Extensions Exploration

Given that I have touched the topic of Chrome extensions, I'll write about it a bit more. 

Already a while ago I was exploring the extensions available for Chrome and added a few, but not many survived the test of time (being deleted or non used at all). The list of alternatives is too big to be able to give a full account of what is useful or interesting, but partially trusting in the collective choices and rating of people makes things a bit easier.

Just recently I decided I was tired of the excesive advertisement placement, in particular those with movements, sounds, flash based, etc. An ugly example could be the two biggest newsletters in Chile, but I'm sure there are many others. 

Even when I believe that ads are a decent way to get revenue, there are limits to the kind/style of ads I'm willing to be bothered with. So, finally after years of avoiding it I installed AdBlock and now I'm much happier when wandering around the Internet. Still I have exceptions in place for those sites I know and value and don't have annoying amounts of annoying ads.

What I do have is an essential list of extensions I install every time in either Firefox or Chrome.

• Stumbleupon: This is an Internet Black Hole! Although for this I use Firefox because the Chrome extension has been giving me some issues.
• Evernote: I use it basically as some sort of advanced bookmarking for research porpuses and note taking.
• AdBlockPlus: Well, already sorta explained. It could be complemented with NoScript (or something of the like) to remove other annoyances and also reduce the memory/cpu footprint of the browsers.

I should also look for some sort of privacity or something regaring cookies and tracking coming from sites like Amazon, Facebook and others, but for now I use the private mode in Chrome for that kind of sites.

UPDATE: I found this article at Lifehacker related to Chrome and privacity.

Close-up in Brühl

In a recent trip to a town between Cologne and Bonn I went to Brühl. The most notable thing about it is that a castle is visible from the train station! Sadly I was not able to produce a nice picture of it (even when it was my main objective during the trip). I have another excuse to go at some point.

Instead I produced a few of close-up pictures around in the garden of the castle. This was partially motivated by the huge amount of subjects to photograph and because the sky was very uneventful and so looking down was more interesting than looking straight.

Brühl Castle.

It's a very frenchy castle and garden, which is not exactly of my taste. It reminds me a bit to the Versailles.

Garden of the castle.

Pink Flower

Red and Green Leaves

Butterfly

With these three pictures I declare myself satisfied with the trip =).

Forced Aggregation

A few years ago, my dear friend Cecilia recommended me to use Google reader as an aggregator of feeds (not her words, but the idea was along those lines). At that point I was quite comfortable and satisfied using iGoogle (Google homepage solution) which added extra widgets like e-mail, weather, calendar and what not.

Old iGoogle with some widgets.

Slowly my use of iGoogle was reduced only to a feeds aggregator without the use of any of the fancy widgets. As such, iGoggle was not very comfortable anymore but I kept using it until now.

Some months ago, Google decided to kill the iGoogle service giving its users until November 2013 to do as they see fit. Obviously this drove me looking for alternatives. I've found basically two alternatives that they could be complementary to each other. The first one is to use Goggle Reader which works fine for me and as a web application I can see it anywhere.

The second solution, is a small Chrome extension which looks good. As an extension, it's present in all my Chrome instances where I'm synchronized so has the almost same level of presence as Google Reader it doesn't share any feed within the multiple instances. One "advantage" is that shows notifications as new elements appear in the feeds.

I'm still open to alternatives, but for now I'll keep experimenting with these two and see what kind of balance/complementarity I achieve between them. But I already expect to be based solely on Google Reader.

Now one drawback I'm feeling already after one day, is that my information overload will increase... and in this moment that's something I don't need.