John Reel’s Blog

When Google Chrome came out, I switched to it as my default browser because of one significant feature:  Each tab runs in its own process.  I was using Firefox as my default browser before and I frequently had to kill all my tabs because one of them would start taking up 100% CPU power.  Of course, I couldn’t figure out which one, and killing FireFox killed all the windows and tabs.

With Chrome that isn’t a problem in theory.  If one tab is causing problems, I simply kill it, and the rest keep going.

However, Chrome has loads of other problems.  

• Rendering a page when you switch tabs usually takes just an instant, but sometimes it can take 30 seconds or more.
• Several pages do not work or display correctly in Chrome, including the web mail on my server (Horde mail) and the new otherinbox that I’m testing.  So, two of the sites I use the most don’t work right in Chrome.  
• While the way Chrome handles downloads is cool, I cannot download Wordpress or Wordpress plugins with Chrome.  The download button on that site just doesn’t do anything.  There are other sites with the same problem.
• Video is a nightmare on Chrome.  I’ve even downloaded the latest developers release that supposedly fixes it.  As soon as streaming video loads up, Chrome usually makes my computer very sluggish.  Switch to Firefox and all goes well.
• I also find the back button frustrating with Chrome.  When I click back to a form submission, it doesn’t work the way other browsers do, and I usually cannot get back to where I’m trying to go.
• Finally, when one Chrome tab is doing anything bad, I cannot access any of the other tabs, or windows, which makes little sense, as they are supposed to be separate processes.  Sometimes it locks up my entire computer while it figures things out.

Overall, I like a lot about Chrome.  I could write a big list of reasons why I prefer chrome, but it simply isn’t working for me.   Apparently I’m not the only one, as people are switching back to IE and Firefox.  Chrome’s early market penetration has started slipping.

Next I’m trying Safari.  I’ve used it on other computers to test web sites before and found it to be shockingly fast.  Hopefully it will actually be usable.  Sadly, I had to switch to Firefox to download Safari, because Chrome wouldn’t download it.

Update: Apparently MashedLife is a direct (and poor) word-for-word rip-off of www.PassPack.com.  Having written software that gets poorly copied by other companies, right down to the marketing material, I can relate to how annoying it is.  Don’t use MashedLife.  Use PassPack.com instead.

Just the other day, I was lamenting at the end of this post about how I’d have to use some sad password manager that only kinda did what one would expect.

And now, a new free service called MashedLife.com has been released that does it perfectly.  You can now manage all your passwords online and login to any site with one click, from any browser, on any computer, with no downloads. This solves all the problems with logging onto web sites!

It’s sheer brilliance and I’m now switching to MashedLife for all my password management.  And of course, I signed up with my new OtherInbox email account, so I can easily manage the emails they send.  Within a minute of signing up, I put my OtherInbox login information into MashedLife and added the Login bookmark to my bookmark list.  Now when I go to that site, I just click the bookmark and it logs me in.  Genius.

By the way, the signup was really quick and they have the coolest “captcha” ever.  The only problem is that their Terms Of Service didn’t open in a popup, so I had to fill in the form again, after I clicked it.

I feel like computers are finally starting to get useful after all these years!

Why the heck didn’t I think of this?

Last week I reached a milestone of 30,000 unread e-mails.  Beat that!

Over the years, I’ve come up with various methods to deal with all the lists I sign up to.  For instance, since I had my own server, I setup a catch-all e-mail account for lists, and then I would sign up with ListName@MyDomain.com for each list.  Then if I got spam email going to one of those addresses, I knew who the culprit was, and could just redirect that email address to null and void.

That got tedious so I eventually just made up a single e-mail address for all the lists I’m on and all the products I buy and just let it collect there.  For a while I would setup rules to collate those emails into separate folders, but that was too much work so they now all end up in one big-ass folder.  Sometimes I glance at the subjects for something interesting, but I hardly ever read them.  

Well, someone took those two approaches and combined them into a new service called OtherInbox.  I just nabbed one of the 500 beta invites from TechCrunch, and boy am I happy!

This beautiful service lets me create email addresses at their domain, one for each list, just like I used to do.  Then it automatically removes any emails coming to that address that don’t belong, meaning I don’t have to bother with the spam or redirecting those emails to null.  Then it goes a step further and organizes all that email by each list.  

It’s everything I wanted for dealing with lists, rolled up into one, and automated!

Now, I just need to setup something on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 1,000 workers to move my 30,000 unread e-mails into there, unsubscribe me from all my lists, and resubscribe me with the my new OtherInbox email address.  lol.

Having had hard drives crash over the years, I know how important backups are.  Many years ago, I was making a backup of all my important data to my re-writeable DVD.  It was such a hassle that I only got around to it every three or four months, but at least I was doing something.

But, right in the middle of that backup, it all went to hell.  The computer crashed, the hard drive died, and the backup was corrupted.  I lost years of work and had no backup.  In an attempt to recover from this complete cluster-f**k, I sent the hard drive to the kind of specialists who wear space suits and work in a clean room and recover your data bit-by-bit.  They quoted me a very big number (over a grand) and said it was unlikely I’d get anything back anyway.

I told them to toss the drive and I very seriously considered shutting down my business that day.

Flash forward to today.  I now pay a measly $49.95/year/computer for unlimited backups of my data on Carbonite.  It’s a great “set it and forget it” system for making sure everything important is automatically, always backed up to the cloud.

The peace of mind of knowing everything is always backed up is wonderful.  I continually recommend this service to people, though most seem to be more comfortable with having their data on a DVD where they feel in control.  Of course they only make backups once in a while, and if their house burns down, the DVD’s are going with it and they lose all their photos and financial records.  But that’s their problem.  I’m safe with Carbonite.

Yesterday, something new came out on the market called DropBox, which is something I’ve been waiting for.  DropBox allows you to sync your information between computers, have shared folders between friends/colleagues, or grab your important files from any Internet connected computer.  It is totally seamless, so anyone can just start using it.

Up until now, I’ve been using Google docs for shared access to files, which is okay, but loses a lot of the formatting of Word and the accessibility of having my files on my own computer where I can use them offline.   Dropbox fixes both those problems, and at just the right time as I’m moving mostly offline.

Finally, I can put all my important files onto DropBox and they will be automatically synced between my computers, or friends who I share them with.  They have free accounts with 2GB of data, and for $99.99/year, you get 50GB.  I probably will be fine with the free account, but have no issue whatsoever paying for this great service.

Just to make things even easier, I’m also following this advice and installing PasswordSafe to create and manage complex passwords.  Then I can just keep that encrypted file in my DropBox folder so I can access my passwords from anywhere.  It isn’t too hard to get passwords into a web site, but it would be  nice if it had browser plug-ins.  Of course, my browsers can remember my passwords on my laptop, so I only need to do it manually when I’m elsewhere.

My work-life is getting easier to manage today.