Category: Geek Stuff

Last week, the guys from Google released their own web browser: Google Chrome. And thus, Google fanboys all over the ‘Net fell to their knees in religious ecstasy, chanting over and over again: “Google my master, Google my master…”

Look, I frankly just don’t see the point of all this. On the Windows platform you already have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. And now there’s another browser? And what does Chrome do that any other browser doesn’t? Well, nothing, actually. And it actually lacks a lot of the features that other browsers have, even boring old Internet Explorer.

After using it for about a week, I can honestly say that the one (and only) feature I like about Google Chrome is the “paste and go” feature in the address bar. If you cut and paste an address into Chrome’s address bar, you can either “Paste” it or “Paste and go”, which pastes the address then automatically loads the page in question. Nice, but hardly groundbreaking, especially when the “Right-Click Link” extension does the same thing in Firefox without the need to paste the address into the address bar.

As of this writing, Chrome doesn’t have any extensions. None. So you either get the full “Chrome experience” or you get nothing. No AdBlock, no Weave, no DownThemAll… nothing. Oh, you can hack together something similar to a lot of Firefox extensions – see this post from Lifehacker for instructions on setting up Privoxy as your ad blocker in Chrome, for example – but it’s nowhere near as elegant as Firefox.

So… for now… I’ll stick with Mozilla, thanks!

Weave is an extension for Firefox that allows you to back up and synchronize your bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form entries across multiple computers. It’s a nifty little plug-in that takes up the slack for the much loved (and dearly departed) Google Browser Sync. Unfortunately, the Weave extension and service are in beta testing mode, and the backend servers that Mozilla uses to make Weave work are usually overwhelmed, making synchronization as slow as molasses. To make matters worse, the Mozilla servers are frequently taken offline for various reasons, so not only is synching slow, it doesn’t even work much of the time.

In this post from a couple of weeks ago, I linked to an article that showed you how to set up Weave on any WebDAV enabled server. Unfortunately, I was never able to get this working on this very server; apparently WordPress and WebDAV don’t play well together, and I was never able to find the Apache settings I needed to tweak to get it to work.

However, I recently came across this “easy as pie” method for setting up Weave using the free “online disk” service MyDisk.se:

Continue reading “REVISITED: Weave On Your Own Server”

If you’re like me, you spend an awful lot of time moving back and forth between a certain group of folders in Windows Explorer. I spend a lot of time in my “Music” and “Video” folders, in addition to server shares and temporary “download folders”. Going back and forth between them can be a pain, and that’s why I just love this new program I found called Folder Guide:

You simply install the Folder Guide software, then right-click on any whitespace in a Windows Explorer window. Choose the “Folder Guide” option and then choose “Settings”. From there, you can choose any folder on your computer (and an alias for it) to add to the Explorer context menu. Once you’ve added a few folders, all you need to do is right-click on a whitepace and choose Folder Guide > FOLDER to switch directly to the folder alias in question.

If you think that Folder Guide works a lot like the “Save Image in Folder” extension for Firefox, you’d be correct. Moving from one folder to another is as easy as pie with Folder Guide. Best of all, the program is free and doesn’t have a tray icon. In fact, Folder Guide only runs as a separate EXE file when you have its “Settings” window open.

I’ve been using Folder Guide for almost a week now and I love it! I especially love that it works within the “Open\Save” dialog box too… just right-click a whitespace in the dialog box and choose your folder with FolderGuide, then save the file just where you want it!

Read more about it (or download it) here.

Just over a year ago, I wrote this post, which talks about some of my favorite Firefox extensions (plug-ins). A year has passed and Firefox 3 has come out, so let’s take another look at some of my favorite extensions:

AdBlock Plus – My all-time absolute favorite extension, AdBlock Plus blocks 99% of the ads you’d see in your web browser. Unlike a lot of other ad blockers, AdBlock also re-renders the page without any kind of “placeholders” for the ads, so all you get is the content you want. It also has an automatic list update feature, which keeps new ads at bay. I’ve gotten so used to this extension over the years that it’s jarring to use a browser that doesn’t have AdBlock.

Save [Thing] In Folder – These are the handiest Firefox extensions ever!  There are two versions of this extension, “Save Image In Folder” and “Save Link In Folder”. Both work the same way, but on different objects. For example, you normally save image files in Firefox by right-clicking an image and choosing “Save Image”, then selecting a folder using the standard Open\Save box. With “Save Image In Folder”, you choose which folder(s) you want to save your pictures in. You then give each folder an alias, like “Default”, “Data Drive” and “Server”. When you see an image you want to save, simply right-click the image and choose Save Image In Folder > Default or Save Image In Folder > Server to save the picture. Save Link In Folder works the same way, but with hyperlinks. You simply right-click a link and choose Save Link In Folder > Desktop or Save Link in Folder > Server to save a linked file. It’s so much faster than the default way of doing things that I can’t believe that this isn’t the default way of saving files in Firefox!

LinkAlert – Firefox (still) doesn’t play nicely with PDF files. Clicking on a PDF link can slow Firefox down to a crawl. Thankfully, this handy little extension changes the cursor in Firefox when you hover over a certain type of hyperlink. Although it was originally created solely to warn you about PDF links, LinkAlert has been updated to include all kinds of icons, such as icons for music, image, compressed and script files. It’s not a vital plug-in, but it sure is nice.

Continue reading “Firefox Extensions Revisited”

On Wednesday, Microsoft released beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. You can check out their official Internet Explorer 8 website here, or go for the gusto and download the beta directly here.

I’ve installed in on a virtual machine and am pretty impressed so far. It’s a lot snappier than Internet Explorer 7, and has a few neat new features like Compatibility View (which allows you to view sites coded only for IE 5 or IE 6 “correctly”), Accelerators (which allow you to right-click a word or phrase and act directly on it, such as defining the word via Google or looking up an address via Google Maps), Web Slices (which allow you to turn almost any part of a web page into an updatable “feed”), InPrivate Mode (known online as “Porn Mode”), and the SmartScreen Filter (an updated take on IE 7’s “Phishing Filter”).

Microsoft, it seems, is serious about taking on Firefox, and IE 8 will apparently do much to close the functionality gap between the two browsers. I’m pretty impressed so far – especially with the stability of this release. Remember that this software is still in testing mode, so it might be less stable than the finished product on your system. If you’re the adventurous type, you’ll probably want to check this out!

The Internet Explorer 8 beta is available for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP only.

Google Browser Sync was an awesome tool that automatically synchronized your Firefox bookmarks, passwords, autocomplete information, and even your tabs between multiple computers. So if you installed Browser Sync on your work and home computers, you could close your browser at the office, then come home to the exact same experience – the same bookmarks, the same open tabs, same saved passwords, etc.

Sadly, Google announced that Browser Sync would not be updated for Firefox 3.0. So the Mozilla Foundation announced that they were rolling out Weave, a Firefox plug-in that would do all that Browser Sync did (and more, some day in the future). Although Weave is still very much in beta mode, it promises to be great one day. If you have any need for a browser synchronization tool, Weave’s where it’s at these days.

A few days ago, a guy named Marios Tziortzis posted this article on his blog about setting up Weave on any WebDAV-enabled webserver. So if you have your own website, you can set Weave up to sync to your server instead of Mozilla’s servers, which frequently go down for testing or maintenance.

Now, one of my “commandments” for running this site is that I always test out everything I recommend here. Most of the time, if I say that “[program name] works great!”, it’s because I use it at home and have tested it in detail here at home, not only on my own computer, but on virtual computers and test machines, too.

In the case of installing Weave on my own server, I haven’t quite figured it out yet. It seems that WordPress and WebDAV don’t get along that well, and much of the follow-up advice Marios offers in the comments section of his post is a bit over my head (for example, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to change the WebDAV login type to “AuthType Basic” from “AuthType Digest” using my host’s control panel).

Still, many others have had success with this, so it’s worth checking out if you want to sync up to your own webserver.