Chrome OS, The Cr-48 (ChromeBook) drop test

My little girl loves the Chromebook (my new name for this). She loves to type on it and put sticky finger prints on it. The notebook gives the illusion of sturdiness and ruggedness. I know it probably isn't ruggedized especially compared to some of the Panasonic laptops I have seen, but the black cover feels a little sturdier than most. So this morning I was typing away when my daughter decides she has had enough Blue's Clues and wants to help me with my typing. I quickly it close it and put it on the corner of my desk. Somehow it wasn't far enough over and it falls just over two and a half feet. When I can get my daughter away from it I open it back up and it works fine (so far). Now granted, if it had a hard drive and didn't have a way to stop the heads before it crashed to the ground (like ThinkPads do with their accelerometer), then I would probably have picked up a nearly dead laptop.

Chrome OS, what price privacy?

My Cr-48 has gotten slow. Why? It is my own fault. Too many extensions. Seriously, I have too many extensions. It slows the really fast Chrome browser to a crawl. If I go incognito, this puppy is fast and furious (the first one, not the second one, you know Vin Diesel). I don't like selling my soul one small piece at a time on the Internet. I know it is a strange world trying to live an online life and hide my identity. But I don't want a web site tracking me and I don't want Facebook snooping on every site I visit. My friends know me and if I have something worth sharing, I will, but otherwise, they don't care and I don't share.

I run the following extensions:

(see screen shot)


Actually the picture is just a sampling of the extensions I run.

I fun AdBlock to block ads (including Google Text ads, though it has an option to allow them). It was written by a former Google Engineer. I have run nearly the same plug-in when I was a Mozilla fan. I never knew Facebook had ads until one day I was using my wife's computer. What is with all these ads?

This same author wrote Disconnect and Facebook Disconnect. Facebook Disconnect makes sure you don't share any information with FAcebook. Disconnect makes sure you don't share information with pretty much anyone. In fact it works so well, I can't log onto Yahoo at all with that extension running so I have disabled it.

I use Ghostery, which shows who is trying to track me.

WOT is a web site reputation utility. It is based on votes and requires an account to use (something I hate). Sharing what does not need to be shared. When I do a Google search, if a site doesn't have a Green circle by it, then I usually don't visit it.

Last but not least I use Flashblock. Flashblock prevents Flash ads as well as pretty much any Flash unless I decide I want it. It doesn't work as easily as it did in Mozilla, but I do like it all the same.

If I had an extension wish list it would be for NoScript to have an extension for Chrome. I run this on Firefox and it blocks all JavaScript and Java. My Mac has never had spyware on it thanks to using all of these extensions. Sure, some sites aren't presented in their full glory, but my safety is more important than my web experience.

But...

All of these extensions slow down Chrome. It doesn't seem that bad on my Mac when I run these, but on Chrome OS, it drags it down. So I have to make a value judgement. Is my privacy worth more than speed? And I fairly evaluating Chrome OS if I run all these extensions? Or does running these extensions really test Chrome OS?

Chrome OS. "Will it blend?"

I just love the guys over at Blendtech. They blend some cool things. And now they have blended a Cr-48

How to drive a technician insane...

So today I have an engineer from a far away country helping me resolve an issue. He was copying a really large file (800+ meg) over to my hard drive via Webex. He seems to mention the file is done copying, but I realize he has uploaded the file to the wrong location. So here we are almost done downloading the file and I "move" it to the correct folder. I thought it was done. Needless to say, the guy goes ape. He quickly returns to his professional self, but it was funny to see him freak out. I felt bad about it as now we had to download the file all over again. But it was funny... His expression was basically like "For the humanity of the world..." I know he wanted to tell me I was a idiot. But it really was an accident.

Christmas gifts: Snow Leopard and iLife 11

So Santa was better to me than I deserved. I have an older MacBook so I did not rush out to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but I decided I wanted to upgrade to iLife 11. I do some video editing, photo editing (though I usually use Adobe Photoshop for that), and some music editing. I do like iPhoto's facial recognition. I know Picasa does the samething and I am not 100% sold on iPhoto's event approach,but Picasa has been changing and I am not has thrilled with it as I once was. With iMovie 11 they have added more transitions and it is more like other video editing apps I have used, so it is easier for me to use. GarageBand is such a fun app for creating music on the fly to use for DVD productions and for iMovie sequences. So I am really excited about the new updates. I didn't even run a new back up with Timemachine before starting the upgrade. I inserted the DVD and the install screen came up. I had expected it to say something about upgrade but it did not. I went ahead anyway as my backup before Thanksgiving was good enough for me. I usually have Timemachine running all the time but my son borrowed my desk and my stuff was scattered everywhere. It took about 56 minutes and involved two reboots. Before the upgrade I had only 12 gig of free space on my hard drive. After the install I had 21 gig free. I had read Snow Leopard was more efficient and that showed it. My MacBook came with a 120 gig hard drive so I was worried about my disk utilization. On of the downsides of a MacBook is even though Snow Leopard is 64 bit, the kernel that works on this Mac is 32 bit. As lots of things do not have 64 bit drivers, this isn't a huge drawback but it gets in my craw to know I am less than optimal.

Next I installed iLife 11. I will tell you about that in my next post.

Chrome OS, What it can and can't do so far

So this has become my beside the bed machine. I have always had a dream of having a laptop or tablet that made it easy to get on quickly to check weather or news or look something up on Google. This netbook fits the bill nicely for that. Plus it isn't a huge machine so it isn't hard to pick up. The fast resume time makes it idea for quick searches and information. So for these tasks I am loving this.

But I love visiting Amazon and digital downloads of  music and books for Kindle (though I do not have a Kindle device, I simply read on screen). The music situation seems to me to be the biggest show stopper, though I admit I had not being able to do Netflix on this device.  But I love music and while I do have an iPod, I actually prefer listening to music on my laptop or PC at work. But it is all duplication of effort. I have to carry my current music on an USB device and copy my current likes to work. If my music was in the cloud and I could use any MP3 player with it, then that would be awesome. Even Microsoft's Skydrive will let me upload music so if Google could hurry up and fix this missing spot or partner with someone to allow me to upload my music library and play it anywhere, that would be awesome. There are rumors of a Google Music store in the works coming first of the year. It seems Google has taken it upon itself to compete against every product Apple or Microsoft come out with.

I used to responsible for anything that ran on a Microsoft platform. My boss would come to me and say, Roy, this runs on Windows so I need you to take care of it. So I was responsible for Exchange, SQL, IIS, System Management Server, and anything that ran on Microsoft platforms, but in the end I had to juggle so much that I could only hit the high water marks and never ever did I have time to ensure things were the best they could be on any one system. I see the same problem for Google. If you try to do everything, you can't necessarily do everything well. Jack of all trades and master of some. That was me and that is the direction Google has been headed for some time.

Chrome OS, about:flags

Okay. so if you haven't come across this feature, try typing about:flags in your Chrome browser on your Cr-48. This gives you additional options like turning on the media player, allow more access to the file system, etc. As it warns these are experimental features. But take a look. I will let you know my results.

about:flags