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Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:
1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.
2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.
3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.
Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.
Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.
Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:
If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!
Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:
Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.
This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.
Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:
Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:
No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:
Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.
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So Gmail is down again today for some of us. Let the onslaught of angry tweets begin:
Gmail contacts have been down for hours now… Why am I starting to feel like Google is slowly turning into Microsoft… the deal with Gmail is: give up your life, gain awesome apps. this morning i’ve fulfilled my side… but now i wait Thanks Gmail…. just another reason to have a Hotmail account!
Gmail contacts have been down for hours now… Why am I starting to feel like Google is slowly turning into Microsoft…
the deal with Gmail is: give up your life, gain awesome apps. this morning i’ve fulfilled my side… but now i wait
Thanks Gmail…. just another reason to have a Hotmail account!
Okay, so it’s easy to bag on Google for this and make you regret your decision to switch to Gmail in the first place. I mean, heck, what good is email if you can’t use it, right? Well, I don’t get too mad about it for a few reasons:
The “what if it goes down” attitude needs to be applied to just about every form of communication. Your cell phone can fall in the toilet. Your internet connection can go down. Mail sometimes gets lost. Your electricity can go out right in the middle of a Packer game (happened over the weekend – neighbors’ kid plowed a 4-wheeler into the electrical box and knocked out the power for the entire block). Your car can break down. The plane you’re in may need an emergency landing. The sun can be blocked by clouds all day, etc.
I could go on and on. The truth is, you always need a backup plan for everything in life. If you are running your life through Gmail (and you should!), you need to have a backup plan for when it goes down periodically. If you are putting all your eggs in the Gmail basket and not backing that up somewhere, you only have yourself to blame if your day goes off the tracks because of a little outage.
A few hours feels like decades in today’s “gotta-have-everything-NOW” world. But in the grand scheme, it’s not so bad. If your computer dies and you use Outlook for your email, it can be days before you get your email back up, and even then, you might not get your mail back, which leads me to…
Even if Gmail goes down for a while, when it’s back up – you don’t notice much of a difference. Email that was sent to you in the meantime is still there. Email that you’ve kept is still there. If you’re storing all your email on your home computer, you run the risk of losing all of it when that computer goes down. Google keeps your mail backed up in several places that are in different locations. If something happens to one of your databases, they can just switch to one of the backups and you’re fine.
If you open up a Web browser, type in “http://mail.google.com”, and you can’t access your mail, you’re not completely out of luck. While not always the case, many times there are several ways you can access your Gmail in the event of an outage and not ruin your entire day:
Your smartphone. Google Sync can push your email, contacts, and calendar to your phone, if you have the capabilities. My Windows Mobile phone can pull email from Google into its own email program. It may not always be the most convenient, but it’s something.
Microsoft Outlook. As much as I hate bloated, overpriced Microsoft products, Outlook is on a lot of computers. You can set up Outlook to grab your Gmail, and, like today’s outage, you won’t miss a beat.
Mozilla Thunderbird. I don’t have Outlook, and many of you don’t, either. Mozilla Thunderbird comes from the same company that makes Firefox, so you know it’s good. It’s like a free version of Outlook. As you can expect, then, you can set it up to pull your Gmail, and it works the same way. It has an Account Wizard, so you just have to tell them you use Gmail, enter in your information, and it will automatically set it up for you.
Set up Gmail’s Offline Access feature. Lifehacker has a great article on setting this up, but it basically allows you to access your Gmail whether Gmail is up or not, and whether or not you have a working internet connection.
You know there’s going to be outages. Everything online has outages (Twitter, anyone? Facebook?). If you rely on this stuff, take a few steps to ensure that it won’t ruin your life. It’ll take five minutes. I understand that a company at Google’s level needs to be more reliable, but I’m not about ready to throw it under the bus yet. As long as I know there are ways to keep using it, I’ll keep using Gmail.
The internet is awesome. There’s no denying it. What was once a breeding ground for dorks everywhere has turned into a social gathering place for millions of people of all ages. What happened? What caused those changes? What made the internet so gosh-darn inviting for so many people? Let’s start at the top.
The internet of the mid-‘90s was something else. Dominated by *shudder* America Online, the Web browser was the afterthought, because AOL wanted to be its own gathering place for people with common interests. If you wanted to hop on the internet, you likely went through AOL at the time (50 hours for FREE!). Here’s what you wound up getting:
Computers and servers weren’t as far along back then. We’re talking the days of processors in the MEGABYTES (and hey, if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it and move on to the next sentence. I’m trying to say “They were SLOW”). So as a result, once you got past the header of a web page, the rest was usually text. And I’m talking about all-the-same-font kinda text. Sure, they tried to mix it up with underlining some words or maybe making some words bold, but in the end, it was just flat-out boring. You were there to read, and pretty much nothing else. Graphic designers hadn’t started on the concept of “Web design” just yet.
If you wanted to interact with other people on the internet, you did it through forums and chat rooms.
Forums were, initially, the only thing on the internet. And they were called “bulletin boards”. You and other people that generally resembled the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would go on there and wax intellectually about the latest episode of The X-Files or something. It was a place to share opinions with a bunch of people who won’t listen to you, not unlike many forums of today (I guess not everything’s changed).
Chat rooms were a whole ‘nother beast. They were real-time, and generally useless. You went into a chat room to really just insult each other and marvel at who you were talking with, or who they were pretending to be, anyway. You’d go into a chat room, type “hi everyone a/s/l”, and then get bombarded with people saying stuff like “hi there! 19/f/Honolulu”. Riveting. Regardless of the fact that the person was probably 29/m/Detroit, there was zero point in any conversation in chat rooms. You didn’t go there to communicate with people you knew. You were there to, again, talk about the latest episode of The X-Files, or watch people lob insults at other people.
When I was 12 years old, I thought it would be awesome to have a web page. With sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod offering free web pages, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever. So I put together a web page about pro wrestling (I was cool), with some of the pre-loaded backgrounds and stuff from GeoCities, and I had myself a web page! I cannot stress to you enough how useless this web page was and what little value it had to other people. I was 12. I had nothing to talk about.
And I wasn’t alone. That was the bulk of the internet at the time – a bunch of kids who knew nothing about stuff like “graphic design”, “HTML”, or “being interesting”.
Thankfully for all of us, the internet changed for the better. But it wasn’t immediate:
The first CD I ever burned was through my oldest brother’s computer in late 1999, using music I found through his IRC client. Internet Relay Chat was the first way to get music, and it was the most tedious, mind-numbing process around. You went in to a music-sharing community, had to request a song, and wait for somebody to respond by sending you the file. It was clunky, slow, and generally awful. But I was able to put together a CD of my own mix. It was a huge moment!
Once Napster hit the scene in 1999, all bets were off. Napster was, at that time, easy to use and a lot quicker. You were still waiting 20 minutes to an hour per song, but the interface was something you could conceivably understand. You now had a logical reason to own a computer hooked up to the internet.
Ah, dial-up internet. When you wanted to hop online, you first had to sit through this (click "play" and then shudder a little). The biggest problem with sitting around on the internet? You were tying up the phone line! Unless you were rich and had a second phone line, you were paying per minute on dial-up, and you couldn’t make calls in the meantime.
Broadband changed all of that. First, it set up an entirely separate connection for your computer’s modem. Instead of paying per minute, you had a continuous connection to the internet at a flat rate. Then, it was about 87 billion times faster (approximately). Now you could sit on the phone with somebody and talk about the web page you’re looking at! Wicked!
The stage was set: file sharing, legal or not, was on the rise. Computers were getting faster. You had a continuous connection to the internet. It was time for things to boom. And boom it did. Here are the things that make the internet of today the most awesome thing since… um, the last awesome thing that happened:
It started with Yahoo!, and then Google perfected it. Heck, even Bing has it down pretty good. As more and more people were connecting to the internet, more information was being shared. For you to find that information, you need a search engine. While Google has become the Kleenex of search engines (how many people ask for a “tissue”, anyway?), several companies out there all make it dead simple to find whatever you need, and especially stuff you don’t need. Whenever somebody is looking for an answer to something, what do you tell them to do? “Google it.”
For example, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet yesterday. No, I wasn’t texting while doing my business. It literally flew out of my shorts pocket and square into the toilet – nothing but net. In the old days, I would worry that my phone was ruined forever, and that I needed to shell out another $200 to get another phone (phone insurance? peh.). But I hopped on Google and typed in “cell phone in toilet”, and got about 5-6 different strategies for drying out your phone, along with endless testimonials from people saying their phone works as good as new.
[Side note: if you ever drop your phone in the toilet, pull it out immediately, take out the battery, clean the thing, then throw it in the oven at 150 degrees for an hour or so. Dries the sucker right up and you’re back in business.]
So many people resisted it for so long out of fear for their credit card numbers, but as secure transactions rose, internet shopping became hotter. Amazon is the de facto place to get just about anything. Struggling to find whole, fresh rabbits for dinner at the supermarket? Amazon’s got it. Thinking about getting a little romantic on your next camping trip? Get your tips from this great book! She won’t get intimate because your back hair is thicker than Sasquatch fur? Amazon to the rescue!
On top of all that great stuff, sites like eBay and Craigslist make it easy for you to get top-dollar for that antique peach de-fuzzer that you’ve had in your family for generations. Instead of trying to unload it at a garage sale, you can snap a picture of it, put it on eBay, and get $475.24 for it. On the flip side, your search for antique peach de-fuzzers is over. [Note: here's what a search for "peach de-fuzzer" turns up.]
Peer-to-peer file sharing has certainly evolved since the days of Napster. Your Limewire, your Ares, your BearShare, KaZaa, and WinMX are almost all but dead at this point. BitTorrent allows you to not just download from the person who posted the file, but from everybody else who’s downloading it or has downloaded it before. You know what that means? That means the latest album to hit the shelves can be downloaded inside of a minute. The latest episode of The Office (premiering tonight!) can be on your computer within 20 minutes of it hitting the Web, and under 2-3 minutes the next morning.
This is not a discussion of the legalities of BitTorrent use. The point is, downloading from the Web has completely turned the corner and become near-instant. Add to that the legal methods like iTunes or my Zune Pass subscription (so awesome and so few people use it!), and music is everywhere these days.
We all know parents and grandparents who have no idea what they’re doing on the computer. You wonder why their computer is so slow, then you find a “Downloads” folder with over 350GB of videos that somebody emailed them ranging from a guy setting himself on fire while wearing a banana suit to that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You know why? Because in the old days, when you wanted to watch a video from the internet or listen to an audio clip, you had to download it. The first video I ever saw that was from the internet was the music video for “Buddy Holly” by Weezer.
Once YouTube rolled in, streaming video became easier than ever. In fact, you can even embed the stuff right into web pages, so now you can watch all those great videos I just mentioned quickly, without having to put anything on your hard drive. Observe:
[Warning: before you hit “play”, the first video is the banana one, then there are like, ten other examples, many of which are riddled with profanity, a naked butt, and hundreds of idiots whose parents were too busy to teach them not to do stupid stuff like this.]
And for cable TV becoming obsolete, I submit the following examples: Hulu, network television websites, and Surf The Channel. I rest my case.
I discovered Wikipedia as a giant time-suck a couple years ago, and I love it. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is generated and monitored (for the most part) by its users. While it can be edited to reflect false information, it does cite most of its sources and also allows you to check out random information about little-known stuff. Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites when discussing the power of collaborative thinking. It also is really useful when you didn’t read the novel you were supposed to write a paper on for your class on 19th-century British Literature.
And if you are wondering about the reference to Small Wonder in the heading there, click here to check out Wikipedia’s entry on this ‘80s television series featuring a little robot girl.
Obviously The Practical Nerd would be an example of “for better”, but Wordpress made it insanely easy for anybody to start a real web site, and customize it in a way that people would actually want to look at it and read it. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet right now, and many – not all, but many – of them offer some interesting and useful advice. In the old days, you had to go get a book based on newspaper book reviews for this stuff. Now, you can just Google it and find a blog that caters to your interests. Done and done.
In addition, the development of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds offer a method of subscribing to a web site’s content without having to check in on it every day or every couple of hours. It saves many people time and energy.
Remember Netscape Navigator? Ugh. Ugly, slow, and clunky. Internet Explorer? A little better, but slow and behind the times. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Firefox lets you add plug-ins and install different “skins” for your Web browser. There are an infinite number of ways you can alter Firefox and make it work the way you want it to. As I previously wrote, plug-ins and add-ons make Firefox the best browser around, in my opinion. They let you create the experience you want for your internet surfing (do people still “surf” the internet, anyway?).
When I took my last trip to Taiwan, I took about 300 pictures over the course of two weeks. In the old days, if I had done that, I would have to get home, develop all that film, and then get together with everyone I wanted to show the pictures to. Instead, in a hotel room in Los Angeles on the way home, I plugged my camera into my laptop, uploaded all of the pictures to Facebook, added captions, and sent everybody an email with a link to the album. People saw my pictures before I even got home.
Facebook and MySpace let you keep in endless touch with your friends. Flickr and Google Picasa allow you the opportunity to bring pictures to anyone you want. YouTube makes showing people that video of your kid doped up on laughing gas a cinch. Twitter lets you do any of those things to anyone who’s on Twitter, as easy as possible. All these things are now going real-time, too. Scheduling with your family or friends can be easily done with a shared Google Calendar, and you can get reminders of anything sent to you via text or email from Google Calendar or Remember The Milk, or just about anything that helps you organize and schedule your life.
Knowledge that you want to share with others is easier, too. There are bookmarklets and plug-ins that make sharing as easy as clicking a button. If I find an interesting political article that I want my friends to see, I can click a button that says “Share on Facebook” that will do just that. If I see a cool game or blog post about personal finance that I think is useful for the general public, I can click “Tweet This” and it will go to all my Twitter followers. Knowledge and information is being spread quicker than it ever has in the history of the world. Word-of-mouth can go across states, countries, and the entire globe in seconds, instead of years.
Mobile computing is taking instant communication to unheard-of levels. And if that Bill Curtis guy from those “get the internet anywhere” commercials are any indication, you can send and receive anything at anytime, anywhere. You can snap a picture on your phone and send it to your Facebook account, or email it to your buddy, or send it directly to someone via MMS. Everybody is with everybody, all the time.
Mobile computing also has lots of business implications as well. Entrepreneurship continues to rise as people can take their laptops anywhere and log onto their Google Apps to write up a document or edit a spreadsheet. The big, envious symbol of a successful blogger is somebody with a laptop on the beach, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. While that’s not every blogger (and certainly not me!), it can be done. Computers have gone from the size of warehouses to the something that fits in your pocket. All the coolest things you can do on the internet can be done on your phone.
The internet isn’t just a meeting place anymore. It’s a method of delivering an endless stream of content, knowledge, and anecdotes of your life to the people you care about. It’s no longer necessary to get emails with “Fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Fwd:” at the beginning of them. It’s no longer necessary to sit and wait for downloads. The internet has made computing easy and fun for anyone. It has a purpose now. That’s why it’s so awesome.
What makes the internet awesome for you? Share with us in the comments!
Good grief, how did I miss this one?
As I began to build my business over a year and a half ago, I determined that, by working from home, I needed a strong cell phone to take with me when I needed to hit the road. For example, if I’m stuck getting my oil changed in the middle of the day, I would like access to my email and so forth so that I can keep working. I purchased a lovely green Moto Q with the accompanying data plan. At the time, I was using Vista with Microsoft Outlook (I never said I was a smart one), and the Windows Mobile-enabled phone allowed me to sync up with my contacts, send and receive emails, and manage my calendar.
It was a mess.
Everything on the phone felt bulky, and I had to clear the email out every day, because every time somebody sent me an email, a copy was downloaded to my computer and another copy was downloaded to my phone. I got notifications on both machines, and I hated it. When I made the switch to Gmail for my email management needs (the standard-bearer for email these days) and got rid of Outlook and Vista altogether, I used my web browser on the phone to access email, calendar items, etc. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was lightweight and it got the job done.
Flash forward to last week: my buddy gets a brand-new cell phone and is going crazy loading it up with all sorts of new doodads and what-nots. Then he asks me if I’ve ever heard of Google Sync, because he just set up a Gmail address. I didn’t at first, but upon further research, I found the website for Google Sync. Google Sync links your phone to your Google account – you can manage your calendar and your contacts database on either your computer or your phone, and Google will sync the two machines together automatically, without hooking your phone up to your computer. This is cloud computing as its finest.
I strongly recommend you set up Google Sync on your phone, and here’s why:
Easy is what Google does. When you click the link to go to the Google Sync website, it gives you a step-by-step guide to setting it up on your phone. No muss, no fuss. Set it once, and reap the benefits forever.
Google Sync uses Microsoft Exchange technology. In other words, you already have all the necessary software to use it. Google’s instructions walked me through just a couple of steps and then it synced it all together for me immediately. No bulk.
In the last few months, I’ve had to set up various meetings while away from my computer. So when somebody asked me if I was free a certain day, or wanted to set up a meeting at some point, I had to pull out my phone, open Internet Explorer, let it load, go to Google Calendar, then browse to the date that we were discussing – and Google Calendar’s mobile site isn’t the greatest. Now, because it automatically syncs up with my phone’s built-in calendar, managing my appointments is near-instant. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
As I was growing up, my mother kept an address book. When we needed to look up somebody’s address, we went into the closet and hunted for the address in this book. When somebody’s address changed, my mom had to cross it out in the book and write it somewhere else. With Google Contacts, you can fill in as many different fields as you want – phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, etc. – and have it clean, easy, and searchable. Changing information is a snap, and you obviously don’t have to deal with pages and pages of crossed-out names.
Additionally, now you carry your entire address book in your pocket at all times. Pretty handy!
I’ve touted the praises of online backup solutions and why you need them once before, and this falls right in there. How many times have you seen a new Facebook group along the lines of “Steve Idiotface lost his phone – I need your numbers again!” No more. When you get a new phone, just re-set up Google Sync on it, and your contacts will be restored, along with all your appointments and dates to remember.
I’m in love with Google Sync, and I’m pretty disappointed in myself. I’m a Google nut, and you’d think I would have had that one figured out already. Check out Google Sync right now, or if you are using it already, share your thoughts in the comments!
Nine Ways I Use Google Calendar to Keep My Money Straight [The Simple Dollar]
As an avid Google maniac, I love Google Calendar. In fact, of all the things that Google does, I think Calendar is probably the single best application it came up with. With Google Calendar, you can set up multiple sub-calendars (mine: personal stuff, work appointments, blog topics, bills, Brewers schedule) and choose if you want to view them all at once on one calendar, or click around to just see the ones you are looking for. You can set up both email reminders or text message reminders, and you can share calendars (my girlfriend and I share our personal calendars with each other, so we know how to make plans). Best of all: it's free.
So I was incredibly pleased to see the above blog post in my RSS subscriber this morning from The Simple Dollar. My favorite tip is one I already use:
1. Keep track of bill due dates This is perhaps the most obvious use of using a calendar for personal finance. When you know a bill’s due date, add it to your calendar, then pay the bill when you see it’s coming close to its due date. So, for example, our mortgage payment is due on the 28th of each month, so on my calendar, on the 28th of each month, there’s a note that our mortgage payment is due. It helps me keep track of our payments. How can I do this? It’s simple. Log onto Google Calendar. First, I recommend creating a new calendar specifically for bill due dates if you haven’t already – this makes it easy to highlight them. Then, click on the day the bill is due, create a new event, and add the appropriate information – the amount and the type of bill, at the very least. If this bill recurs on a regular basis, make the bill a repeating event. You might also want to add an event reminder so you’re emailed a few days in advance of the bill due date. Free from Broke offers a nice visual guide to adding a bill due date to your calendar.
1. Keep track of bill due dates This is perhaps the most obvious use of using a calendar for personal finance. When you know a bill’s due date, add it to your calendar, then pay the bill when you see it’s coming close to its due date. So, for example, our mortgage payment is due on the 28th of each month, so on my calendar, on the 28th of each month, there’s a note that our mortgage payment is due. It helps me keep track of our payments.
How can I do this? It’s simple. Log onto Google Calendar. First, I recommend creating a new calendar specifically for bill due dates if you haven’t already – this makes it easy to highlight them. Then, click on the day the bill is due, create a new event, and add the appropriate information – the amount and the type of bill, at the very least. If this bill recurs on a regular basis, make the bill a repeating event. You might also want to add an event reminder so you’re emailed a few days in advance of the bill due date.
Free from Broke offers a nice visual guide to adding a bill due date to your calendar.
Some tips can be used with any calendar application (or even a paper calendar *gasp*!), but they work incredibly well with Google Calendar. Check it out!
Posted via email from tommeitner’s posterous
