Google Chrome offers a new perspective on the browsing experience

I have been testing the beta version of the Google Chrome browser for the last few days. I am redoing a video of it now after having some technical difficulties. All of my personal issues aside, the browser is very promising. While it doesn’t boast the community backing of the Firefox browser yet, I would suspect that by the time it is launched in it’s final version it will start to close that gap and be more expandable via third party developers.

Watch me download and install Google Chrome.

Getting to the nitty gritty of the browser it is very fast to install, use and uninstall if you don’t like it. Some of the features that it boasts such as the dynamic tabs is rather cool (You have to see it to believe it). The crash control features are a God sent. How many times have you had an unresponsive tab or window and lost your entire browser session because of it. Say goodbye bad browser, Google Chrome has included a task manager feature whereby an unresponsive tab can be closed without affecting the browsing experience of your other windows.

The incognito mode is cool if you are working in a corporate environment where big brother is constantly watching. This mode enables you to surf the web without adding entries into your History file. Typically, when you visit a page it is recorded and essentially a trail of your web surfing is created.  Incognito prevents all of that, but it retains any downloaded files or bookmarks created during that session.

One other thing that should be mentioned about this browser is the Home Page that you are given whenever you open a new tab. When you first navigate to Google Chrome or create a new tab with Google chrome you have a page the shows your most visited or favorite pages listed as thumbnails. This enables you to visually recognize where you want to go and rapidly get there. You also see your most recently bookmarked sites among other things.

Overall, I would give this browser a 7 out of 10. It has not arrived, but it does show promise. Check it out. You might end up crossing over.

Watch and Learn how to get Ubuntu linux running in a Virtual Machine

Hot off the press, if you were scared to try out linux for the first time this tutorial should ease some of your anxieties. The video shows how to get VMware Server software, then install it and create a virtual machine and lastly install the latest version of Ubuntu in the newly created virtual machine. You will need to already have a disk burned with the latest Ubuntu distro (check the multimedia posts for that). After creating the virtual machine you can play it in the Vmware Player instead of using the Server application.

This tutorial is for educational purposes only.  Use at your own discretion. Enjoy.

This video is free to the community. For best results please allow the video to download before playing.
total time: 17 minutes

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Where did my sound go? Firefox 3 flaw

Here I am sampling some files to create a nice intro for my video tutorials and I can’t hear anything.  So I take a look at my speakers, is the power on? Yes. Let’s turn up the speakers, nope that doesn’t work. How about restarting the browser, nope that doesn’t work either. Ok, I reluctantly fall back to Internet Explorer 7 and voila! I hear sound again. Let me check the master volume controls on my PC, no such luck. I’m getting tired so I quit for the night and think maybe tomorrow it will fix itself.

OK tomorrow is now and I still don’t have sound, NO Youtube, No internet videos or music. Quick search on google for “no sound in firefox” reveals there are many people having the same problem with a bunch of different suggestions. Cut to the chase, the one that worked for me was to disable and re-enable the Flash Shockwave plug-ins in Firefox.

Go to Tools-> Add ons -> Plug ins->  disable both Shockwave Flash and Shockwave Flash Director, then enable both again. Close the browser for good measure and you should be ok. This worked on my windows xp box. I haven’t tested it on my ubuntu install, but it should affect that also.

I’m not sure if mozilla was rushing on this one but there is no excuse for that one. This should have been caught and a fix implemented. Good thing we have the community.

Why I chose Wordpress over Joomla for this site?

I have been a fan of Joomla for a while, it was actually one of the first open source applications that I actually discovered. I have created many websites using Joomla for both pleasure and profit, in fact, I still maintain a few. On this site I toyed with Joomla for a while, but I recently switched over to Wordpress (WP). I had no real previous exprerience with WP other than installing it a few time on my hosting account. Few things I want to briefly touch on that made me jump ship. Learning Curve, Backend, Stability and Speed.

Learning curve- WP has a way shorter learning curve in my opinion, it took all of about a day to figure out how everything is held together. I am still learning Joomla. To this day I am scared to even try certain upgrades on Joomla in fear of crashing my site (I’ve been there more times than I care to remember). I installed WP, installed a theme, and transitioned my content in a days time. (took more than a day cause I had to go to work- You know work right!?)

Backend- The Backend of WP just looks cool coming from Joomla. I love hitting the Dashboard and it tells me everything that I need to know such as number of posts, number of comments, approved comments etc,. The Joomla backend shows what I can do and where I can go, but not in an inviting way (purely subjective opinion).

Stability- I know this could probably stir the pot for a few die hards, but I found extending WP using the plugins to be much smoother than installing Joomla components, mambots and modules. Everytime I installed a new module or component I had to pray that my site didn’t break. It was like sitting on pins and needles while waiting for the “successfully installed” message. By no means have I intsalled many plugins yet, but I have not seen catastrophic results from the ones that don’t work that well. If you have had another exprerience feel free to chime in.

Speed- Another reason that I chose WP is that it loads in half the time of my Joomla website did. I really made an effort to have a no frills and light weight website using Joomla. A simple speed test on www.websiteoptimization.com revealed that on a 56k connection my Joomla HTML loaded up in 8.67 seconds where as my WP HTML site loads up in only 3.45 seconds.

This topic WP vs. Joomla has been discussed all over the net, but I never really had to experience it first hand. I guess we all have to cross the road some time (you know, to get to the other side). On a serious note let me know your thoughts on it. Post a comment.

Burn a linux Operating System .iso file using Nero

You may already have Nero and need to burn image file. Such as a copy of Ubuntu Linux or any other flavor Linux that you may find. Just in case that is all that you have we could not leave out this video.

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Learn the last 3 ways to Print a PDF file using PDF Creator

In this video we are going to explore the Document adding, command line and windows explorer method of printing to a PDF using PDFCreator.

There is something about using the command line that makes me feel smart (maybe just me)

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Discover the First 2 methods of Printing Files to PDF using PDFCreator

This short video will explore the Printing methods of Printing from a document and also the Drag and Drop method.

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Learn How to Combine Documents into one PDF file using PDFCreator

This video will show you how to use PDFCreator to combine separate documents such as a Word, Excel and text file into one PDF document. Watch and learn.

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Learn How to create a Secure PDF document easily and cheaply

One of the cool things that PDFCreator can do is create password protected PDF documents. Watch and learn

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Start creating PDF files for FREE

If played around with this PDF creator called PDFCreator for a while now. At first I didn’t know what I was doing, the only thing I knew how to do was convert one page to a PDF file. I now know a good bit more. I will first share the install and basic usage. Check out the video.

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