I installed Firefox 9 a few days ago and I’m loving it so far. In fact, it has replaced Chrome (which had replaced Firefox for me awhile back), which says a lot for the progress that Mozilla has made in the last couple of years.

Anyway, I was having this issue where resizing the Firefox window was really choppy and slow. Not a huge deal, but still annoying. The solution was to go into the Options, go to the Advanced tab, and uncheck “Use Hardware Acceleration”.

The screen hinge on my Lenovo S10-3t netbook/tablet was getting loose to the point where the screen was wobbling back and forth whenever I moved with it sitting on my lap.  Also, the screen was falling forward a half inch or so when I was holding it in tablet mode.  I was worried that the hinge itself was wearing out, but last night I decided to see if I could fix it anyway.  It turned out to be pretty simple.

If you’re having this problem, all you need to do it tighten two screws located on the bottom of the screen.  They’re hidden beneath two rubber pads, which I’ve highlighted in this picture:

The pads are glued on, so you should be able to pry them off easily with your finger nails.  Once you’ve tightened the screws enough to eliminate the wobbling, you can cover them back up with the rubber pads.

If you’re having trouble installing Windows 7 SP 1, here’s something to check.  I have my computer set to dual-boot with Ubuntu, and apparently that changes some of the flags on the Windows partitions.  That said, this fix may not work for you if you aren’t dual-booting, but I’d give it a try anyway.

What you do is right click on Computer, click on Manage, and when the Computer Management screen comes up, click on Disk Management.  After a few moments you’ll see a list of drives and partitions.  You should see a 200 MB partition for Windows.  Right click on it and click Mark Partition as Active.  At this point you should be able to run the service pack installer.

All you have to do is hold the Shift key while moving them.  This is great for when you’re trying to line up your gadgets and they snapping/sticking to the side of the screen or to another gadget.

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.

If your laser mouse is a bit jumpy when you move it across the screen, try flipping it over and blowing out the little hole where the lens is.  I futzed around for 15 minutes trying to adjust the settings when I found this blog post with the solution.

The Acid3 Test tests how well your browser handles various web standards.  Or something like that.  Anyway, I ran it on the lastest version of Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and here are the results:

Opera:

Firefox:

Internet Explorer:

(No, I didn’t put the FAIL there.  The test did.)

As you can see, Opera 10 tests perfect, which is rather impressive.  Firefox comes in with the letter grade equivalent of a C-, which is disappoint performance, but acceptable.

Internet Explorer 8 comes in with an unbelievable 21%.  And that’s Microsoft’s latest and greatest.  I thought maybe it was due to security settings, so I added the test to my Trusted sites and set it to the lowest possible security settings.  It didn’t help.  Sad.

Edit:

Here’s the test result for Google’s Chrome browser: