If you’re noticing that Google Reader seems to load or scroll slowly, try disabling your ad-blocker (like AdBlock or AdThwart).

I was having some issues with Firefox being terribly slow, particularly on Facebook and Google Reader. I started disabling extensions and it turns out that the Skype phone number highlighter was the culprit. So if you’re having the same problem, there’s one quick thing to check.

It was an interesting 3 years using Ubuntu.  Linux has come such a long way since the first time I tried it back in 1999.  It’s a usable, functional OS that has most of the features/programs that people need.  It looks good and works well.  However, it just has this unfinished feel.  It lacks polish and overall consistency.  Obviously, this is inherent when you have thousands of people working independently on different pieces of an OS…but it becomes a bit annoying when things don’t work how you expect, or a particular settings doesn’t affect everything that it should.  Also, the lack of documentation/tooltips that give you info about what a setting does is highly lacking.

For example, proxy settings in Ubuntu are not used by all applications.  It seems rather random as to which apps use those settings and which do not.  It’s so tedious to go and change the proxy settings on half a dozen different applications whenever you are using a network that needs a proxy.

The various interface themes have a bulky feel…buttons are too big, there’s too much padding between controls, etc.  The dialogue to open a file is simply enormous.  Someone with some UI experience needs to come and streamline the look and feel, and give it a modern, professional appearance.

That said…

I’ve been toying with the pre-release version of Windows 7 for about two weeks now, and it’s absolutely amazing.  It is what Vista should have been.  It’s fast, it’s stable, and it looks great.  It has features that increase productivity and usability.  The interface is clean and intuitive.  They removed UI elements that didn’t need to be there, which greatly reduces visual distraction and increases the intuitiveness of the system.

I’ve installed it on my desktop machine and my laptop (which is old and slow) and gotten excellent performance on both.  On both machines, installation was a snap.  I installed Windows 7, and once I had booted up, I ran Windows Update and it found all of my hardware drivers automatically.  This probably won’t hold true for all machines, but it worked perfectly for me.  Overall, I’m just very, very pleased with Windows 7…probably more pleased than I was when I switched from Vista to Ubuntu.  I think I’ll post a blog sometime soon about some of the things I like.  Check back!

When securing your wireless router, you are given basically two choices.  WEP and WPA.  WEP encryption does two things:  it encrypts your wireless internet with a hex (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F instead of 0-9) string like “5FE321A” and it sucks.  It’s a pain to remember the key and it’s easy for hackers to break.  WPA allows you to encrypt your wireless with an easy to remember passphrase like “omgthisismypassphrase” and is tough to break.

So just remember: WEP bad, WPA good.  Use WPA.

Here are a few Firefox extensions that I’ve used that I really, really like and feel lost when browsing without them.  I highly recommend all of these add-ons.  (They work in Windows, Linux, and I assume OS X.)

Tree-Style Tabs
This puts all of your tabs on the side of your browser instead of the top.  This has two main benefits:  it’s much easier to see what your tabs are when you have a lot of them open, and it saves vertical space (good for widescreen laptops and monitors).  Lots of options to configure it to suit your needs.

ColorfulTabs
This goes hand-in-hand with Tree Style Tabs.  ColorfulTabs makes your tabs all a different color based on the site.  Much easier to tell things apart than with just a single color.

Cooliris
I cannot explain how awesome this is.  It allows you to view video and photo searches on a scrollable 3D wall.  Very smooth rendering.  Allows searches from Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.

Xmarks
If you have more than one machine that you use regularly, you need this.  It syncs bookmarks and passwords with as many machines as you want.

ScribeFire
This allows you to write blog posts by simply clicking the ScribeFire icon.  It brings up a rich text editor that offers most of the features that you’d have on your blog, only you don’t have to actually take the time to load up your blog.  You can set it up to post to multiple blogs.  It supports Wordpress, Blogger, etc.  Has features for promoting and monetizing your blog posts.

Adblock Plus
It blocks ads, and it does it well.

FlashBlock
This keeps Flash videos/animations from loading and replaces them with a play button.  Hit the play button and the video/animation plays.  Helps websites load faster, and also prevents annoying movies from automatically playing.  Has a whitelist that you can add sites to.

Hide Menubar
Just what it says.  It hides the menus like File, Edit, View, etc.  This gives you a little more vertical space on those widescreen monitors.

I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.10 (32 bit) to Ubuntu 9.04 (64bit), and the difference is amazing.  There are little things, like the new notification system and slightly different themes, but the BIG thing is SPEED.  Everything is faster.  It boots faster, it opens programs faster, Compiz’s framerate is much higher….I’m very impressed.

Now just waiting for Firefox 3.5 to be released.

Alisha’s mom was down last week, and we went for a walk on the trail along Lake Ewauna near downtown Klamath Falls.  The wildlife was out and about.  Here are some of the photos I took.

Some baby ducklings

Some flowers

A turtle on a log

Some kind of raven with a yellow head

Bottoms up!

Some cattail fluff left over from fall

A family of geese

A red-winged black bird

Apparently they needed some space from each other.

A snake out for a swim

A goose sitting on her nest

Hopefully I’ll get out and take some photos of the wild flowers around here before they all whither.  I’ll post the photos when I get them.

For the longest time I was having a problem where my titlebar would flicker/disappear when using OpenOffice or Thunderbird.  The latest Nvidia driver (180.22) seems to have fixed the problem.  You can get the driver here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_180.22.html

For some reason when I installed OpenOffice 3 this week in Ubuntu, it didn’t actually update the icons from 2.4.  I looked all over my icons folders, and couldn’t find them.  So I have put together an icon set of the official icons plus some Office 2007 icons for the .doc, .xls, and .ppt files.

You can download it here:  OOO3_icons.zip

It’s a Gnome icon theme, but you’ll need to do a few things to get it working how you want.  Extract the folder into your /home/you/.icons directory, and open the index.theme file with a text editor like Gedit or Nano.  Replace the names in the Inherits line with the name of the icon theme that you normally use.  That way, it will use these icons for OpenOffice, but fallback to the theme you entered on that line for the rest of the icons.

Once you’ve done that, open your Appearances control panel, hit the customize theme button, and switch your icons to the ones you just installed.

The change should take place instantly, but if it doesn’t, try logging off and back on.