Place of Stuff

I have seen a variety of stories around the web extolling the virtues of the new browser from Google: Google Chrome.  At the moment, it is still a beta available only for Windows and Mac, but it seems to be an, erm, internet browser I suppose.

To be perfectly honest and frank, I find it incredibly difficult to get excited about a web browser.  To me, the browser is a tool, not a way of life.  For comparison, go now and find a carpenter - I’ll wait.  Got one?  Good.  Now explain to your carpenter that there is a new hammer available.  Gauge the carpenter’s reaction.  Now contrast and compare with all the hoopla over Google’s offering.  Now decide who the hammer should be used on.

Gosh, I sound grumpy, don’t I?  The fact is that Chrome looks like a decent offering.  It has tabbed browsing, which we all should now expect.  It has a way to import your bookmarks from your existing browsers, again, we should all expect that.  It displays pages from the internet.  The best thing, in my opinion, is that it is very minimal and there is little that is not functional about it:
Continue reading ‘Google Chrome for Linux’ »

I often find myself casting around for ideas for new posts or even what to write on a post I had thought about. It all makes so much more sense in my head. And then, a stroke of luck! On my dashboard there was a link to a story on Mark Ghosh’s blog Weblog Tools Collection. So I followed it. And that tortuos story brings us here, I installed a Firefox extension by Zemanta. Called Zemanta.

There will be screenshots later, but for now let’s talk about what it does. I quote their front page here:

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. We are making blogging fun again.

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I rebuilt my machine again recently. I fancied seeing what Fedora was doing and whether it was worth switching. Answer is: not for me. It felt somewhat lighter than it used to, but still a bit bulky and not all that great. And Gnome. I have lost a lot of my vehemence against Gnome, but I find that having 2 task bars kinda wastes screen real estate. It did make me wonder though, if KDE is the more Windows-alike desktop environment, why do businesses feel comfortable with Gnome?

Anyway, that’s beside the point. One of the downsides, in my opinion, to reinstalling your OS is remembering the various passwords, logins, bookmarks and plugins that you had before. Firefox, being a community-ish project has hoards of people to help solve that problem. There are a variety of plugins to help you with one or more of the problems - bookmark backups (although you could just back up the bookmark folder), password exporters and the like. You could even manually back up your profile (as long as it was working at the time) and then copy it to your new profile. Lots of solutions.

My new favourite is called FEBE. This backs up your entire profile or just bits of it to a schedule you set. You could ask it to back up to a network folder or to your hard drive. It just sits there in the background and does it’s thing. All you need to do is to install te FEBE plugin when you reinstall and get it to restore the profile. If you need a profile from a few days or weeks ago, not a problem. You can set it to save itself to date stamped folders meaning that it’s easy to go back to a “known good” profile. The only thing it’s not happy about doing is to restore the default profile if there’s only one profile set - the workaround is to rename the backup to end in .zip rather than .fbu and then to manually copy over the contents to your profile folder.
Continue reading ‘FEBE for Firefox’ »

As those who know me will know, I tend to change distros a lot. One of the problems I have encountered with this is that you lose your internet browser bookmarks and tend to forget your passwords and this rapidly becomes a pain. One of the solutions to this is to use the Google Browser Sync Firefox addon.

The program itself (if we assume, as I did, that it works flawlessly) is a godsend. It saves your bookmark list to a Google server along with your passwords, your cookies and the tabs/windows you last looked at. It’s also configurable, in a very limited sense, so you don’t have to save everything. As I said, it’s useful if you reinstall a lot but even more so if you wish to keep things sync’d across multiple PCs. And, because it’s Google, you feel all safe and helped.

But. A couple of months ago I reinstalled a distro and reinstalled the addon and discovered that all my bookmarks had gone. My passwords appeared to have been saved and worked, but all my carefully gathered bookmarks had disappeared. It wasn’t a total loss - I’m a bit of a hoarder and tend to save things even after they cease to be useful, so it was a good time to clear out my bookmarks and start again. But it was perturbing and so I hit the search trail - Google, not unsurprisingly.
Continue reading ‘I Can No Longer Recommend Google Browser Sync’ »