Chromium Web Browser (Chrome)

As much as I love Mozilla Firefox, There are some pages that run poorly on it, one in particular is Launchpad.net, which I frequent, and which slows down almost any machine to a crawl when displayed via Firefox in Ubuntu.

I also find it quite useful to have more than one browser when doing web editing.

Chromium is my close second choice in the Ubuntu world for several reasons.

One is that it's built quite differently from Firefox, and is not a WebKit browser, which is built on Firefox technology.

The second is that Chrome, and it's Linux counterpart Chromium, are becoming (or are) quite popular, which helps you to see how your webpage will react to an up and coming web browser.

Enough of the reasons why I use it, here is what the
Google people have to say about their product:

*From the webpage "http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/make/features.html?brand=CHMB".

Chrome is designed to be fast in every possible way. It's fast to start up, fast to search and load web pages, and fast to run all your web apps.

Chrome is built to help you browse more safely and securely on the web. Chrome's sandboxing, Safe Browsing, and auto-update technologies help protect you against phishing and malware attacks.

Chrome's browser window is streamlined, clean and simple. Its combined search and address bar makes it easy to search and navigate the web, all from one box.

The Chrome Web Store is an online marketplace where you can discover thousands of apps, extensions, and themes for Chrome.



My suggestion is to use the wrench icon to add your favorite start up page, and to add a home button, both found on the main "wrench" options page.

Other than that Chromium is pretty much ready to go upon installation.

In all fairness I must point out that the actual page for chromium itself differs, and is found here: http://www.chromium.org/

What the good people at Chromium.org have to say specifically about Chromium (not Chrome):

"Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code."

If your in the market for another browser on your Linux machine, consider Chromium, I have found it to be rather reliable.

XChat, open the comm

If you are an Ubuntu user or have another version of Linux, then you are probably a user of x-chat, or irssi.

The Ubuntu and Linux community offer extensive support for most if not all Linux distro's.

This support is run through what are called "IRC" channels.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat.

X-chat is my first choice for talking with the people at Ubuntu's IRC chat room.

I also suggest installing irssi, just in case something happens to your distro and you need help, or if you are a fan of the console, or don't use X.

Ubuntu's IRC channel can be reached at irc.freenode.org, the channel being #ubuntu.

If you are interested in this program, which is available for Linux and Windows, you can download it at:

http://xchat.org/

If you use Linux, including Ubuntu, you can install it by either using "sudo apt-get install xchat", or by using the synaptic package manager found in the system menu, then administration.
(Atleast for Ubuntu you can find it there.)

IrfanView Image viewer and editor

Irfanview is my favorite image editor and viewer because of it's speed of use (by user) and many many formats it can use.

I also love the add ons available for it, which make it almost as good an audio and video player as vlc, even though that's not irfanview's intent.

The website states:

"IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7.
(click here for IrfanView EULA)

It is designed to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

IrfanView seeks to create unique, new and interesting features, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole "creativity" is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView has been stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, for 10+ years).

IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support.
One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support.
The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.

Some IrfanView features:

* Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
* Multi language support
* Thumbnail/preview option
* Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
* Toolbar skins option
* Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
* Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
* Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
* Fast directory view (moving through directory)
* Batch conversion (with image processing)
* Multipage TIF editing
* File search
* Email option
* Multimedia player
* Print option
* Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
* Change color depth
* Scan (batch scan) support
* Cut/crop
* IPTC editing
* Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
* Screen Capturing
* Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
* Lossless JPG rotation
* Unicode support
* Many hotkeys
* Many command line options
* Many PlugIns
* Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
* No registry changes without user action/permission!
* and much much more"

I actually use this program in Ubuntu using wine, because it is just that much better, in my honest opinion, than the alternatives.

If you are interested in this software you can download it here:
http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

(I would also download the add ons pack for it here as well.)

The official website is here:

http://www.irfanview.com/

P.S. to Linux users, as of Tuesday, May 31 2011...

If you want to use this in linux, I suggest getting the Portable Apps version, available here:
http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/irfanview_portable

Removing Facebook Apps

Do you have that Facebook app that's either annoying or improper and you want to remove it?

Click here: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications

Then click on the "x" on the right of the app you want removed.

I hope this helped others out there with an annoying facebook app.

Kompozer your website

If you do any website editing, this might be your best friend.

As Kompozer's Official website states:

"Easy web authoring

Finally, a top-notch WYSIWYG web page program for the rest of us! Now there's no need to pay a little fortune for a program to create and edit great-looking web pages, including powerful and easy to use CSS capabilities.

KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs.

KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Reliable technology inside


KompoZer is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla; it's a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its remarkable support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers the best authoring platform on the market. Its architecture based on XUL makes it the most extensible editing tool ever.

KompoZer is a stand-alone tool; hence its small size and fast speed.

Those who are familiar with the DreamWeaver interface will feel right at home with KompoZer:

WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.
Details about key features and capabilities

FTP site manager

With KompoZer, all the sites you have specified in your Publishing Settings become browseable in a sidebar. You can get a tree view of a site, la Explorer's folders pane, or a one-dir-only view, la Explorer's directory view. It is also possible to filter files and show all files, or only HTML documents or image files. The browsing area also allows to show for each file its size and the date of last modification.

A new color picker

KompoZer has a new extended colorpicker, more conformant to what most users are used to. Set a color from its red blue and green components, or its hue saturation and brightness. Or just use your mouse to pick up the color you want.

Tabs!

One of Mozilla Firefox's killer features is now available in KompoZer! Have one window only on your screen and edit several documents at once, each document having its own Undo/Redo stack! Just glance at the tabs to know if a document needs to be saved or not!

CSS editor

Create stylesheets easily and manage the styles attached to your documents. You can see your style settings applied '"live" to the document you're editing.

A dash of style(s)

With KompoZer, right-click on any element in the hierarchical toolbar at the bottom of the window and set directly its style properties.

Customizable toolbars

Just customize your toolbar and show only the buttons you want/need.

Forms

Take advantage from a XUL-based UI to edit all your forms, and edit all your form elements.

Cleaner markup

KompoZer contains some machinery to get rid of most of those annoying
. Combined with the ability to call W3C's HTML validator from within KompoZer you'll make valid, clean documents.

XFN

When you create a new link to an external resource, or when you edit an existing link, you can now add XHTML Friends Network information to say that the owner of that resource is someone you know and trust.

Visible marks

In a complex page layout, you often need to see visible carriage returns and block borders. KompoZer can now do that for you. And of course, everything is controlled by a CSS stylesheet so you can customize those marks and replace them by your own.

Table/Cell resizing rulers

On the left and top side of the opened tab you will find the convenient table resizing rulers which will help you easily adjust the size of rows and columns in any table in the web page you design.

Automated Spellchecker

The integrated in-line spellchecker will underline all misspelled words as you type to ensure correct spelling throughout the entire web page."

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What I like most is the easy editor built with a decent html editor, very usefull.

I used to use bluefish and firefox... this combines all that into one package.

I still suggest checking your work with Firefox, sometimes Kompozer's view and Firefox's are not one in the same.

If you are interested in this software, here is the website:
http://kompozer.net/

OSDisc may I have some more?

OSDisc is a website that sells you free operating systems...

That's right, they sell you FREE operating systems, but their is a purpose.

OSDisc is perfect for those of us who have limited bandwidth, or are still stuck on super slow dial up.

I personally have purchased about 20 os's from them in my time.

I have 3 on the way, right now.

If you are like me, give OSDisc a try:
http://www.osdisc.com/

Watchtower Library 2010 in Ubuntu under Wine

I am a Jehovah's Witness, and one of my interests is always in getting a digital publication offered by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania to run under Ubuntu, it is called the Watchtower Library.

As of the 2010 edition, the normal wine offered in the repositories of Ubuntu 10.10 (and earlier versions) is no longer sufficient to run the program.

In particular, it will always report an error, and then close, being non functional.

I figured out how to solve this problem, and thought it a good idea to help any other brothers and sisters out there that are a linux user and also like to use the Watchtower Library.

Here are the steps I took:

Open the Software Sources menu by going to Applications->Ubuntu Software Center, then selecting Edit->Software Sources. Choose the Other Software tab and click Add.
System->Administration->Software Sources->Other Software

* Some of you may not have the menu item "Software Sources", to gain access to the area I mention here, you can find the same area for entry under System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Once in Synaptic, click on settings, then repositories, and you will have the same menu mentioned above.

Then, copy and paste the line below into the APT Line: area.
ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Then click the "add source" button. it is below the APT Line: area on the same window.

Once Ubuntu reloads the new repositories, click this link:
"click this link to install the wine1.3 package."

This link is found on this webpage:
http://www.winehq.org/download/deb

Once this process is complete, if you have already installed Watchtower Library 2010, it should now just work without the error.

I hope my little how to on this problem was helpful.

Most of this information is available at 'Wine HQ' under downloads, and then Ubuntu. I did some small editing in order to be as clear as possible.

Also, this was not intended to in any way encroach upon the rights of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, this information is released solely as a remedy to a technical issue with Wine 1.2 or earlier releases and the Watchtower Library, edition 2010.

(P.S. Some people might find that once the library is running all the letters are blocks. This can be fixed by pressing F2, or by going to the Library option on the top left, and then under the text tab choosing another font category or type, i.e. browser text, printer text, etc for category, or arial, freesans, comic sans, etc in the font type.)

This fix may be undone by system updates, or upgrades. Just follow the steps again to repair the non functioning Watchtower Library.