New Chromebook

Today, I upgraded my three-year-old Acer Chromebook 514 with a new model. The original served me incredibly well, but i got annoyed with serious performance issues, like login taking ages - just to enter the PIN. That with some other symptoms to me looked like not enough memory (4GB). One other thing that I regretted immediately after buying it about 3 years ago was the lack of a keyboard light.


So I got myself a newer model with 8GB and a backlit keyboard.

Installation was smooth and easy - switch it on, scan the QR code with your Android phone and it will setup everything from there. It couldn’t be more easy.

Especially when compared to setting up a brand new Windows 11 (which I did a week before for my mother) - but that’s another story which I will probably NOT write ;)

All apps (incl Android apps) are being re-installed on the new Chromebook as well. Chrome settings are synched as usual. Really nice.

Login, opening apps - even android apps - is lightning fast as expected.

Only need to clone/re-create my ssh keys - but more on that later.

So, trying it out now with writing a blog post from the couch….

FlickrTab for Chrome

How about an extension for the Chrome Browser that does nothing for your productivity, almost the opposite: Flickr Tab

All it does: it will show a photo from flickr every-time you open a new (empty) tab on Chrome. That's it.
No productivity value at all. But you get to see truly awesome pictures.
I installed it a couple of weeks ago when it first was released, and enjoyed it ever since.

Broken Google Maps Rendering on Chrome on Windows

The other day, I noticed that Google Maps rendering on my Chrome (v 36.0.1985.125) on Windows (7) was so broken, that Google Maps essentially became useless.
Streets/Roads were mostly invisible - looks like the line for the street has been overwritten by the street name:

At the same time it worked fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer (yes, I admit to having IE on my machine, just to test stuff like this).

So some testing and googling ... ok a lot of googling, since "google maps broken chrome" reveals essentially every rant on google maps there ever was...

Finally with some refining of search terms, I found the following hint.
Turns out, in this case you should disable the video hardware acceleration in Chrome.
Just open the settings, then search for "accel", and disable it, i.e. unmark the checkbox, if it is marked.

Restart chrome, and it works fine again:

Google Now on Chrome vs. Celsius

A couple of weeks ago, I enabled Google Now notifications in my (desktop) Chrome browser.

One thing I noticed, that on the weather card the temperature for Vienna, Austria, was given in Fahrenheit, instead of Celsius. Weirdly, there was no setting for this.

My PCs are definitely all running with Austrian locale (so it should be Celsius), this particular PC even with German language (and the combination of German and Fahrenheit is rather odd). And nowhere could I change this.

My mobile devices are also all on Celsius, so I thought it could not have been picked up from there.

Oddly, however, on my other PC (laptop), it displayed in Celsius. And even more oddly, this PC had English as language.

So did some Googling and found suggestions that you need to change this on the iPhone (iPad in my case), and that maybe switching to F and back to C could work.

That's what I did. Go to Google app on iPad, then into Settings > Google Now > Weather > Temperature.
Change for Fahrenheit, save.
Repeat with Celsius.

And voila, it is Celsius on the Desktop Chrome as well ...
Weird, but part of my software developer brain actually understands this.

Five Reading Tools - part III: BeeLine Reader

Beeline Reader is a Firefox and Chrome extension very similar to Evernote Clearly, but with a little twist...

They use a color gradient that "flows" along the line and creates a high onctrast between two lines.
See how the color changes from black to blue to red and also varies saturation:

Supposedly this should make reading easier. Quite frankly, I cannot judge this, but it seems to work.

The drawback is, that it only allows for reading, no saving, printing, ...

If you are a Firefox or Chrome user, install it from here and try it. Worthwhile.
Again, here's our Wikipedia entry for comparison with the other tools. Click to enlarge.

You're asking me, Google?

Have a smartphone or tablet? Get Chrome for Mobile

Oh c'mon, Google, you know anyway. Why are you asking me?

Especially since I'm using chrome on my Android as the default browser.

Firefox 13

So, yet another Firefox update.

Version 13 with the new homepage (featuring buttons to bookmarks, downloads, history, add-ons, sync and settings) and the new tab page looks  suspiciously chrome-y to me...

I don't think it will have a huge impact on me, but lets just see over the next weeks.

Keyword Search on Google Chrome

I discovered this one by accident (i.e. I must have hit the tab key at the right time in the location/search bar), so I did some (re)search and found an awesome - somewhat hidden - feature on Chrome that I was missing all the time.. mainly because I'm using it a lot in Firefox.

Keyword search

i.e. you just type a keyword for your search engine / site and the browser will do the rest for you.
In Firefox you just type the keyword for the search engine followed by the search term and then hit enter.
In Chrome you type the keyword for the search engine, then tab, and then the search term (and enter):

As soon as you hit the tab key the label of the location bar will change to the search engine/provider you associated with the given keyword like this:

You can configure those search providers in the Chrome options; the fastest way is to right-click into the location bar and then select "Edit search engines..."

There you provide the name, keyword ans search URL (with a %s for the keyword, like in Firefox).

And that's it.

I still have to get used to the tab thingy...


PS: turns out the tab is not necessary, space will do as well - just like Firefox... so even better.