existence trainer

Lately a bunch of sites have been moving from Flash to either Silverlight or Adobe AIR for their video feeds. Unfortunately, neither are officially supported yet on the Linux platform in general, or on Ubuntu in particular (that said, there is a lot of hard work being done to change this: check out mono and Adobe AIR for Linux ). Its easy to feel left behind. For example, I wanted to watch the live feed from foxnews.com on the huricane Ike. Unfortunately, it requires Adobe AIR. What could I do? I'm not one to feel sorry for myself, so I figured I'd do some hacking and tinkering around and see if I could get it to work anyway. And I did! Here is what you need to do: First, download the alpha of Adobe AIR for Linux here . Using the command line navigate to the download, and type: chmod 755 adobeair_linux_*.bin Type: ./adobeair_linux_*.bin [this will execute gksu automatically] Follow the directions. Once it is installed: close and restart Firefox [I'm not sure this step is...

If you use Firefox, but occasionally need to pretend your browser is IE, Safari, or even the Iphone browser, you can using User Agent Switcher and the user-agents provided here by Brent Strange (thanks!). The import file includes the following spoofs: Internet Explorer MSIE 8 (Win Vista) MSIE 8 (Win XP) MSIE 7 (Win Vista) MSIE 7 (Win XP) MSIE 7 (Win Storage Server) MSIE 6 (Win XP) MSIE 5.5 (Win 2000) MSIE 5.5 (Win ME) MSIE 5.0 (Win 95) MSIE 4.01 (Win 95) MSIE 4.0 (Win NT) FireFox FireFox 2.0.12 (Win Vista) FireFox 2.0 (Win XP) FireFox 1.5.0.6 (Fedora Core 5/Linux) FireFox 1.5.0.4 (Debian Linux) FireFox 1.5.0.3 (Mac OSX) FireFox 1.5.0.1 (Win Vista) FireFox 1.5 (Win XP) FireFox 1.4 (Win XP) FireFox 1.0.7 (Win XP) FireFox 1.0.6 (Win XP) FireFox 1.0.5 (SlackWare/Linux) FireFox 1.0.4 (FreeBSD) FireFox 1.0 (Win XP) FireFox 0.9.3 (Win XP) Opera Opera 9.1 (Win XP) Opera 8.0 (Win 2000) Opera 7.6 (Server 2003) Opera 7.51 (Win XP) Opera 7.5 (Win XP) Opera 7.5 (Win ME) Opera 4 Opera 3 Opera 2 Op...

Recently, one of my favorite firefox addons stopped working: CustomizeGoogle . This extension provided search suggestions when typing a query into google. Unfortunately, for some reason it stopped. After following the directions on the addon website and some additional fiddling, I was able to get it working again. Here's how: Set http://www.google.com as your homepage, not the one with the Firefox logo on it Disable Google Suggest in CustomizeGoogle. Click on preferences on www.google.com and make sure "Provide query suggestions in the search box" is selected. Click Save Preferences. Clear your cache (without doing this it still didn't work for me). EDIT: Doesn't seem to work with Google UK. More info can be found here .

If you use Firefox and haven't yet checked out the many add-ons that you can install into it, then I'd highly recommend trying (at least some of) the following. They really improve my browsing experience: Adblock Plus with Adblock Filterset.G Updater - Now you don't have to constantly be bombarded with ads when browsing around. Highly recommended! (Question: I feel bad for those sites that use ads in a responsible non-intrusive way. I guess I wish there was a version that would white-list those sites, because hey - we all need to earn money. Any suggestions?) Always Remember Password - If you use Yahoo email, then you know that they have disabled the ability for Firefox to save the password in the password manager causing you to have to type it every time. Well, now you don't. CacheViewer - Exactly what the title suggests. Its a bit rough around the edges, but at least it gives the ability to view your cache. del.icio.us Bookmarks - I've yet to be entirely sat...

I was recently asked the following question: How secure is Firefox's Password Manager? I wasn't entirely sure, so I went checking. Here's what I've found. All things considered, Firefox's Password Manager (PM) looks fairly secure. Check out this post here . Given that the passwords are encrypted, they will be hard to recover. There is though, as the comments of this article point out, at least one security weakness in Firefox's Password Manager, but it should be fixed by the 2.0.0.2 release, which will be released sometimes later this month (or so they say). So I guess its not the end of the world. About brute force password recovery tools (like FireMaster ), well, I'm not sure what to think. As long as your Master Password is a good one, then I suppose it will probably have difficulty cracking it (am I right about this, anyone?). Maybe I'll try it out and see how long it takes for it to crack my own password. Anyway, if you want to be paranoid about it...