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Click “play” above to see me demonstrate how the Readability bookmarklet works with Evernote to create clean web clips without having to manually take out a bunch of garbage (blog comments, ads, etc.). Then, head on over to the Readability setup page to get yourself the bookmarklet!
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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.
Time for another edition of Big Pile o’ Links, where I feature some of my favorite links and groups of articles from all over the wonderful world we call “The Internet”:
Ah, Evernote. It’s one of the most useful and versatile programs/cloud storage ever, and yet so few Cooler People use it. It’s not just for tech bloggers and people with lots of crap to write about – it’s also incredibly useful for normal people in their day-to-day lives. I use mine every day, and I can’t tell you how useful it has been at the office, at home, or even running around. Here are some great links from recent times that list a bunch of great, easy ways you can start using Evernote more often in your life:
Job got you down? Feel like you’re headed the wrong way? Here are a handful of great articles (and one AWESOME documentary!) to help you make some changes:
It makes the world go ‘round. Here’s a quick handful of resources to further your knowledge on the subject:
Phew! There you go! Another Big Pile o’ Links for your pleasure. If you have an article or site or tool or whatever that you want featured in the Big Pile o’ Links, send it my way at tom@thepracticalnerd.com (it doesn’t have to be yours either, just something you like!).
Everybody’s million-dollar-question is “How do you make money on Twitter?” Well, I managed to “make” over $60 this month, thanks to one simple tweet. Here’s the backstory (this also answers the OTHER million-dollar-question, “What’s the point of being on Twitter, anyway?”):
I keep my checking account with ING Direct right now, and I love it. While I am moving to a joint checking account with my lovely fiancé, my ING account is all mine and currently, I still pay some bills out of it while I make the switch. But for a period of time, I also had my “emergency” checking account with Guaranty Bank.
The reason for this was simple: ING has no branches, and in case I need to make an emergency transaction, I can deposit cash or checks immediately into my Guaranty Bank checking account, and then pay a bill if I need to. Except the big issue was that, once in a while, I would accidentally pay a bill out of my Guaranty Bank account while all my money was in my ING account.
For example, a few months ago, I accidentally drew my Bank of America credit card payment out of my Guaranty Bank account without realizing it. So, the money for the payment was sitting in my ING account, and Guaranty Bank winds up paying the bill and then charging me $37. That’s fair. It was my mistake.
But I accidentally did it again last month. This time, disaster struck. Guaranty Bank decided not to pay the bill. So when the charge came through, they took it, charged me $37 for a returned check fee, and then sent it back. Bank of America, for some reason, decided to try sending it through again. So Guaranty Bank took it, charged me $37, and sent it back again. Guaranty Bank does not have any type of email alerts or anything – they send a letter. That’s right, a snail mail letter. They might as well have given it along with a flask to a guy on a horse. By the time I got this letter, I was well over $70 in the hole and my credit card payment had not been paid.
Now, at this point, it is my fault. I’m not trying to skirt responsibility here. However, I do take issue with the idea that the bank could suddenly change its mind about how it handles these issues and then literally notify me days after the fact that this happened. If I have ever overdrawn on my ING account, an email pops up on my phone before I get my keys out in the parking lot.
So I closed the account with Guaranty Bank. I was done. If I needed another brick-and-mortar bank, I’d find a different one. I paid off the debt and closed the account after five years (and I used to work there!), because they took away fee reversal privileges from the tellers since I left there. I called Bank of America and the woman said she didn’t know why the payment was sent through twice, and that a cash advance was going to be taken off the credit card to pay the account and I would have to pay the associated fees, along with the late fees and the returned check fees. I asked if I could make the payment over the phone right then and there – after all, I still had the money! She said I could not, because this process had already begun and there was nothing we could do. It didn’t make sense to me, but I accepted it because that’s apparently what they do.
I waited, and the next week, I noticed all the fees hit, but the cash advance was not processed, and I had a double payment due the next month. I called back, and the next woman told me she didn’t know why I was told this, but they don’t take cash advances to pay accounts. She didn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to make a payment over the phone – and that money was gone at this point. She also reiterated that the payment should not have been attempted twice. She then told me she would reverse the late fees and the returned check fees, and I would owe about $130, much less than the nearly $200 payment I originally owed. I thanked her and went on my way.
The following week, I saw that the fees were reversed but the payment was still almost $200. I called and complained, saying I had already altered my budget twice now for wrong information. The gentleman said there was nothing he could do. I hung up. Angry, I called back once more and spoke to another woman. She attempted to reverse another $40 (which she did), but it did not affect the payment due. She said she couldn’t do anything about it.
Furious at this point, I went to Twitter. I was shocked to see @BofA_Help on Twitter. I decided to publicly send them a message:
Like I said, I was angry. I wasn’t really expecting anything to come out of it, it just was my way of venting.
Next thing I know, I get a response asking for my contact information. I then get a phone call and I explain my situation to the woman. She calls me back later and says she doesn’t know how I got all this incorrect information, and she’s clearly not thrilled about doing this, but she tells me to pay the $130 and then notify her and she will adjust the rest of the payment.
I did. And it was taken care of within a day.
Now, I’m still not exactly a big fan of Bank of America. I think they need better training for their reps, as I received so much wrong information in such a short period of time that severely impacted my budget. However, I have to give them props for being so responsive and having a dedicated team on Twitter to help their customers.
It doesn’t stop there – there are plenty of companies on Twitter, and sometimes it’s easier to get access to REAL people by going the Twitter route. If nothing else, you should be on Twitter to have your voice heard by the customer service reps for the big companies that tend to treat you like dirt. That one tweet above was a throwaway thought, but it wound up finally getting me what I was told I was going to get. All my fees were reversed and I still paid the money that I rightfully owed.
Thanks, @BofA_help.
Do you have any cool Twitter stories to share? Drop them in the comments, we’d love to hear them!
Boy, do I hear this stuff a lot.
I’ve got friends and family who will ask about The Practical Nerd, and then they’ll spout off some reason why they don’t follow it and apologize to me. First, it’s not like I get offended for every person that doesn’t read what I have to say. My words aren’t for everybody (though, in most cases, they should be reading this stuff!). But as a blogger, you tend to thicken your skin towards that stuff. But the Cooler People of the world have an excuse for not reading a few blogs, and they think they need an excuse for everything. Just think of some of the long, drawn-out explanations you might hear for the following topics:
And the list goes on. Today, however, I want to go with the three reasons I hear most often for people who tell me they don’t follow The Practical Nerd, or blogs in general. Consider it my rebuttal to the Cooler People of the world.
Hey, back off! It’s only for nine months!
Yes, I have recently moved back in with my parents to save some dough before I get married and be a grown-up forever. But I want to list just a few types of people who have very successful blogs: brilliant marketers, people who have successfully morphed their lives into dream lives, sports commentators and pundits, best-selling authors, people who lost weight without having high-priced personal trainers scream in their ears while millions of people watch, and personal finance experts. These are not people who live in their parents’ basements. These are people who have changed lives and are darn good at what they do. They have valuable life experience and they share it with you. This leads to…
Bloggers do rant, there’s no doubt about that. But here are a few blogs I follow that have some ridiculously useful information:
That’s just the tiniest footprint of all the blogs out there. Sure, some are full of idiots who just want to complain about [insert topic here]. Some are celebrity rumor blogs like that piece of crap Perez Hilton. But some are honest, interesting people who are trying to teach and help. Those are the people I follow.
In addition, there are plenty that give you a good laugh after a long day, like 11 Points, Awkward Family Photos, Calvin and Hobbes (the best comic strip of all-time, every day).
This one is easily the most common one I get, and usually the word “life” is emphasized as a way to make me feel like some kind of loser.
Do you ever read a magazine? How about the newspaper? Ever watch anything on TV? Then you have time. It’s that simple.
What is the best use for your time? Is it watching another crappy fake “reality” show? These are shows with people who add nothing to society other than generally wanting a bunch of attention so that they can justify their giant contracts and sponsorships by playing to your emotions with overproduced crap. Why not experience the true reality of people’s lives and actually learn from and enjoy their experiences without corporate involvement? That’s what a blog does. The blog is the ultimate reality show. There are podcasts, video podcasts, and plain ol’ blogs that all exist for people to bare their lives. There are some captivating stories out there that would put the “I’m a single father with three kids and instead of getting a job I traveled all the way here to sing for you” stories to absolute shame. Put down the remote and belly-up to the monitor for a few minutes.
Newspapers and magazines are going by way of the dodo. Think you’re going to miss much? Most magazines have their articles on their websites, and most can be subscribed to. Same with newspapers. You can get your daily dose of news just about anywhere, and you can tailor it to just be news you’re interested in.
Then use an RSS subscriber like Google Reader to pull them in. Instead of searching through each individual website, it will highlight all the new content, pull it to the front, and you can move through it, skipping articles you don’t want to read and highlighting the ones you do. The other reason I use Google Reader is because it’s web-based, so I can access it on my work breaks or on my phone’s web browser, which is great for waiting rooms and other times where you just need to kill a little time. Plus you don’t have to carry around anything extra – you already have your phone! And finding that article from the past you were just thinking about is as easy and entering a few terms into the search box. All your sites are saved and past content can be searched in seconds.
The truth is, many blogs are written by respected, well-rounded people with inspirational and practical advice for you that can be read any time. You have the time. Start following a few blogs and see how your life will change for the better as a result. Or not. Then you can go back to sitting on the couch and watching Jersey Shore instead. I’m not here to judge.
