I can’t believe it took me so long to do this, but I finally got a second monitor. I bought a Samsung 245T, which has a nice IPS panel in it, which has good color and wide viewing angle. It goes nicely with my old Samsung 910T. I’m enjoying it so far!

So I’ve set up bridge to show me the thumbnails on the left, and the full-size preview on the right. Right now, I have to manually set this up every time I launch Bridge. Does anyone know how to make Bridge remember my window set-up so it just launches automatically like this? That would be handy.

If you use Firefox, you should definitely do the things detailed in this blog. Firefox is already fast, but this makes it faster.

A handful of Firefox tweaks that will double your browser speed : Boy Genius Report.

I got a new phone yesterday. I’m still learning the ropes, but I think I’ll be happy with my sexy little Touch Diamond.

Renewing my contract with Bell was a bit of a nightmare. Their initial offer to existing subscribers like me is significantly worse than what they offer to new customers. For instance, if I’d just gone through the normal route, I’d have had to pay $350 for the phone. However, since I talked to their telemarketing/retention department for about an hour, I got the phone for $99. Glad to see they value their customers enough to make them go through hell to be treated like utter strangers. Also, the telemarketing guy basically promised me the world for about $50/month. Unlimited Internet, tons of minutes, lots of extras. However, when I got to the Bell store to pick up my phone, I was told that plan doesn’t even work with my phone. Great. Anyway, the lovely lady at the Bell store went to bat for me, calling the telemarketing centre to ream them out and get me a similar deal on another plan, including free call display for the next three years. If you ask me, it’s ridiculous that the phone companies are charging for call display when it’s something that used to be free on every cell phone, and probably costs them extra to filter out of your calls. That all being said, I got the phone for a fair price, and the contract is decent too.

Here are my initial impressions of the phone.

Things I like

• It’s tiny and shiny.
• The HTC TouchFlo 3D interface is hot. No two ways about it, those animations for viewing photos and weather look great.
• The voice recognition works well.
• It hooked up to my Bluetooth headphones/headset immediately without any messing around with codes.
• The Opera browser built-in makes browsing the web pretty easy and natural.
• The screen is fantastic. It’s 2.8″ with 640×480 resolution, so everything looks smooth and bright. I can easily use this is a pocket photo portfolio.
• It came with a little screen protector sticker thing. Too bad I realized it only after I’d managed to scratch the screen a bit. Oops.
• It’s Windows Mobile so it works with all the programs that I’ve been using in my last five years of owning Windows Mobile/PocketPC devices

Things I don’t like

• Bell had slapped on their own interface instead of the one that comes with the Diamond. It’s just loaded with advertising, and is not nearly as attractive. I ditched it as soon as I figured out how.
• The phone is absolutely bursting with bloatware, which has the sole purpose of selling additional crap for Bell. Everything you click on seems to bring up a message saying that for an additional $8/month, you can get access to more stuff you don’t need. That’s not so bad, because I can ignore it, but it was taking up so much of the phone’s memory that there wasn’t any room to install my own programs on it, like my ebook reader.
• It uses a special weird USB cable to connect to the computer and also to charge. The AC adapter is a wall plug with a socket for plugging this special weird USB cable into. So, if you want to use the AC adapter, you have to unplug the special weird USB cable from your computer and plug it into the AC adapter instead. This is something I’d do a lot, since charging the phone from the computer takes all day, and charging from the AC adapter takes about 2 hours. The first thing I did this morning was go on eBay and buy a couple of spare weird USB cables for $1 each, plus $10 shipping. Come on, Bell. I’d pay $111 for this phone so I didn’t have to buy the special weird USB cables on eBay.
• I’m stuck with Bell for another three years. I don’t really trust Bell, being that Bell has tried numerous times in the past to screw with me (possibly intentionally or unintentionally… it all feels the same). I always feel like I need to be on guard to make sure I’m not getting ripped off when dealing with them.
• I don’t really understand how to use the media player yet. I guess I’ll figure it out eventually.

Anyway, if I think of anything else, I’ll write more about it later.

Everyone in the geekworld has been talking about Google’s new Chrome browser lately, and for good reason. I feel bad for Opera,  who has been around for ages and has created a pretty damned good browser, but still gets no respect. Opera is at version 9.5, and people still say, “Opera what?” when they hear the name. On the other hand, Chrome is only in beta, and it’s the talk of the town. A lot of this has to do with Google’s unquestionable star power, and also hip marketing strategy: there’s an online comic book explaining what’s under Chrome’s hood.

Being the unapologetic Internet lover that I am, I had to give it a spin. Honestly, I’m pretty impressed. It has a few new innovative features. For instance, the “home page” learns from your browsing habits and puts up thumbnails of your most visited sites, so you can just click on them. The design is very clean and user-friendly. It’s missing a lot of stuff, like a bookmark manager, but this is just a beta, and I’m certain that those features will be added later.

Chrome seems pretty fast. It loaded up all the pages that I tested without any complaint, and rendered them correctly too. Chrome’s claim to fame is its power to handle Javascript, which is powering everything from blogs to social networks. Chrome is a star in this department. Obviously, Gmail works brilliantly in Chrome, loading and running noticeably faster than in Firefox. Other Javascript-heavy sites like Facebook also perform beautifully in Chrome. I can see myself using Chrome exclusively to access these kinds of sites.

I did a little Javascript speed test to get some numbers. Internet Explorer 7 clocked an average of around 1000ms on this test. Firefox 3 ran it at a respectable 300ms. Chrome was consistently below 200ms. Pretty impressive indeed. Firefox 3.1, which comes out soon, promises major improvements to Javascript performance, so it will be interesting to see what happens in this battle.

Perhaps the most interesting innovation of Chrome is its use of multithreading. Chrome creates a new process for each new browser tab, and even each plugin that runs. The payoff for this will happen some time in the future, as websites get more complex and more likely to crash your browser. If a site crashes one tab, you can just close it without affecting other tabs. In current browsers like IE or Firefox, a crashing tab might take down your entire browser. So far, that hasn’t been a problem for me, but I think future sites might be more demanding. Multi-threaded tabs is probably one of those ideas that makes browser developers wish they’d thought of it first.

I’m excited too to hear that Google has plans to make Chrome the basis of future mobile browsers. Currently, browsing the web on phones sucks. Let’s face it. An open source browser that can be applied to any phone platform is good news for everyone who wants to access the web on the road. Again, it sucks to be Opera.

So here’s something kind of amusing. I had a spare hard drive, so I slapped it in my computer, and installed OSX on my PC, just to see what it’s like. I used Kalyway’s 10.5.2 ISO image, and it was as easy as pie. It took about 30 minutes, and now I have a fully functional Mac on my PC. Sound, network, video all work nicely. Fun stuff.

Now, back to Vista.