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It is hard to change computer habits, be it operating system or web browser. I’m a person who doesn’t leave her usual browser without a good fight. I wasn’t always a Firefox fangirl. I was once an IE user like most people and when I first tried Firefox, I hated it immediately, seemed too much hassle to getting used to it, so I uninstalled in 10 mins. Second time I tried, I took it easy to learn my way around Firefox and eventually have become an addict. Now I don’t know how I had lived through the days before tabbed browsing and all that customization.
And I was thinking Firefox and I are great friends and there will be no other browser that will come between us. Chrome is faster ? Well, I love my highly customised Firefox the way it is even it is slower.
Then there is Flock. They call it “social web browser”. I was curious at first, but as soon as I see Facebook in the services list, it was an immediate turn-off. I’m trying not to be a FB hater, I have an account there which I rarely use (For those who use Facebok on daily basis, you should definitely check out Flock. See the video ). I thought “It’s not my kind of social” since I use mostly RSS-reader and no digg, no delicious, no microblogging until trying identi.ca, and Flock doesn’t support identi.ca yet.
When I finally decided to try, I was so sure I would uninstall it in 15 mins. most. And I couldn’t be more wrong. I fell in love with its simple and neat interface at first sight, no need to change any browsing habits since it is basically Firefox with native social web toolbar and fully compatible with Firefox plugins. I can check my RSS feeds, twitter, even youtube videos and e-mails without disturbing my browsing. I’m trying blog editor right now, integrated to browser, makes it so easier to compose a blog post.
Another thing I like about Flock is it developer team seem to undertand social web well. My experience so far, they are so responsive to their users (e.g. via twitter) and have and account on Youtube “How to Flock” introducing browser’s features and how to use them.
Yet they are not without flaws (yet 
). They don’t have identi.ca integration as I said and friendfeed. I’m looking forward to see them integrated soon.
Well, I uninstalled Firefox, customized Flock to my taste and definitely enjoying the experience. And passionately recommending for those who haven’t try it out yet. Give it 15 mins. and it will steal your heart.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
A couple days ago, on Amy’s Ramblings blog, I read her post on how time consuming social media had become for her due to so many updates and ‘noise’ to deal with. I was thinking on the subject for some time and I agree with her points.
I have an ambivalent relationship with social media. I like it, I encourage people around me to actively use it but I have some problems with it. There are many more or less similar services and catching up with friends on different services is not as easy as it should be.
An example scenerio: I have 3 friends on 3 different microblogging services. To stay in touch, I have accounts all three of them. When I have an update, I have to update three of them so that all friends can see it. Guess what it would do to my friendfeed; one message repeated three times. To avoid it, if I update 3 different accounts with different messages, my 2 other friend on other services won’t be able to see some of the updates and … etc.
This fragmentation and duplication of the messages are the main problem of social media. It is terribly time consuming as well as addictive. Monitoring all your feeds, sorting out and filtering useful information from useless soon makes it tiresome routine. This is the point I end up quitting my social media watch for a while, only to return some time later, baffling immense number of updates I have no way of catching up.
Ok, this is mostly because neatness is not really my forte. And applications I tried didn’t help the situation, either. I use Posty to manage and monitor microblog feeds. It allows me to view only the last 20 message. But I need to see all new messages since I last checked. Posty won’t let me. And I don’t know if any other application that can work on Linux do. Gwibber don’t have a feature to show public timeline, and I love to check timeline for randomness’ sake.
Can I add one last complaint? So hard to follow a conversation if three or more people are involved on a microblogging platform, harder when using microblogging application. It would be lovely to see a conversation among there or more people in a threaded way or something.
I’m searching for one central place to control this wild wild social media beast and more control over what I’m sharing to whom.
I don’t remember when I first heard about Open Source Software / Free Software terms. Probably very long ago. When I began to seek more information about OSS/FS, I was so impressed by their philosophy. But I got the impression that one need to be geeky techie in order to use one of the GNU/linux distros without much pain. At that time, formatting a pc was a great deal for me. Besides, Windows XP was fairly good. Instead of using a distro and risking my computer and nerves, I began to try Open Source softwares. In the days of XP, everything was peaceful enough for not to think about using another OS other than XP, although I was so annoyed by endlessly various security issues, malwares, spywares, adwares… etc. How come an operation system, which we pay quite a big amount of money to obtain can be so insecure?
Then, Vista came out. It was rumored to be the ultimately secure OS of the Windows family before it was released. Rumors turned out to be wrong. Besides, Vista still has compatibility issues. I saw and heard many people prefer XP over Vista. What a failure! My experience with Vista? Well, I hate it; I hated it from the first moment I had to use it. System requirements of Vista is totally absurd, and its performance doesn’t worth it. I miss my XP so much. And I’m stuck with Vista and I’m unhappy with it.
This is how I decided to convert to GNU/Linux based OS on my notebook.
But my first attempt didn’t work out quite well, though. Everything went pretty well during installation. ( I will not mention my weird experience when attempting to make a partititon for Pardus – the distro I decided to try- using Gparted and end up waiting like 23 hours for it to complete the process. I must have done something quite wrong.) I eagerly booted my notebook after installation, GRUB screen showed up and… well nothing happened. Grub kept itself at “Stage 1,5; loading…” with no error messages or anything. I didn’t find anything useful for me in the forums, since it has no error messages. I thought it is because I did something wrong while trying to set up a dual boot notebook. I re-installed the OS and re-installed as a single boot; no chance. On every try, I couldn’t go far than Grub screen. I gave up and installed Vista back.
The only issue before my new attemp to install another distro is the need to back up the files, settings etc. I will try dual boot solution once more. It seems a bit early for me to make linux my primary OS, but I won’t know until I use it properly. My next target is Kubuntu ( I don’t know why exactly but I tend to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s probably because I’m told KDE is more newbie-friendly) and I also want to try Mandriva. But I believe, I will try Live CD versions for a while.
Hi there,
As a lazy author, I’m temporarily having difficulty about what to write next. I’m wandering around other people’s blogs and whenever I come across a “Tips for (Newbie) Bloggers” article, it emphasizes the importance of frequent update. That makes me feel kind of guilty and I decided to justify my not-so-frequently-posting intervals.
Firstly, the city I’m living is terribly hot and humid, no rain not even a single rain cloud for quite some time now. It’s brightly shiny and annoyingly humid. This weather kills my every possible ability, let alone my writing capacity.
Secondly, my last summer holiday is about to end. Less than one week later, my job is starting. Since I’m not a person who can live with a tight schedule , I’m quite worried with my new life and can’t help cling onto my last days of unoccupied new graduate frantically.
And finally, I’m having a negative mood about how rotten a place has become the world we are living in and trying to remember what good things are there struggling to exist despite the wicked and mindlessly destructive side of human beings.
(This should be a general announcement actually)
To the prospective visitor of Misty Forest: your comments are pretty much welcome (for any post, any time even in any language 
) Why don’t you just say “hi” this time.
