I’ve always preferred the speed and UI of Chrome over Firefox, but stuck with Firefox as my primary browser because there were too many add-ons I relied on daily for work (web design/development) and personal browsing.

However, I finally set aside an afternoon to research available chrome extensions and discovered replacements for almost everything I use in Firefox.  I was initially concerned that installing too many extensions would impact performance, but discovered Chrome runs tabs and extensions in separate processes, so none of the extensions can affect the entire browser as add-ons do with Firefox.

So I’m now officially using Chrome as my primary browser.  I still think Firefox is a good browser, but with too many add-ons installed and tabs open – it slows to a crawl, which annoys me.   This isn’t a ‘Chrome is better than Firefox’ post.   Instead, it’s just my personal list of favorite chrome extensions that do the equivalent of what I did with Firefox for my work.

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Scenario:

After configuring your router or computer with the OpenDNS nameservers, you can no longer:

a) connect to WHS through the client console
b) establish a connection between two systems running KaVoom! KM

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Last week I upgraded three of my systems to the newest Windows 7 RC (build 7100). After doing so, I realized that the Netflix Movie Player would no longer install because it isn’t compatible with Windows Media Player 12.

It appeared my options were to either hack a rollback to WMP11 or switch over to the Netflix Silverlight player. I had  purposely been avoiding the latter because of all the [negative] [feedback]. Additionally, once you opt-in to use that player, you can’t revert your account back. So you’re stuck with it, whether you like it not.

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I finally got around to softmodding my old xbox last night in order to run XBMC on it.  It is something I’ve been wanting to do for at least a year now, but had procrastinated on because I thought it would be more complicated than it actually was.

I initially made the attempt last week, but because I didn’t have an Action Replay kit (the reader or memory card) – I followed another tutorial that outlined how to use a USB flash drive with a homemade xbox-to-usb cord for transferring the Linux os & game  save exploit needed to perform the softmod.

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Because the s-video out of my Mobility Radeon 9600 wouldn’t work with the open source drivers in Ubuntu 8.10, I decided to install ATI’s proprietary driver. There was nothing listed in Ubuntu’s Restricted Driver Manager for my card – so I downloaded the Catalyst Package directly from ATI’s website.

After several failed attempts using ATI’s automatic driver installer (which resulted in a black or garbled screen after rebooting), I eventually found a manual installation guide outlined at the Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki that worked for me.

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Until this past year, I’d always been a Windows user.  Unlike a lot of die hard geeks, I don’t think Microsoft is evil incarnate nor do I feel there is anything wrong with a company wanting to make a profit from their products.  However, because I have a curious mind and enjoy putzing around on my systems, I started exploring a few different Ubuntu-based Linux distros several months back.  Initially it started with Xubuntu on a system I was building for my 3 year old.  All of the hardware was pretty old, so I wanted OS that was lightweight and had minimal system requirements.

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