Google has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1997 and now offer a huge array of online services. One of the criticisms often aimed at the company is centred around privacy. From searches you make on the search engine, to the contents of your email if you are a Gmail user — they have the ability to build up quite a detailed picture of what you do online.

Apparently, the Google Chrome browser itself also does various things which may impact privacy. The browser creates a unique client ID which is sent to Google when you do things such as type terms into the combined address and search bar, for example, and if the browser crashes, the technical information relating to that crash is sent to Google.

If you are someone concerned by the implications of this and maybe don’t trust Google very much, you may want to give SRWare Iron a try.

Iron is a browser based on the open source Chromium project which also powers Google Chrome, but with many of the potentially unwanted features that may impact privacy disabled.

This is a great example of open source code working well — it allows you to enjoy the benefits of the Chrome browser (the speed, interface and unique tab-as-process architectre) while side-stepping things you don’t want.

Personally, I am not enormously bothered by the privacy issues and at the moment I’m pretty happy with a Safari/Firefox combination for my browsers of choice, but if you are looking for Google Chrome, without so much Google, this is worth a try.

You can download the browser from the SRWare website.

UPDATE: The Mac version can be downloaded from this forum post on the SRWare site.

If you’re running the excellent Twitter client TweetDeck on Linux, specifically with the KDE desktop (here version 4.1.1), you may run into a problem where when you start the program, the TweetDeck window is just blank. The buttons at the top and bottom appear, but there is nothing in the window.

To solve this problem, first launch the application KWalletManager by pressing Alt-F2 and typing in kwallet. It should be the first result, so press Enter to start the application.

After KWalletManager is running, start TweetDeck again and you everything should work as normal.

All the time we get information thrown at us and managing that information so that you are in control of it and not the other way round can be a real challenge.

As you should know, I have recently started university. If there’s anything you can do that suddenly causes loads of information to be thrown at you, then that is it.

And it all adds up. A brand new email account with lots of stuff coming in, timetable information from multiple places, tasks to add to to-do lists and so on.

So I thought I’d take a moment to share how I’m dealing with some of this information and how I am using the technology available to me to have access to that information (hopefully) wherever I need it.

» Read the rest of this post…

I got a new printer today. Actually, it’s a printer and scanner and copier, All-in-One sort of device. It is the HP DeskJet F2180, found for £30.

It’s replacing my ageing and rather incompatible Lexmark Z45. The Z45 was bought a very long time ago, back even before I started using Linux. Back then, compatibility with alternative operating systems wasn’t a priority and ever since I have been dogged with issues printing from my own machine.

» Read the rest of this post…

Just a quick post to cross-post the fact that I’ve just put out a new printable guide, designed for Linux beginners which details installing software on Ubuntu.

It’s posted at FOSSwire – here’s where you’ll find it.

The idea is to bridge the knowledge gap for the person literally just starting out with Linux. Installing software is one of the big areas where there are differences, so this double sided guide covers that.

The one time I actually go for installing a distro on a physical, real computer, rather than in my MacBook-powered Parallels virtual machine environment, it won’t work.

In attempting to install Fedora 9, Sulphur, on standard PC hardware (than runs Fedora 8 just nicely), I’m getting this after choosing to install from the DVD as the package source:

Admittedly, I haven’t yet checked the image checksum (I usually do before burning), so I’ll do that when I get back tonight and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem.

Ultimately, I’ll have to fall back to Parallels.

OK, so cross-linking is bad and stuff, but it’s been a long time since I last did it, so it’s OK, right?

Just finished a review of PC-BSD, a BSD distribution based on FreeBSD for desktop system.

I was really impressed at how easy it was when compared to the big bad FreeBSD install, which I seem to always mess up right at the last moment thanks to the far from intuitive menu system.

But I digress. PC-BSD is as slick as any desktop Linux, and I think it makes a fine general purpose desktop OS, as you can read more about in the full review.

And yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly here too. It’s working, so far.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to know exactly how hot the Geforce 6600 GT in my desktop PC here was. Turns out, it idles about 52 Celsius (125 F).

Then, again, out of curiosity, I put it under some load, by running glxgears at full screen – 1600×1200. Turns out the GPU positively roasts at such a temperature.

83 C ~= 181 F.

Pretty hot.

I downloaded it when I came in this evening and I’m just finishing prepping to clean install it over Feisty (7.04), which is currently my primary operating system on my desktop PC.

I’m choosing to do a clean install because it’s about time my KDE preferences and everything else for that matter were cleaned out and I started afresh.

October really is turning out to be operating system month – less than 8 days now until I’ll be upgrading myself to Leopard on the MacBook; provided everything ships in time.

So – here goes Gutsy!

Thanks to Preferences dialogue regression in Firefox 2.0, the option to force all links that would open in a new window to open in tabs instead disappeared. Which is pretty stupid.

Just wiped out my old, bloated Firefox profile on my Kubuntu desktop here and suddenly, horror of horrors, it starts opening new windows instead of new tabs. I can’t use the Preferences dialogue, so…

browser.link.open_newwindow in about:config needs to be set to 3. Someone should make an extension which can change all these preferences that didn’t make the cut to 2.x from the GUI.

All fixed now.