Use Firefox to Fix the Web's Biggest Annoyances

Friendly Computers found an excellent article about some small and simple tweaks you can do in Mozilla Firefox to fix some common annoyances on the Web. Read more below…

If you've spent more than 5 minutes browsing around the web lately, you've no doubt dealt with greedy webmasters assaulting their readers with awful ads and more—but Firefox makes it easy to take back control.

Blocking Unnecessarily Obnoxious Ads

Without question, obnoxious ads are out of control on the web these days—you can barely move your mouse across a page without ads moving around, popping up, taking over the screen or pretending to be a dialog window indicating impending doom if you don't pay for a system scan NOW. These ads can be put in their place easily, using everybody's favorite Adblock Plus extension. Lifehacker is, of course, an advertising-supported site—so we'd be grateful if you'd keep us on the whitelist—but it'll do a charm for those flashing, pop-up-ing, overlaying, obtrusive ads all around the web.

Turn Off Auto-Playing Sounds

As annoying as advertisements and blinking text might be, nothing is more embarrassing than heading to a web page only to have everybody around you hear donkey noises emanating from your speakers at some ridiculous volume. Thankfully Firefox makes this problem easy to solve—though you probably should still think about headphones if you are in an office (even if they're not connected to anything). You can block most auto-playing music and/or sounds with the Flashblock extension, but since people can still embed media directly in the page, you'll want to take a look at the Stop Autoplay extension for a tool that can address both issues.

Prevent Sites from Resizing Windows and Disabling Menus

How many times have you clicked a link only to have your browser window resized and moved to the corner of the screen, or right-clicked on a page only to see a message saying that the clueless webmaster disabled the context menu on the page? Thankfully Firefox makes all of this easy to disable—just head into the Options panel and head for Content -> Javascript -> Advanced and remove the checkboxes.

Disable the Blink Tag

One can only assume that the <blink> tag is the result of some practical joke by the nerds that created HTML in the first place, and Firefox makes it easy to disable. Just enter about:config into your address bar, filter for browser.blink_allowed, and double-click it to set the value to false. Once you've made the change you won't have to deal with annoying commenters that think they are funny, causing seizures across the web.

Disable Blinking Text in Firefox

Block Animated FavIcons

This is one of the annoyances that isn't terribly prevalent (yet), but if you frequently need to use a site with an animated icon in the address bar, it can become irritating very quickly. Unfortunately there's no quick config setting to disable the animation, but you can use Adblock to disable the specific FavIcon or use the FavIcon Picker extension to choose a new, friendlier icon for that site with the clueless webmaster.

How to Block Distracting Animated Favicons

Stop Pages From Auto-Refreshing

Whenever a web site wants to artificially increase their pageview numbers, all they need to do is set a meta tag in the page that makes your browser reload the page every x number of minutes. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons for automatic page refreshing, but if this one is driving you crazy you can simply head into about:config and set the accessibility.blockautorefresh value to true. You'll end up with a message in the page window saying that Firefox blocked the page from refreshing, but it's better than wasting your bandwidth.

Disable Automatic Web Page Refreshing

Click, Click, Clicking Through Multiple Pages

One of my personal pet peeves are those web sites that split up every article with a single paragraph on each ad-ridden page, and 437 Next links to click through before you can read the whole thing. The sad thing is that I'm only slightly exaggerating—it's a serious problem, but there's also a plethora of extensions that can help you deal with it. You can take your choice between AutoPager, Skipscreen, repagination, PageZipper, Unlinker, and even the Antipagination bookmarklet to load the next page inline without having to reload. Each of the extensions works a little differently, and none of them work as well as boycotting sites that are particularly hostile to their readers.

Greasemonkey and Stylish Can Handle the Rest

If you've got a specific pet peeve that isn't solved already, you can simply install the Greasemonkey or Stylish extensions and get to work customizing your favorite pages to work just the way you want them to. If you don't have the skills to create your own scripts, you can head to userscripts.org or userstyles.org for customizations created by the community—or take a look through our top 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 2009 edition.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5349446/use-firefox-to-fix-the-webs-biggest-annoyances

Yelp Brings First US Augmented Reality App to iPhone Store

Friendly Computers learned about a cool new app that uses Augmented Reality to help you find restaurants and other businesses. Read more below…

Social review service Yelp has snuck the first Augmented Reality (AR) iPhone app specifically for the US into the iTunes App Store. The undisclosed new feature allows iPhone 3Gs owners to shake their phones three times to turn on a view called "the Monocle." This view uses the phone's GPS and compass to display markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses on top of the camera's view.

Blogger Robert Scoble discovered the hidden feature and posted about it on FriendFeed today. A screenshot is below.

Right: Blogger Josh Bancroft is surrounded by Yelp-reviewed businesses when he looks south.

Developers did not expect to be able to get Augmented Reality apps into the App Store until the release of the next iPhone OS this fall. Earlier this week, though, we reported on what appeared to be the very first - an update to an app called Metro Paris Subway.

Layar and Wikitude, two European companies offering multi-purpose AR browsers, both have Android AR apps that include content for the United States, but neither company has released an iPhone app yet. Layar's CEO said yesterday that he was testing an iPhone version of his company's software and that it was "very fast."

Building a little AR into an already established app seems to be the method of choice for sneaking AR into the app store.

Yelp had already built a layer of data for AR displays that it deployed on the Layar platform. Having done that, it was probably relatively trivial to build its own AR feature. Correction: AR company GoWeb3D says it actually built the Yelp layer for Layar using the Yelp API and with Yelp's blessing.

This may be what the future of mobile Augmented Reality looks like: many vendors offering their own in-app AR views, and a handful of AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude and Acrossair aggregating many different published AR views or layers.

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yelp_brings_first_us_augmented_reality_to_iphone_s.php

MP3 Diags

Friendly Computers stumbled upon a useful tool to help you clean up your MP3 library. Read more below…

In a few words, MP3 Diags is a GUI-based application that allows end-users to identify issues with their MP3 files, fix some of the issues and make other changes, like adding track information. It also lets you "look inside" an MP3 file.

Unlike some programs that are designed to deal with a single topic (like fixing VBR headers or adding cover art), MP3 Diags is a one stop solution that identifies more than 50 different issues in MP3 files and provides the means to fix many of them (well, not everything is fixable; you can't make a 64kbps file sound like a 256kbps one.)

Some of the more important issues that are found:

• broken tags / headers / audio
• duplicate tags / headers
• incorrect placement of tags / headers (ID3V2, ID3V1, LAME, Xing, ...)
• low quality audio
• missing VBR header
• missing track info / cover art
• broken track info / cover art
• missing normalization data
• character encoding issues (for languages other than English)

Some of the fixes and changes that MP3 Diags can do:

• Adding / fixing track info, including album cover; information can be retrieved from several sources: Internet, clipboard, file name, local files, and (obviously) keyboard
• Correcting files that show incorrect song duration
• Correcting files in which the player cannot seek correctly
• Converting characters for non-English names
• Adding composer name to the artist field, for players that don't handle the composer field
• Renaming files based on their fields
• Changing word case for track info

Source: http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/

TomTom $99 GPS app heads to iPhone

GPS specialist TomTom has released a new app and car kit that will turn your iPhone (or iPod touch!) into a full featured GPS device. Friendly Computers has more information below…

A hundred-dollar makeover can turn your iPhone into a GPS device.

GPS specialist TomTom announced Monday that its new $99.99 iPhone app is now up for sale at the iTunes store.

TomTom for the iPhone comes with features typically found in standard GPS units, including voice directions and full maps of the U.S. and Canada. Maps for Europe, Australia, and New Zealand are available at varying prices.

The app uses a new technology called IQ Routes, said the company. Instead of suggesting the quickest route based on travel time, IQ Routes taps into the actual experiences of other TomTom drivers to determine the fastest route to take. TomTom said this technology lets people reach their destinations quicker up to 35 percent of the time.

In addition, the software can suggest alternative routes if a turn is missed or a road is blocked, the company said.

"With TomTom for iPhone, millions of iPhone users can now benefit from the same easy-to-use and intuitive interface, turn-by-turn spoken navigation and unique routing technology that our 30 million portable navigation device users rely on every day," said Corinne Vigreux, managing director of TomTom.

The company will also offer a car kit, so that drivers can attach their iPhones to the front window or dash.

The new app runs on the iPhone 3G or 3GS and requires iPhone OS 3.0. Compatibility with the iPod Touch and older iPhone models should come soon, said TomTom.

TomTom first announced its new iPhone app at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference on June 8 (see video demo).

TomTom's new app will battle for a spot on your dashboard with several other iPhone navigation products--AT&T's $9.99-per-month Navigator, the similarly priced Gokivo app from Networks in Motion, and Navigon's MobileNavigator, now on sale for a flat fee of $69.99 until August 31.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10310838-37.html

Driver Sweeper Cleans Up Uninstalled Driver Leftovers

Sometimes having old drivers installed on your hard drive can prevent new drivers or hardware from working properly. Friendly Computers stumbled upon a useful utility that cleans up and gets rid of any old drivers you don’t need. Read more about it below…

When you upgrade your video card—or even just the drivers—the old version leaves settings and registry entries cluttering up your system—but you can clean them up.

Driver Sweeper works by removing all the extra stuff that the driver uninstaller leaves behind—so you'll need to first uninstall the video card, motherboard, or sound card drivers, and then run the utility to remove all the extra traces. Once you've done so (and rebooted), you can proceed with installing the newer drivers. It's one of those really useful utilities that isn't necessary for most people—in fact, not recommended for the less tech-savvy—but a critical tool that I've used whenever I do an upgrade.

Driver Sweeper is a free download for Windows only.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344002,00.asp

Vanish Gives Your Message an Expiration Date

Friendly Computers found a useful tool for protecting sensitive emails by making them literally vanish after a set time. Read more below…

Encrypting a message is an excellent way to protect it from prying eyes. What if you want to protect it against prying eyes and make it disappear? Expiring-message service Vanish can help.

Alarmed by trends in US case law where individuals were forced to give up their encryption keys and by the brutality of regimes abroad that did the same in less tactful ways, the creators of Vanish wanted to create a method of encryption where your encrypted data expired and could in no way be retrieved.

We created "self-destructing data" to try to address this problem. Our prototype system, called Vanish, shares some properties with existing encryption systems like PGP, but there are also some major differences.

First, someone using Vanish to "encrypt/encapsulate" information, like an email, never learns the encryption key. Second, there is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages.

Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires.

How do they achieve this guaranteed destruction? The key that is generated each time you create a unique Vanish message is shared across Bittorrent networks—unlinked in anyway to your identity—and temporarily stored in a distributed hash table. By the nature of the Bittorrent network your key can exist in increments of 8 hours depending on how long you want the Vanish servers to keep your message alive.

Once your message reaches the expiration date the number of users in the Bittorrent network carrying the necessary parts of your key begins to degrade and your message essentially disintegrates. You can never decrypt the message or be compelled to share the key because no key even exists.

Vanish is available as a web-based demo, but they recommend you download the Java-based Vanish System for a more powerful and customizable experience—you can increase the size of your key and tweak other settings with the download. The Firefox plug-in makes it easy to quickly create Vanish-encrypted messages for web-based email and other online services. Vanish is an open-source and free project available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5331359/vanish-gives-your-message-an-expiration-date

LockHunter Deletes Stubborn Files and Applications

Friendly Computers found a useful application that will help delete those stubborn files that can’t be deleted normally. Read more below…

Windows: Everyone has run into the problem at some point. You want to move or delete a file and Windows flat-out denies you because the file is supposedly in use. Break your file free with LockHunter.

LockHunter integrates with your system shell via the right-click menu. You can highlight any file or folder to see what processes are holding it hostage, and then unlock or kill the process, or delete the selected file.

If you need a portable solution for deleting files locked by Windows, check out previously mentioned Pocket Killbox. LockHunter is freeware, Windows only.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5333857/lockhunter-deletes-stubborn-files-and-applications

Cookienator Cleans Up Questionable Cookies

Friendly Computers discovered a useful utility that deletes all of the potentially harmful cookies on your computer while leaving the others in-tact. Read more below…

Windows only: Portable application Cookienator cleans up cookies from any of the major browsers, but instead of removing all your cookies, only removes the ones that are used to track you.

Once you've downloaded and extracted the no-installation-required utility, you can simply launch the executable to analyze just how many evil cookies are sitting around on your computer, and clean them up immediately. The options panel will let you choose which browsers to check, and it even includes the hard-to-delete Flash cookies. The utility can automatically clean your cookies when you log in, or you could choose to only run it manually.

Cookienator is a free download for Windows only. If you'd like to just opt-out of the tracking mechanisms, you can use previously mentioned PrivacyChoice, which works the opposite way—it adds a cookie that tells advertisers not to track you.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5332032/cookienator-cleans-up-questionable-cookies

Windows 7 XP Mode enters RC

Friendly Computers has learned that the much-anticipated XP Mode add-on for Windows 7 is one step closer to a final release with its new Release Candidate status. Read more below…

Microsoft has announced that XP Mode, the Windows 7 add-on that will allow users with the proper hardware to run a virtual version of Windows XP within Windows 7, has entered Release Candidate status.

There are several new features in XP Mode RC. XP Mode programs will now offer users a jumplist of most recently opened files with that program. This brings one of Windows 7's more useful productivity features into play with older programs that wouldn't otherwise have it. So, not only will you be able to directly start your most recently used XP Mode programs from the Windows 7 taskbar, but you'll be able to launch specific files from the Windows 7 taskbar, too. You can now use USB devices in XP Mode without having to make it full-screen, directly from the Windows 7 taskbar.

Drive sharing between XP Mode and Windows 7 can be disabled, and a new tutorial has been created on how to use XP Mode that users will first get access to from the XP Mode installation screen. In the XP Mode beta, users couldn't customize where to store differencing disk files. These relate to the virtualization aspects of running XP in Windows 7.

Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc recommends in the blog post announcing the XP Mode RC that users install antivirus and anti-malware protections in XP Mode in addition to whatever protective steps users have taken in the native Windows 7 environment. He also cautions that XP Mode is designed for running productivity applications that won't be upgraded to Windows 7, implying that Microsoft doesn't expect the average consumer to get much mileage out of the feature.

Users who are still interested in testing out the Windows 7 RC can still do so through August.

Source: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10303288-12.html

Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.0.13 security updates now available for download

Users running Mozilla Firefox, including some of us here at Friendly Computers, should make sure they have updated their browser to the newest version that was just released, as it corrects some major security flaws. Read more about the update below…

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.2 and Firefox 3.0.13 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.2 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.13 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.2 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.13 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.2 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

Source: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/08/03/firefox-3-5-2-and-3-0-13-security-updates-now-available-for-download/

Themes support now lets you reskin Chrome

Fans of Google Chrome may be happy to learn that theme support will soon be available in upcoming versions of the browser. Friendly Computers has more information below…

Google's Chrome tries to make a virtue out of its minimally intrusive browser interface, but that doesn't stop people from wanting to change its colors. So customization fans probably will be happy to learn that themes are now activated in the newest developer release of Google's browser.

Themes have been gradually getting simpler to activate in the browser, but they became enabled by default in the newest developer releases this week, version 3.0.195.3 and a hasty bug-fix release Wednesday night, version 3.0.195.4. No longer must you mess with pesky "--enable-extensions" command-line switches or other nitty-gritty options.

If you're using the new Chrome developer release, there are two sample themes available, Camo and Snowflake. To activate them, click the link then agree to save the CRX file. Chrome will then switch themes and give you a yellow alert it did so.

Google is working on making this easier. In the tools menu, clicking "Options" and then "Personal Stuff," there's a "Themes" section with a "Get Themes" button. So far the Web site it links to is empty, but presumably it will be populated with some themes soon enough.

The themes also work on Mac OS X, though the options dialog box has a tantalizing color picker that I couldn't get to do anything.

The options dialog box also includes an option to reset the theme to Chrome's default. However, it appears there's not much in the way of theme management at present; to switch themes, you'll have to reinstall them from the Web or your hard drive.

Not every Chrome user can try themes so easily yet. Google typically introduces these changes with the developer release before spreading them to the slower-moving, better tested beta and stable versions.

Google evidently has high hopes for Chrome themes. Trying to reproduce what it's done letting people reskin the iGoogle personalized home page service, Google is trying to coax artists to volunteer themes for Chrome. According to The New York Times, a number of those artists declined to offer their work for free.

Themes in the browser are an element of Chrome's nascent extensions system, a high priority in development at present. Extensions can customize what the browser can do, and they're a big advantage Firefox has over rival browsers.

The themes change the color of the frame behind the row of tabs, with inactive tabs becoming somewhat translucent to show a blurred version of what's behind them. Other elements such as the status bar and find tool also shift colors accordingly. The background image on the new new-tab page also gets a related graphic--and by the way, that more interactive new-tab page is now activated by default.

The new version also adds support for the HTML 5 video tag, Google said. That feature is a centerpiece of browser makers' efforts to propagate "open Web" standards that permit richer Web sites and Web applications that don't rely on plug-ins such as Adobe Flash.

Source: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10299814-12.html