my computer so much better and faster than Windows, and using an appliction like Gimp over PhotoShop can save you around $600 (at least).

If you want to see some of the very much free applications you can install, just check out Appnr – which also makes installing these apps much easier for the less Linux saavy.

Anyway, I digress. My love for Ubuntu is known and I will work to switch everyone who ever complained about the expense and propritary nature of Macs and the numerous lock ups and slowness of Windows.

All that said, I’m ready to blow away my XP partition altogether. One of the reasons I’ve left it alone for now is so that I could back up my data before I rebuild. That’s what I’m doing this week. Moving and organizing my data to our back up servers so I can do a fresh rebuild.

Even though I can’t boot XP, I can access all the files over there and move them to the server for safe keeping. Once that’s done, I’ll back up my install of Ubuntu and then rebuild my entire computer using only Ubuntu. If I need XP (hahahaha!) I’ll use a virtual box.

I know how hard it is to read an entire blog and not get to see any pretty pictures, so schooch on over to Flickr to see a screen shot of my desktop and read the notes about what’s what.