www.steveneely.org

Speed up Firefox 3 on the eee pc 900

steve — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:04:39 +0000

I’ve installed EEE Ubuntu on my eee pc. The default xandros install is not active enough or up to date. It was a constant battle to get new libs ad apps on xandros.

I noticed that FF3 runs slow as a 3 legged asthmatic dog and just found the solution. The 900 has two drives: a fast 4GB system drive and slower 16GB drive. Since my home ~ folder was on the slow 16GB drive all my FF data was being written slowly. The solution is to move ~/.mozilla to the ast 4Gb system drive. This is modified from the solution (assues your login is “username”which means your group is also “username”):

sudo mkdir /usr/share/username

sudo chown :username /usr/share/username

sudo chmod g+w /usr/share/username

mv ~/.mozilla /usr/share/username/

ln -s /usr/share/username/.mozilla ~

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What colour is this?

steve — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:52:45 +0000

I just spent too much time looking at colour bars on a webpage we were building. The top flash menu versus the bottom div looked different. But the colour codes were the same. I’d been caught out by the viewing-angle dependence of LCD screens.

“Eh?”, you say. Well, it turns out the colour or hue changes significantly on LCD screens as your angle of viewing changes. So colours at the top of the screen look different to colours at the bottom. This is true even over the tiny 9″ of real estate as on my eee pc. To doubly confound my cones the effect gets worse the closer you get to the screen. So by pressing my nose against the screen and squinting at the menu versus the div it looked worse.

Great explanation and example colour swatch.

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Feed me simple

steve — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:37:52 +0000

On our travels we’ve been keeping a blog with updates and photos. It seems like a better way to let people know what we are doing than the mass email shot approach (which no one really reads and you always offend someone by forgetting to add them to the list).

I keep up-to-date on blogs, news, journal publications and assorted RSS feeds with google reader. Explaining what that means to non-geeks is almost impossible. A friend of mine had exactly this problem with his folks and came up with the idea of Feed My Inbox.

FMI is the simplest way to keep up with feeds. To subscribe to a blog you go to Feed My Inbox, enter the blog addess, your email address and then click a link in the confirmation email you get sent. From then on FMI will send you a daily email with feed updates. For low volume RSS consumption it looks perfect.

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Installing Firefox 3 on the eeepc (easy way)

steve — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:38:50 +0000

So I had to F9 my eeepc (press f9 on reboot to restore factory defaults) in an attempt to make wifi work properly. It seems good now but I’m keeping an eye on it. Anyway, I had to reinstall FF3 and found some deb packages to make life far easier.

Initial install instructions [eeeuser.com wiki] included this link to 3eportal where the deb packages and instructions reside. I had to run the dpkg command twice to make it work without errors. This method does not touch your FF2 install.

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Drivel (test post, really)

steve — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:55:13 +0000

I’m on extended honeymoon, travelling around the world with my wife and eeepc 900 (in that order). Simon recently posted on his blog about using a Gnome-based editor called Drivel for offline blogging so I’m giving it try.

Network connectivity has bee scarse at times out here…

(P.S. connecting Drivel to wordpress is explained here)

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Working up the EEE PC 901

steve — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:41:42 +0000

I’ve been upgrading and installing on my eee pc 901 ready for travelling. Getting FF 3 on this was a fight. Top hints:

add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list (although I’ve read that adding debian repos to this xandros install might be dodgy). The first is to get out of that stupid simple UI and have a real desktop again:
1. deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/ p701 main
2. deb http://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
install http://www.gtk.org/ and associated libs (pango, glib…) as per the docs in the tar.bz download. Then add the library path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /usr/profile (I’ve also read LD_LIBRARY_PATH is now considered harmful so I should read up on pkg-config command)

I’ve found the rest of the default install to be pretty good. Amarok works great with podcasts and my ipod (much better control over the ipod contents than itunes), the default movie player is great and twitterfox is keeping my tweets up-to-date.

If only I could get FF weave to behave. It seems overloaded since google sync became obsolete.

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Manging too many IM buddies in Pidgin

steve — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:55:09 +0000

My list of buddies on Pidgin IM was getting out of hand. Too many friends with multiple accounts — Jabber, MSN, AIM… Tim pointed out a couple of space saving tips.

First, you can drag a buddy icon and hover over another to nest them as a single entry. I’ve now amalgamated those with Jabber, MSN and AIM accounts into a single buddy on the list. Whichever account is top-most gets IM messages when you send them. You can expand a buddy with a right-click and change this ordering if you like.

The second tip is: buddies menu -> show -> buddy details. Uncheck this option to remove the icons and make the font nice and small. Now I’ve got space for more buddies. If only I could find some…

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Firefox 3 in and Google synch out

steve — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:23:24 +0000

A couple of days ago I upgraded to Firefox 3.0. I managed to get in as part of the world record # of downloads stunt. It is being reported that they had over 8 million downloads so it is a new record. Turns out no one has ever entered this record before so recording and reporting any downloads would have counted. We should’ve done this with Construct.

When I started up FF3 it told me that some of my plugins are not compatiable. No big suprise until I spotted Google sync was gone. Eh? Surely Google will update it. Well, no Lifehacker is reporting that Google will no longer support sync. Ouch.

I guess I can try Foxmarks but I really liked that password, tabs, cookies and history saving. Foxmarks only supports bookmark saving. Google, this is the first time you’ve let me down. For shame.

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Geotracking, photos and google earth

steve — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:04:16 +0000

I’m planning a round the world tour and have been looking into options for geotagging photos and posting our path online. After a bit of research I think a good option is to go with the geotagging feature of Picasa. It is a fairly straightforward process which involves selecting the photos in Picasa, zooming round the globe in google earth and clicking on where they were taken. I considered carrying a gps (Leo Laporte on the “mac break weekly” podcast was big-upping Garmin Nuvis recently) on me at all times and recording tracks but the battery life of the gps was going to seriously limit how much I could record. We’re looking at a max of 8 hours of tracking — that is no use in the Amazon basin where there are no plugs.

For fun I might build tracks on google earth and post them too. I can use my gps to locate points of interest (will need to pay $20 for GE plus if I want to use GPS directly with it) or just zoom round. To prepare for offline access I’ve upped my disk cache in GE preferences and will cache images before we head out. You can do this by setting a collection of way points and then playing a movie that flies over them. As GE goes along our trail the images will get cached and I can replay them in an offline state [details].

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Autonomous Robots to Sail the Atlantic

steve — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:44:26 +0000

The Microtransant Challenge is a autonomous robot sailing race across the Atlantic. They’ve had two warm up competitions in which the boats variously didn’t arrive in time or components failed. In the second competition in 2007 the INNOC (Austrian Association for Innovative Computer Science) team managed to sail for 24 hours and were pronounced the winners.

When I first arrived at the SRG three years ago we discussed doing something similar on the pond at UCD. An autonomous yacht would be a fun thing to build. Perhaps that is a summer project for us.

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