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.

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:

Last week I decided that I wanted to set up my own testing network so I could experiment with various networking things in various operating systems. I figure this is the only way that I’m going to learn some things, and heck, it’s just cool anyway.

So I ordered:

5 x Dell Optiplex 240 – 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD
1 x 8 port KVM switch
1 x 24 port Cisco 100 Mb Ethernet Switch
10 x 7″ Ethernet Cable
1 x PS2 Keyboard and Mouse

The grand total for all this, including shipping, was about $700.  Not too bad…that’s about the price of a cheap laptop.

So what I’m going to do is stack these computers in the corner of my UBL (Underground Basement Lair, pronounced “yoo-bull”), plug them into the KVM and the switch, and run a cable from my main computer to the switch so I can manage everything remotely once it’s set up.

Some of the things I want to try include:

• Windows Active Directory Domain
• MS SQL Server
• MS Exchange Server
• Clustering/Load Balancing
• Creating Firewalls and IP rules
• VPNs
• Linux Domains
• Web servers
• OpenVPN
• OpenExchange
• PostgresSQL Server
• Distributed Computing
• Anything else I can think of.

I’ll post a picture when I have everything set up, as I think it will look neat.  It’s been like Christmas every day this week with all the stuff arriving   The only think I’m still waiting for is the computers.  I feel sorry for the UPS guy though…the UPS tracking site says that the package weights 145 lbs.

I installed the beta version of Flash 10 awhile back to fix some crashing/freezing problems in Firefox on my Ubuntu laptop. Everything worked fine until yesterday, when I began having the same problems, so I removed Flash 10 and reinstalled Flash 9. I haven’t had any problems since.

How is it that a piece of software that does work stops working and the old software that didn’t work starts working?  I do not know.