Archive
August, 2008 Monthly archive

Disable auto completion in Firefox address bar

By: Shanx
27-08-2008
Web Tools

Fire­fox 3 has a "fea­ture" that auto-fills a web­site that you wish to go to as you're typ­ing in the Loca­tion bar.

I wanted to turn this off, but with­out turn­ing off other auto com­plete functionality:

  • I want to retain the auto­com­plete in forms (which can be man­aged from Tools -> Options -> Privacy)
  • I also want to retain the auto­com­plete in the search box on the right (which can be turned off by right-clicking inside the box, and then check­ing off "Show Suggestions")

But the Loca­tion Bar is a some­what more involved beast. After hunt­ing in the innards of "about:config" I dis­cov­ered that this was pos­si­ble. Just fol­low these steps:

  1. In the loca­tion bar, type about:config. The loca­tion bar is of course the place where you type URLs. Note that this is your inter­nal Fire­fox con­fig­u­ra­tion. Don't mess with it.
  2. In the text box that appears at the top of this page, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as the pref­er­ence name. (Tip: copy it from here and paste it into that box.)
  3. Set the value to 0 if you wish to dis­able the auto-complete alto­gether. I have it set to 2 so I get some sug­ges­tions but it doesn't crowd up the experience.
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Uninstall Saft. For good. Really.

By: Shanx
04-08-2008
Web Tools

If you're here, you know what I'm talk­ing about. The Safari plu­gin sounds like a neat lit­tle tool but is a pesky cus­tomer on any com­puter. Not the way to win hearts. Delet­ing it doesn't work, not do the instruc­tions on their website.

Here is how I did.

  1. First, close Safari. This is VERY impor­tant, as it does not work otherwise.
  2. Start Ter­mi­nal. (Go to Appli­ca­tions -> Util­i­ties -> Ter­mi­nal, or type Ter­mi­nal in Spotlight).
  3. Under Ter­mi­nal type "sudo –s" with­out the quo­ta­tion marks to log in as root.
  4. Then enter: 
    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
  5. Go to the blue (or gray) apple at the top left of the screen, then select Force Quit. From the menu of items, click on "Saft" and click on the Force Quit button.
  6. Then, in the same Force Quit win­dow, click on "Finder" and click the "Relaunch" button.
  7. In the Finder win­dow, on the top right bar (the Fil­ter spot­light bar), type "saft" with­out the quotes. Delete with delight any file called Saft. Note: This may reveal a few other files that may con­tain the word "Saft" such as threads.py in my case (a Python file). Nat­u­rally, you want to NOT delete these. Just get rid of the Saft files.
  8. Empty the trash. If there is a file that won't delete because it's in use, then Force Quit "Saft" again as in Step 5 above, and then Empty Trash again.
  9. Go back into Ter­mi­nal, and type "sudo –s" again with­out quo­ta­tion marks. Then enter: 
     defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

    This will set the Finder back to the way it was before. Then type "exit" and it will exit out of the root.

  10. Now nav­i­gate to the folder: /Library/InputManagers. Note that this is NOT the "Library" folder in your Users folder. This is the Library folder from the root. Inside Input­Man­agers is the "saft" folder — get rid of it.
  11. Empty Trash (again). If it says Saft is in use, reboot the machine and empty it then. Or if you use some excel­lent util­ity like Main­Menu you can "Force Empty Trash".

Go back to your happy, prob­lem free Mac!  :)

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Remember WEP wireless password on Nokia e61i (any e-Series)

By: Shanx
02-08-2008
Miscellaneous, System Maintenance

I use the Nokia e61i as my mobile. Instead of my telco's data plan (which offers me a mea­gre 1GB per month) I sim­ply pre­fer to use my home wire­less LAN when I am at home. Until recently I used the wire­less "access point" with­out any secure set­tings, but have had to move to WEP now due to cheeky neighbors.

Prob­lem: Nokia's WLAN option kept prompt­ing me for the WEP key *every­time* I would con­nect to my email or any website.

After googling for a good many days and bum­bling around on Nokia's forums, I have finally fig­ured out how to make Nokia remem­ber the cotton-picking pass­word. Sim­ple answer: you need to lose your cached WLAN entry, which may be stored as a non-WEP access point.

Here are the more detailed steps:

  1. Delete your cur­rent WLAN access point you've cre­ated for the E61i. This is the secret sauce.
  2. Now, under

    Tools > Settings > Connection > Access Points

    Select Options and cre­ate a new access point using "default set­tings". We'll tweak them below.

  3. Under Con­nec­tion Name, pick a name for your con­nec­tion. This doesn't have to be your wire­less network's SSID, but you can keep it under the same name.
  4. Under Data Bearer, select WLAN.
  5. Under WLAN Net­work Name, select man­ual entry and type in your SSID name.
  6. Under Net­work Sta­tus mark "Hidden".
  7. Net­work Mode will be the default: "Infrastructure".
  8. Under WLAN Secu­rity Mode, choose your secu­rity type. For instance, mine is WEP, so that's what I selected.
  9. Under WLAN Secu­rity Set­tings, go to WEP key set­tings and define your encryp­tion level, for­mat, and key. For instance, for WEP you might have 64 bit, ASCII, and "xyz­abc" as your level, for­mat, and key respec­tively. If you don't know this stuff, this entire tuto­r­ial is per­haps not for you, oth­er­wise you know what these val­ues are. (You can always login as admin user into your wire­less router and recon­firm these set­tings for your spe­cific case.)

That's it. You can now con­nect to some web­site or your email server on your mobile phone, select the WLAN with the name you chose in Step 3 above, and your Nokia e-series phone will remem­ber your WEP pass­word for good. Finally.

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Readair: Google Reader client on your desktop (with Adobe AIR client)

By: Shanx
01-08-2008
Web Tools

If you use RSS, Google Reader is among the best there is. So good, in fact, that I imported all my old Blog­lines feeds. The inter­face, the star­ring of impor­tant feed items, the shar­ing — all of it is addictive.

Recently, I started using the Vienna client on OSX, which looks good but it's a pain to man­age the feed list­ings in two places– Google Reader, and local Vienna.  Yes, you can import your Google Reader OPML into Vienna, but to have them synced, you need to import it often.

But that's a man­ual sync and not very useful.

If Vienna's user forums are any indi­ca­tion, the auto­matic syn­chro­niza­tion between Google Reader and Vienna is among the top requested fea­tures, and I can under­stand why.

Well, I won't be wait­ing for Vienna any­more, as the Adobe AIR Google Reader client is here, and it works like a charm!


The inter­face is very Mac OSX like, very clean and nifty. Just set up your Google email and password:

And you are ready to roll. Of course, it doesn't (yet) have the func­tion­al­ity to tweak font sizes or flag impor­tant items or share — i.e., a com­plete desk­top alter­na­tive to Vienna or Google Reader, but this is a fan­tas­tic start.

Google Reader Desktop Client - Adobe AIR

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