My Move from Firefox to Chrome

As you might have noticed because of me actually having posted some Google Chrome App reviews recently, I've changed browsers from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome. In this post, I'll cover why I downloaded Chrome in the first place and why I ended up sticking with it.

Okay, first of all I want to tell you guys that I don't want to hate on Firefox and I think that it's a great browser and does exactly what it needs to do. I really liked Firefox and I still think that for those who use their browser for productivity purposes only it's probably the perfect browser.

The big problem here is: I don't try to be as productive as possible with my internet experience.

The reason why I downloaded Google Chrome is because I wanted to see the difference between YouTube videos in 30 FPS and 60 FPS. It turns out you can't actually notice the difference, but that doesn't really matter as I ended up sticking around anyways. Here's why.

I like some stuff to do on the side, a never-ending journey of finding out about new functions you can use to make your computer as personal as possible. This usually makes me pretty productive in the long run, but that's just because I always end up choosing the apps/programs that make my PC/smartphone as fast to use as possible (due to me not liking to waste loads of time knowing that it could actually be done faster).

And that's where Google Chrome comes in. Its App Store makes me able to add an almost infinite amount of apps to my browser so that I can get the most out of my browser. In fact, I'm using the MyMusicCloud app to listen to my music without the need of a thousand songs being stored on my laptop (this app will come in extremely handy in the future, because I usually fill my phone and laptop up with thousands of songs within a month and decide to delete most of it just to stumble upon the same problem a month later).
Firefox just didn't do the job in this aspect: it has extensions, but good Firefox extensions are harder to find than apps on Google's extremely user-friendly App Store.
That, apart from me liking the Chrome design more than the Firefox one, is pretty much the reason why I stuck around with Chrome.

The Way I Game

Well, everyone has their own style when it comes down to gaming, and I want to talk about mine.

The games I play

RuneScape

It's an MMORPG based around you developing your characters and training various skills. The reason I like it is because you can choose what direction you want to go with your character: will you mainly train the non-combat skills, or are you the type for exploring dungeons and killing every monster you see? It's up to you, really. I play RS3, the newest version of the game. It's a brower-based game, but I have a downloaded client for it just to be able to start gaming faster :-P. It's an awesome game in my opinion, but it might not be for those that are easily fooled by scammers etc. because those are, unfortunately, still playing the game and want to get your account emptied as fast as possible so that they can sell your stuff for real-life money.
Apart from the scammers, that are almost as bad as the Indian callcenter guys, the game is very good: it gets frequently updated so that there will always be content for you to discover, the developers are constantly working on getting cheaters out of the game as effectively as possible and they are good at that and last but not least: the community is awesome once you get to know the way their personalities generally work.
I personally play a skiller: I try to make my way through the game without fighting ANY monsters. This is pretty hard, as the game is combat-based.

MineCraft

I know, I know... loads of people think this game is extremely childish. For me, it's a way to get creative without necessarily getting comments about what I make. I build stuff in Creative mode, mostly on the Vadact Buildteam server (part of the Shotbow Network). Those guys really know how to take creativity to the next level, and that's exactly what I like so much about the Vadact server. They are skilled, know how to have a laugh and you never see any of the actual Vadact members get mad in chat or anything like that. Their world consists out of plots, small areas of land you can claim and build your stuff on. You start off with absolutely nothing: no landscape, no structure, just a flat surface. This is what we make of that flat surface:

We fill it up with montains, trees, bushes, rivers, cities, hot air balloons and much more. If you build very good on your plot, you'll get promoted to the next rank and you receive an additional (sometimes also bigger) plot for you to build your next project on.

Gaming behavior

Gaming communities are just like real life communities (sometimes a whole lot weirder, but that depends on the community just like in real life). That's why you need to behave yourself in order to really fit in with a certain community. If you come across some guys building up a meme community, you should stimulate them and give them advice on what you think would be awesome in a meme. If you come across some Call of Duty try-harders, you shouldn't start to talk about that one cat meme you saw on the internet yesterday (even though it may be awesome).
In the Vadact community, you have to remain a bit serious but there is plenty of room for jokes. Helping others is mandatory, so don't get too selfish around there! If you don't help others and give advice about what improvements could be made to a build whenever it's asked, you won't really get into the community and you'll just be sitting there on the side.

Setup

Oh, the ever-so-important setup. My setup is pretty much just a basic home PC (Acer) with two relatively small monitors (Samsung) and a pretty cheap keyboard (Acer, came with the PC), a wireless mouse (Logitech, obviously) and one of the cheapest microphones (Audio-Technica) that delivers relatively decent quality. I also have headphones (Philips, ordered online because my Turtle Beach was broken), but those were in my bedroom when I took the picture.

That's basically all I can say about the way I game, I hope you all liked it!

Cleaning my Keyboard

My keyboard got really messy, as I have the bad habit of watching movies on my PC and thinking: "Some chips would go well with this movie!" without concidering the effect it has on my keyboard and mouse. Also, it has been sitting here for a couple of years so loads of dust managed to get under the different keys. The only solution was to completely clean it, and the process took me about an hour or so.
To begin with, I took a picture of what my keyboard looked like in the beginning so that I wouldn't place any of the keys in the wrong order. I forget things like that very easily, so it wouldn't even surprise me anymore.

As you can see, I had already taken the space bar out when I thought of this hint I got from watching LinusTechTips' videos (very handy for picking up any techy ideas and watching reviews on what he thinks is "worthy" of his channel). He used this idea when he was repairing a soaked laptop so that he would remember where all of the parts he had taken out originally were.
Next, I started to pull all of the keys out and blow the dust off of them. This is what took me the majority of the time I spent cleaning the keyboard, and it was a very boring and repetitive process. I could've just put some music on, but I'm not that smart ;-)

As you can see, I didn't put the top row of buttons off because they just felt very different from the others and I didn't know if I would be able to put them back afterwards. Also, there wasn't any dust under there anyways.
After doing that, I used an air compressor to really blow away all of the dust (pun intended :P ). As not all of the dust was gone yet, I used a piece of cloth to get the dust out of nearly every corner.
Then it was time to put my keyboard back together. This went a lot faster than taking the keys out, as just pushing it in the right hole (No, that is NOT what she said!) obviously went a lot faster than getting my fingers under the corners of the key properly and trying to get that thing to let go of its keys (Am I a thief now?).
Now I can type with a keyboard without getting dust onto my fingers every 5 minutes, it consumed some of my valuable time (I needed it for preparing to go on a holiday to Switzerland) but it sure was worth it.
I hope you liked this post and have learned from my mistakes. Here's a quick checklist of what you should keep in mind when doing a full cleanup of your keyboard:

1. HAVE TIME! It'll take you a longer time than you would expect, trust me. I thought it'd be done in like 15 minutes but it turned out to be over four times that. If you rush through the process, you'll have to spend more time on it in the long run. Apparently it's not only women that are time consuming :-)
2. TAKE PICS! That camera on your smartphone is there for a reason, take pictures of any information you might need later. If your friends are mad at you for not having time to come on Facebook or Skype, simply show them the pictures. That, my friend, is how men multi-task ;-)
3. Apart from that, basically just make sure you don't spill anything into the insides of your keyboard and don't try anything crazy. You should be just fine.