My best friend and I have a rather unhealthy relationship going. I don’t know when it started exactly but at some point late in 2005, we both stepped onto this path of unending, interminably exciting, all consuming and consequently unhealthy path of not just chasing after electronics and gadgets but also synchronising and paralleling our purchases.
Posted on September 13th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 1 Comment »
When the Palm Treo 600 first came out in 2003 and I became the proud owner of one, I thought then that I had found the ideal gadget. The Treo 600 was one of the earliest of the better integrated PDA-cum-mobile phones and I thought it was in general wonderfully conceived and executed. The one criticism that I had of it - and it is a fairly major one which eventually led to my no longer using it - was the relatively poorly built hardware. My unit, like many others, developed a buzzing sound problem in the speaker that eventually became so bad that the phone function was unusable. I stopped using the Treo in late-2005 and went back to a relatively basic mobile phone, the LG U880.
Posted on September 5th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 2 Comments »
Spring has arrived in Canberra. For the first time in months, the mercury went above 20C today. In fact it went up as high as 21.3C at 1500H according to the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology.
For the first time in weeks, I did an honest day’s work. It’s still not as much as I would like to have seen myself doing but at least it was a fair effort today, though frankly, I’m getting a little tired of reading about the political economy of Korea (which I’ve been doing for the past four weeks)… in fact, I dare say, I’m getting a little tired of reading about my topic in general. After about two years of working on this research project, it has become far too familiar and somewhat repetitive. Alas, it’s a bed I’ve made for myself and I’ve got to lie in it.
Today, or last night to be more precise, also brought with it an interesting new twist. The guy I’ve been dating up in Sydney, let’s call him… err… MJT (!), got around to creating his profile on Facebook and in the process we’ve linked our profiles together as being “in a relationship” !!! I’m not sure what this means exactly… though I’m sure it means something… but consistent with the approach I’ve taken so far in this relationship, I’m not going to analyse it!
Today would also have brought one other new development in my life, or rather new object, or to be more specific, gadget. For many reasons, some quite immediate, I needed a new mobile and I bought a Nokia E61i over the internet a few days ago. It would have been delivered today if not for my own silliness in having it sent to a less than ideal location. I suspect, or hope rather, it will be delivered tomorrow. In the meantime, I did get work done today instead of being yet again distracted, so all’s well…
Posted on August 27th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Life!, Tech, work | 1 Comment »
I’ve had a head start on the browser-face-off. I’ve spent pretty much one whole day, and then some, customising Firefox but, with the exception of one feature that I use a lot on Maxthon, I’ve pretty much replicated Maxthon on Firefox!
First off, I should say that I really, really would like to love and use Firefox. Not because it’s supposedly more secure (I don’t hold much faith in that claim, nor is it a criteria in my choosing browsers), nor because most of my friends are using it but because it has some fun and useful extensions, or add-ons, that I wouldn’t mind having/using but that I don’t, so far, find so absolutely essential that I would abandon Maxthon. So… I really, really want to like and love Firefox but it has to provide me with those features of Maxthon’s that I have come to find so integral to my browsing experience.
Thus, I spent most of the last 24 hours thrawling through Firefox’s add-ons directory in the search for add-ons that would replicate the features that I use so much on Maxthon. After much downloading, installing, re-starting, uninstalling and re-starting again, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of mimicking Maxthon on Firefox.
There is one more feature on Maxthon that I’ve been trying to replicate to no avail and that is the ability to map the keyboard’s function-keys to URLs in order to open these URLs with the click of just one key. There is an extension called “Bookmark Keys” but that doesn’t seem to work at the moment, and even if it did, it would have meant clicking two-keys rather than just one.
This brings me to the following comment: all these add-ons are a great feature of Firefox. It gives users great flexibility in customising their browser almost exactly as they want (provided the add-ons exist). However, because all these add-ons are developed by different people, it is not surprising that at some point, these add-ons will start to clash either with one another or with Firefox itself and either not work (in the best case scenario) or cause problems in the browser. Maxthon, on the other hand, comes with heaps of features out-of-the-box. These features are guaranteed to work and have been pretty much well integrated into the browser. However, the scant availability of plug-ins for Maxthon means that the ability to customise the browser is much more limited.
That said, there are many virtues in having features built into the browser, not least of which is this issue of security that so many laud upon Firefox. After a very long time, and I mean years here, of trouble free browsing on Maxthon, I finally re-encountered the problem of browser hijack and pesty advertisements today on surprise, surprise Firefox. It was a page/site that I have many times visited on Maxthon without a hitch. I was disappointed to discover that Firefox doesn’t come with an ad-blocker out of the box. Maxthon does. I had to install “Adblock Plus” before I was safe and secure on Firefox… or so I think… hmph!
Next: some of the “fun” things that I do like about Firefox!
Read Matt’s initial experience with Maxthon here.
Posted on July 22nd, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 5 Comments »
I’m excited. I’m so very excited.
My best mate and I have challenged each other to an internet browser face-off. This is gong to be visionary, path-breaking stuff. And we’re going to blog about it. It’ll be like our own reality show!!
For a very long while now, I’d say more than a few years, I’ve been using Maxthon instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I’ve learned to love and appreciate the many features that it has, but more importantly I’ve become so accustomed and comfortable with it that it’s proving an obstacle just trying another browser, let alone migrating entirely. Matt has indirectly tried endlessly to help me test Firefox to no avail. I keep finding shortcomings with Firefox and give up within an hour or two. After many trials, I’ve concluded that the one feature that Firefox does not yet have but which Maxthon does and which I have found to be integral to my internet browsing experience is this: the ability to highlight a URL (that is not hyperlinked, i.e. just plain text) on a page and then to use ONE mouse gesture to open that highlighted URL in a new tab. Similarly, with Maxthon, I can highlight a word or a series of words on a page and then to use ONE mouse gesture to search those words (using my default search engine, in this case Google) in a new tab. This is a feature I use constantly and rely upon quite heavily. It saves me a lot of typing, mouse clicks and time and it’s something that I’ve been very reluctant to give up. While some Firefox plugins that I’ve tried can perform similar functions, they’ve usually involved extra clicks of the mouse - this is just not good enough for me.
There is another feature on Maxthon that I’ve also come to rely upon quite a bit, though it’s not so much a deal-breaker: on Maxthon, you can customise the internet search function such that you can use an “alias” or code to use different search engines quite quickly with minimal typing. For instance, if I type “am TEST” in the URL bar, Maxthon will automatically return a page from Amazon US with the search results for “TEST”, “am” being the code I had set for Amazon US. If I type “mw TEST” in the URL bar, Maxthon will automatically return a page from Merriam Webster’s online dictionary with the search results for “TEST”, “mw” being the code I had set for Merriam Webster. This is pretty nifty and extremely useful especially if you do a lot of internet searches and you can customise it to search almost any search engine that exists out there.
Anyway, Matt and I decided, or rather stumbled on the idea of an internet browser face-off. Matt has been a long time user of Firefox and I’ve not previously been able to persuade him to try Maxthon. So from Monday, 23 July 2007, we will each swap browsers for a week and blog about our experience. I will use nothing but Firefox for a week and Matt Maxthon. We will both find our internet browsing experience confusing and frustrating and we will bitch about it constantly but hopefully at the end of the week, we might have a more informed decision of which browser we each individually definitely prefer. But we’re both definitely adamant that Internet Explorer sucks!
Posted on July 21st, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 3 Comments »
