I’ve been using nightly development builds of Google Chrome for Mac, Google’s shiny new web browser, for a while now. A few days ago, it was officially labeled beta for Mac. Until now, I wasn’t using it regularly, but I decided I should try using it full-time for a few days to see how it wears.

I’ve got 12+ tabs open and it’s still fast, smooth and stable. Granted, on the Mac there’s no extensions/add-on feature … it’ll be interesting to see how stable things remain once those are introduced. The browser’s rendering of most pages seems identical to Firefox, except for a few that I’ve stumbled across. Overall, it’s a very usable browser and should have a great future ahead of it.

Of course, there’s still a few bumps and warts that I hope they’ll address soon:

• Needs to be more customizable. For me, this could be as simple as providing an about:config interface like Firefox. Let me easily tweak and turn the various knobs that control stuff under the hood. My biggest gripe is not being able to completely remove the “close tab” button on the tabs. In trying to switch tabs, I’m constantly accidentally clicking the “x” which closes the tab. Sure, Cmd-Shift-T re-opens the tab, but that’s a nuisance that could easily be avoided by removing the “close tab” bit like I have done in Firefox.
• Smart keywords. I pretty much live in my web browser and the Address Bar is my command-line interface to the web. I have smart keywords defined for all manners of things, and switching to Chrome that lacks them is very painful. I’d say that this is a must-have feature before I would switch completely.
• Third-party add-ons and extensions. I can live without most of the niceties that add-ons bring, but there are a few that I would hate to do without:
  • It’s All Text! Edit any TEXTAREA in an external editor. For the average web user, this probably wouldn’t be that useful, but for me, it makes editing code blocks and other large text in web-based CMS‘es tolerable.
  • Greasemonkey. There’s nothing like the ability to “fix” a “broken” website, removing annoying “features” or adding a missing one. While I could probably get by without Greasemonkey, I don’t know if I’d really want to.

Have you tried out Google Chrome, yet? I’d like to know what you think … let me know in the comments below.

My friend Keith has a Troy-Bilt TB70SS weed whacker that stopped working the other day. Not being one to pass on a good opportunity to do a DIY repair, I took it apart and discovered that the piston arm had broken and the reed spring had gotten mangled.

The best source for parts that I’ve found is, surprisingly, the Home Depot Power Equipment Parts site. They have the exploded parts view in PDF form, which makes ordering really simple.

I wonder if there’s pictures or videos online showing folks how to take apart and re-assemble these things — it’s really pretty simple and can be a lot of fun to repair your own things.

Tags: Troy-Bilt TB70SS, DIY, repair, Home Depot Power Equipment Parts

Ah, the ultimate in retro push technology, my old Motorola 929.8625 MHz alphanumeric pager.

Found this little gem while cleaning out boxes of crap in my home office. I decided to take a pic of it for memory’s sake before I trash it.

Tags: retro, push technology, Motorola, alphanumeric pager

I’m doing a bunch of electrical clean-up in the house and have a bunch of scrap vintage BX cable and boxes and switches – I’d hate to just throw these out in the recycling if they’re still worth something, to somebody.

It appears that the going rate for copper/steel BX scrap is around $0.20/pound and I probably only have 20-30 pounds of scrap so far, so it’s really not worth the aggravation of finding a scrap buyer.

Should I just dump this in the recycling bin? Anyone have better ideas?