Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Tag: chrome

  • Shorten Amazon and eBay URLs with these two Chrome extensions

    Shorten Amazon and eBay URLs with these two Chrome extensions

    I spend too much time on Amazon and eBay, looking for stuff I don’t need but want. And, eventually, I want to share my finds with everyone. The problem is that the urls are longer than the bathroom line at a Journey concert. That’s where two handy extensions for Chrome come in to play.

    You can use any Bitly url shortener with Amazon, but the official Bitly extension wants you to create an account, but who needs another account. The Amazon URL Shortner for Chrome does one thing, and one thing well. When on an Amazon page, clicking the extension in the toolbar will create a shortened amzn.to link to the product. And, when on regular sites, it will create a bit.ly link, so win-win!

    You could use the previous extension with eBay, but the Short Item URL for eBay will give you a ebay.com/itm/ link. This is nicer for sharing because people know exactly what they are going to get when they click on it.

    Do you still use any url shorteners?

  • Whooo ooo! I’m under 100 open tabs in Chrome!

    Whooo ooo! I’m under 100 open tabs in Chrome!

  • Chrome split screen extension

    Purely Paperless: Tech Tip Tuesday: Split Screen Chrome Extension writes:

    One extension that I have been loving lately is the Split Screen extension. With Split Screen, you can view two different web pages simultaneously without have to toggle between two different tabs or constantly resize your screens. As a recovering browser-tab abuser, I am pretty notorious for having WAY too many tabs open at once. Split Screen appeals to the “multi-tasker” in me.

    Via: @CurtRees

  • How I fixed my Chrome momentary freezing problem

    For the past couple of months, my main Chrome profile has been frustrating me with its “freezing” everytime the Chrome window was activated. What I mean by this, is that when I clicked on the Chrome window with the troublesome profile, Chrome would freeze/pause for 5-10 seconds. This behavior persisted no matter what platform I used with Chrome.

    Investigating my issue, I would disable every extension, yet the problem continued. I couldn’t find anything online about my particular problem. When logging into the profile for the first time, the freeze wouldn’t happen until everything was synced. It was getting time to just delete that entire profile from Google and start anew. I didn’t want to do that. Finally, as I was looking through the settings in Chrome, I noticed the link to manage my synced data in the Google dashboard. Upon clicking on the link, I noticed I had over 16,000 bookmarks in Chrome being synced! Apparently, in the past, I had used the Delicious extension to sync my Delicious bookmarks with Chrome. What had happened was that it had duplicated all my bookmarks several times. As soon as I deleted the errant folders of Delicous bookmarks, my Chrome profile stopped freezing!!

  • Suspend Chrome tabs with The Great Suspender

    The newer versions of Firefox has a great feature where upon startup, web pages in tabs aren’t activated until they are clicked on. It’s really nice when you’re restarting the browser with several tabs open. Unfortunately, Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature. As I was searching for something like this for Google Chrome, I came across The Great Suspender.

    This extension lets you suspend tabs, either automatically after a time or from a menu option. I leave it set to auto suspend tabs after 5 minutes in the background. You can also whitelist web pages that should never be suspended, which I use for Feedly and IMO.im.

  • Dictionary of numbers Chrome extension helps the understanding of large numbers

    Dictionary of Numbers is a neat extension for Google’s Chrome browser that gives you examples of large numbers in terms that could be easier to visualize. For example, it’s easier to visualize 100M as the height of the Statue of Liberty than just as 100M.



    via: Lifehacker

  • Ohio Goes Google conference notes #ohiogoesgoogle

    On Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending my first Ohio Goes Google Conference presented by ITIP Ohio. The sessions I attended were very informative, I picked up quite a few different tips and ideas. (I’ll emphasize my thoughts like this.)

    Keynote speaker – Jennie Magiera @msmagiera

    Google Moderator

    The Google Tool that nobody uses was big. Jennie Magiera talked it up, and then Sean Beavers led a session at lunch on it. Google Moderator allows for classroom participation in which the participants can post ideas and vote on these ideas.

    Slides

    • Thomas Edison, Elton John, Peter Jennings all dropped out of HS
    • Competitively College Ready
    • 7 out of 8, 72 out of 100 universities have gone Google
    • Docs story builder
    • Google Forms now has images, dates
    • youtube.com/mathademics
    • blog.mrmeyer.com

    Top five skills

    1. Critical Thinking
    2. Complex Problem Solving
    3. Judgment and Decision Making
    4. Active Listening
    5. Computers and electronics

    Resources

    • http://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=209e48&t=209e48.40&f=209e48.6adb7c&o=30

    From Jennie: “Here is a copy of my keynote: (PDF) https://sites.google.com/site/­magierapresentations/ohio-goog­le-keynote And more info at my Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/msmagiera”­

    Jennie was a very engaging keynote speaker!

    Becoming a GMail Ninja – John Sowash

    Slides

    • bit.ly/sowash-PD
    • GTD
    • Inbox Zero
    • Priority Inbox
    • Canned responses
    • To do lists

    Resources

    Google Apps in the Office and Beyond – Wes Weaver – principal

    Slides

    • It’s about teaching and learning
      • Share resources
      • Best practices
      • Conference notes
      • Staff meeting accountability
    • Use Sheets to keep track of office tasks
      • students
      • budgets
    • Guidance Dept
    • Use Google Form for student sign off of forms
    • Track major initiatives
    • Calendars
    • E-mail
    • Forms
      • Self-assessment
      • Feedback & input

    Questions

    • Don’t you feel like you’re on a device all the time?
    • Is your secretary available?

    Wes had several examples of where his secretary took the initiative and created Google Sheets documents to make her job easier. Pretty impressive.

    Resources

    Lunch

    Speaker from Google

    I missed his name. 🙁

    • How do we prepare students for a future we can’t see?
    • The web is changing how we learn

    Sean Beavers – Google Moderator

    Sean gave real world examples on how he had used Google Moderator in his classroom, along with a picture of him in shorts.

    Using Google Scripts to Automate Your Life – Jennifer Magiera

    • Doctopus
    • Goobric (Doctopus extension)
    • FormMule (Calendar merge)

    I had not used FormMule before, looks like it could be very handy. Especially for dealing with input into Google Forms.

    Resources

    A must have Google Chrome Extension!

    Changing Google from Bland to Beautiful – Eric Griffith

    • Use Google Drawings
    • Object based, objects can be linkable
    • Use the built in Web Clipboard to copy/paste multiple shapes
    • openclipart.org
    • softicons.com
    • Drag and drop between tabs in Chrome
    • Presentation will be available on YouTube through the Ohio Goes Google web page

    This was a very cool session. A lot of complaints I hear about Google Docs is that fact that it’s hard to lay things out in the document. By use Google Drawing objects, you can add pizzazz to those boring Google Docs documents.

  • Re-purpose old machines as Chrome Browser boxes – Introducing the GozBrowserBox

    I’ve been going back and forth on when to formally announce the
    GozBrowserBox project. On one hand, I’m sure it’s ready to be used, but
    on the other hand, I’m afraid I forgot something! Anyway, without
    further ado…

    Introducing the GozBrowser Box

    GozBrowserBox
    is a set of scripts that will take an Ubuntu installation and set up a full
    screen browser box. It works very well
    with lower end machines and makes them more useful. There are three
    configurations:

    • Standalone: For Intel machines with at least 512MB of RAM, this
      configuration will set up the machine to launch Chrome full screen
      running on the local machine.
    • Browser server: For Intel machines with a couple GBs of RAM, this
      configuration sets up the machine like the standalone machine above,
      but also allows remote access for clients.
    • Browser client: For PowerPC machines (like eMacs, iBooks, etc) or
      Intel machines with at least 256MB of RAM (it may work with less, I
      haven’t had a chance to test it). This configuration requires some
      network configuration to resolve the machine name browser.

    All three configurations use Chrome to it’s fullest, including Flash and
    sound.

    INSTALLING GOZBROWSERBOX WILL TOTALLY WIPE OUT THE MACHINE IT IS BEING INSTALLED ON WITHOUT WARNING. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

    Check it out over on Github!

  • It feels like the 50s with all this Chrome

    Although Firefox has been my default browser for several years,
    every so often I try out alternative browsers. A couple of weeks ago I
    started to use Chromium (developer builds of Google’s Chrome browser)
    for OS X and it has now become my default browser.

    Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4
    second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click
    throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is
    fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating
    each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or
    window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be
    synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become
    available.

    One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple
    profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for
    professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult
    at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, so now I can launch the
    default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a
    Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings.

    I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve
    tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than
    Firefox 3.5.5.
    Although Firefox has been my default browser for several years, every
    so often I try out alternative browsers. A couple of weeks ago I started
    to use Chromium (developer builds of Google’s Chrome browser) for OS X
    and it has now become my default browser.

    Google has an obsession with speed. In fact, they have found that a .4
    second delay in delivering search results causes a 30% drop in click
    throughs. They started working on Chrome to deliver a browser that is
    fast and secure. It also offers some other advatages such as isolating
    each tab or window into separate processes. This means if a tab or
    window crashes, it only affects that tab or window. Bookmarks can now be
    synched with your Google account, and extensions are starting to become
    available.

    One of my requirements for a browser is the ability to run multiple
    profiles. I have one browser set for personal use and one set for
    professional use (I do try to separate the two, although it is difficult
    at times). Chrome supports multiple profiles, now I can launch the
    default profile which contains my personal settings and I can launch a
    Mr_rcollins profile which contains my professional settings. I’ve had
    Firefox set up for this for over a year and it works pretty well.

    I’ve found that Chromium launches faster than any other browser I’ve
    tried. After using it for two weeks, it feels so much quicker than
    Firefox 3.5.5. You can learn more about Google Chrome here;. I use
    the Techcrunch Chromium Updater to grab the latest builds for OS X
    since Google hasn’t released an official beta yet for OS X.