Insomnic Dreams

Google Chrome is the new browser on the block and it’s garnering a lot of attention. The main reason – it’s fast. The second reason – it’s secure. Today, the latest stable release came out and you can grab it here for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The latest version includes the long awaited extension support and bookmark sync (as well as lots of fixes and security updates).

Here’s my favorite creative video about the features:

So why switch to Chrome from Firefox or Internet Explorer?

Well the IE question is easy to answer – Internet Explorer just doesn’t work as well as either Chrome or Firefox. It has worse security, lack of standards compliancy, short on features and in general just isn’t very snappy. It is best for use in a business environment because of it’s compatibility with Sharepoint and other MS specific services but otherwise it just doesn’t compare – though to be honest, Internet Explorer 8 is probably the best version of IE ever created. So if you are scared about switching please at least update.

So the bigger question is why choose Chrome over Firefox. Well… there it gets tricky. I am choosing Chrome because it’s faster than Firefox on my Mac and has more standard extensions than Safari. On my PC it’s faster than Firefox and the extensions are lighter than Firefox add-ons so it doesn’t hit my resources as hard. The built in bookmark sync with storage in Google Docs is also nice to have. Plus, if you are already using Google services it works very well with them and the official Google extensions only make it better.

A reason to keep Firefox is the extensive add-on support and tried and tested website support. Firefox is a more mature browser; similar to IE in that it’s become better supported over the years. Firefox keeps on trucking and the latest release does provide some increased speed and security.

A last reason to switch to Chrome is because of the HTML5 compliant video function. Sounds really boring right? Well, what it means is better control and playback of video on the web. YouTube and Vimeo now offer it and the playback is much smoother and much friendlier (especially for accessibility users).

So which extensions do I prefer? Here’s a quick list:
AdBlock: Good adblocking (and Google is okay with it).
Chrome Reader: Google Reader RSS subscription extension
Google Similar Pages: Good for finding, well, similar pages…
Google Mail Checker: Basic checker and link
Google Voice Checker: Check Google Voice account and also activates numbers found on pages.
Send from Gmail (No Button): Sets Gmail as default for composing when you click on email links

If you want a few to try out just head over to the extensions page and check out some of the “Featured” and “Most Popular” ones.

So there you have it – a whole new browser to play with and see if you like. Oh – I forgot to mention – it will automatically bring over your bookmarks/favorites and settings from either IE or Firefox so you can be up and running in no time. So give it a try and see what you think – worse that could happen is you don’t like it and go back to what you were using.

I’ll be surprised if you do though…

So I’ve had the weekend to play with the new Google Chrome OS (thanks to the virtual disk provided by GDGT). My opinion – it will be an excellent OS for a secondary computer or someone in a well connected city. Watch the following video for a quick overview of the idea behind Chrome OS.

So what you see is that this OS will be good for people who are pretty much based on the internet. It’s only been out for a week and it won’t be officially released for a year – and as you’ve noticed, more and more is becoming internet (or “Cloud”) based so this makes pretty good sense.

Maybe next year all you’ll need is a browser … in which case all you’ll need is Chrome OS. Google has posted a few other case uses for Chrome OS and Lifehacker has some interesting commentary about other people’s experience.

Even if it isn’t for you – it certainly does seem like an interesting take on where computers are heading these days.

Today, TPB announced that they are going trackerless. This is a newer function of BitTorrent sharing that allows a site to provide links to torrent swarms without actually hosting torrent files – so it’ll be even harder to prosecute sites for peer-2-peer sharing because they host even less data. It also allows for cheaper site hosting without loosing some of the beneficial functions such as file details and comments.

This is all done using a function called magnet links. This allows you to join a torrent swarm without truly using a torrent file or a centralized tracker. TPB has converted all of their torrents to magnet links. TorrentFreak has a good article about the changes. This is why many people will be commenting about “problems” at The Pirate Bay. It’s not a problem but a change – a major change for the site but for most people it won’t affect them much at all.

Many of the popular clients can already use magnet links so the change won’t mean much for those using Azureus/Vuze or uTorrent, but those using the popular client Transmission on OS X and Ubuntu may have to grab a different client for use with TPB (and uTorrent is still working some bugs out of magnet link usage).  You can also try Magnetiser, a Firefox extension for using magnet links.

Other sites may be switching over as well (torrentz.com site started with a trackerless system), especially with TPB’s considerable influence on the peer-2-peer community. Hopefully client development will quickly include the magnet link function.

TL;DR – it’s a change. Grab a client that works with magnet links and The Pirate Bay will be back to normal for you.

UPDATE: Transmission devs have already stated they are reworking the new 1.8 version to include magnet link function. That was fast.

Microsoft has just released their own antivirus and malware software called Security Essentials. It provides free anti-virus and spyware protection and cleaning for Windows XP/Vista/7 computers. This software supercedes the previous Windows Defender software that was Microsoft’s previous anti-malware application – but it didn’t have virus protection.

I’ve been a big proponent of using free antivirus solutions (such as AVG and AntiVir) and Microsoft’s entry does seem like a very good option. It ties in well with the OS and first reports show it is just as effective as any other scanner out there.

For a detailed rundown on Microsoft Security Essentials, check out the Ars Technica review.

Be aware that anti-virus scanners don’t play well together so you’ll want to disable or remove any other anti-virus programs before installing Microsoft Security Essentials.

There is a relatively new site called Super User that has been developed by some very well known tech gurus including one of my favorite – How-To Geek. The site is a combination of  Digg/Reddit, wiki, and forum and at its core it allows you to ask a question and get answers back from the techie masses.

The site is specifically for hardware and software questions and more details about the types of questions and answers can be found in the Super User FAQ and About pages, but the basics are: if your computer is doing something you don’t understand or you have a question about using your computer, Super User is the place to go.

Besides just asking questions you can watch the hot topics to see what interesting items the Super User community is discussing as well as search through to see if someone else may have had the same question and already found an answer.

As a moderator, the How-To Geek has written up an excellent run down on what exactly the hope of Super User is and here is the line that make me truly support this site:

“Super User was created by a group of guys that really believe in putting the reader first.”

This site has the potential to be the best tech support resource on the internet with tons of common users and techie geeks working together to make computing just that much easier for us all.

There’s a weird bug in Firefox that when watching videos on YouTube or Hulu you will see a little video lag every 10 seconds or so… and luckily someone figured out how to fix it.

The fix was presented quite some time ago actually but I only just came across it and it has made watching online video so much more pleasant – and it’s an easy fix.

1. Open Firefox and in the Location/Address Bar type in about:config and hit Enter.
2. You are now looking at some of the advanced functions that can be customized.
3. In the “Filter” line at the top of the list (where your cursor should already be blinking) type in session and it will automatically reduce the listings.
4. Now find “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double click it.
   That number is how many milliseconds between the times that Firefox saves your current browsing session in case of a crash and 10000 milliseconds equals 10 seconds – the same amount of time between video freezes.
5. Change that number to something different. 300000 is 5 minutes and 120000 is 2 minutes. I actually switched mine to 600000, which is 10 minutes, because I don’t worry about session saving much.

That’s it. You should now have much smoother video playback at YouTube.

UPDATE: With HTML5 being used at YouTube and Vimeo now, it would be beneficial to switch to an HTML5 compatible browser such as Chrome and Safari (at the time of this writing). Firefox will be supported on those sites soon as well.

If you are in the market for a new PC but don’t need one right away it is a good idea to wait a little bit. Windows 7 will be released on October 22nd and it’s a huge improvement over Vista. It may not be a soon enough release for a back to school computer, but it is definitely in time for the holidays.

Also keep in mind that the new OS X operating system 10.6 and code named “Snow Leopard” will be out soon as well.  OS X is much cheaper as a stand alone purchase than Windows so upgrade costs aren’t quite as high but still worth consideration.

Lifehacker just posted their list of essential free apps for windows.  It’s an excellent list of programs that will have you doing pretty much everything you need on your PC without paying a dime.  As a nice little extra they’ve bundled them all together in a single download for you.

Some off the list that I definitely recommend:

• Foxit Reader – better than Adobe for handling PDF file viewing
• Firefox – definitely love Firefox
• 7-zip – great zip/archive program (like winzip)
• TeraCopy – replacement for windows file copy/move functions
• KeePass – password database
• AVG – excellent antivirus program

Take a look at the link above to see more programs and details about each one.

I recently purchased a Kindle 2 and I am very, very happy with the product. I know discussions of the Kindle can spark some debates so I’m going to avoid all of those by stating “I like it but if you don’t that’s fine too”. So lets skip along happily now and discuss what I wanted to discuss with you which is specifically about reading manga on the Kindle. Yup… you can read japanese comic books on the Kindle very easily. You can also load your own images for viewing as well using the same process.

So how do we accomplish this amazing feat? Actually, very easily. The program to use is called Mangle.

Mangle does an awesome job of converting images to be optimized for the Kindle display and processed to work correctly with the navigation system of the device.

See for yourself. The following image was converted using Mangle and loaded onto my Kindle 2. The left side image is the original, the middle one is the converted, and the right side image is displaying on the Kindle 2. Click on the thumbnails to see the original sizes.

So as you can see it looks pretty darn good. You can see a couple other examples at the Mangle website.

Mangle runs as a stand alone executable so you can run it directly with no installation necessary. It’s a very basic layout so it’s very easy to use. You pick either a set of images or a directory of images, click the gear icon to get it started, tell it where to put the converted images and then it converts them for you. That’s it!

Once it’s converted, you will plug in your Kindle and create a folder on it called “pictures”. Put the new book you created (the folder with all the images) into the Pictures directory and you are all set. It should show up in your book list using the name of the folder as the title.  If you don’t see it, press Alt+Z to refresh the listing.

You can also use Mangle to convert pictures into a photo album or convert pictures to use as custom screen savers.

Yes… custom screen saver. It requires hacking the Kindle a bit but is very easy and can be reversed. Go to the Kindle 2 Screen Saver Hack wiki page at MobileRead and it will walk you through using it. The image you see above is one of my custom screen saver images.

This program works on Windows and Linux and is free to use. Feel free to post any questions and I’ll be happy to help out.

UPDATE: The Kindle 2.3 update breaks the screen saver hack. The updated version can be found at JYA’s site.

UPDATE 2: The Kindle 2.3 update has some new image viewer options. For some it has caused issues and for others it has not. If you have any issues, the new PDF support has worked pretty well for manga. IrfanView does a good job of converting the Mangle converted images to PDF (process: thumbnail viewer->select all->print to PDF using CuteWriter).

UPDATE 3: After speaking with Amazon customer service and tech support it seems the “developers” have decided that any use of the built in image viewer is considered a hack and therefore note support. After bothering them over and over about it though I was told an image viewer would be developed in a future release. I’m assuming that it will be part of the new active content  that is coming to the Kindle (think “App Store”) and the recent release of the Kindle KDK (Kindle Development Kit). This could easily mean a dedicated comic book reader as well.

Many people ask me about BitTorrent and to be honest, it’s not easy to explain. I’m going to try here but I’m going to do it with lots of help.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol based around a distributed sharing system and optimized for large files.

While completely accurate that description isn’t really useful in getting started with BitTorrent.

If you’ve ever used file sharing programs before like Napster, Kazaa or Limewire … BitTorrent is nothing like those. To explain how BitTorrent is different I’m going to get some help because as simple as it is to use, the initial understanding on how to use it is can be confusing.

I’m going to send you to a bit of learning before we move on to a couple other topics. First, Lifehacker has two guides to getting started with BitTorrent; a beginner’s guide and an intermediate guide. You can skip the intermediate guide for now but definitely bookmark it for future reference. The other excellent guide is The Big Book of BitTorrent by Aibek. That is a free PDF book about 28 pages long… that’s more of a reference tool but will answer pretty much all of your quesitons. Start with the Lifehacker beginner’s guide…

Once you’ve looked through those items you’ll notice that you’ll need a program and some websites. The program handles the downloading and the websites are where you find the torrents.

If you didn’t read the guide here are the quick and dirty basics (but you may or may not understand them just from this little bit):

BitTorrent uses torrent files to connect your BitTorrent program with other people sharing the exact same file. So a torrent file for the movie Elephant’s Dream is like a bookmark or ticket that connects you to all the other people downloading/uploading the movie. People who have the entire file are called seeders and people who are still downloading the file are called leechers or peers. You will be connected to multiple people who have the same file and you will download pieces of the file from different people and others will download pieces from you. So you download the Elephant’s Dream torrent file and open it with your BitTorrent program which connects you to others to share the actual movie file of Elephant’s Dream.

So back to what you need… a program and some torrent sites. If you are on Windows I recommend uTorrent (it’s actually µTorrent using the metric presentation for “micro”) and for OS X and Linux I recommend Transmission. The uTorrent guides are very good as well for help in using BitTorrent even if you aren’t using uTorrent. Each program has a different interface but all BitTorrent applications work in a similar fashion so once you are familiar with one you can use pretty much any of them and it’s just a matter of extra features.

So you have the program and now you need to start sharing. This is where a good set of BitTorrent websites comes in handy. For beginners, I recommend The Pirate Bay and Mininova. Those sites should provide you with pretty much all the items you may be looking to download. Demonoid is also a popular location but requires membership and sometimes they aren’t open to new members – but you can get an invite if you ask around. The Pirate Bay is probably the most open and busy torrent tracker (the backend service that directs your torrent “ticket” or “bookmark”) so you’ll find lots of content there. Mininova also has a lot of content and is a bit more manageable in regards to browsing particular catagories.

A note on piracy… there are lots of laws and rules about piracy and some of them apply differently depending on your situation and the content. There are loopholes and so forth but put simply: if you didn’t pay for it, and you should have, then you are stealing. That being said, BitTorrent is not digital piracy… BitTorrent is just a system for transfering large files.

One last note… BitTorrent is a LOT safer than other file sharing services but you can still get infected if you download and install the wrong thing. Be sure to check through torrent site comments and run antivirus utilities just to be safe.

So that should provide you will all the information you need to get started with your file sharing. Don’t let the amount of information be too daunting … it really is easy to use.

Good luck and happy torrenting!