This is rather strange. Recently I’ve noticed the BBC will not let me watch any video content site with Firefox 3 beta 5 on Ubuntu. Now I know this is not a country based issue, I live in the UK. Secondly, I know it is not an issue with my ISP that makes me look like I am accessing the content from abroad. How do I know this? Simple, by switching user agents.

First I clear my cookies and try to watch a video, say one of Fabio Capello’s crazy interviews in English, the site greets me with the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available at the moment”

Now, if you’ve had ISP issues before with the BBC’s site you will know that if your ISP has acrazy routing scheme up the BBC site will give you the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available in your country”

Notice the difference?

Now all I have to do to watch the video is clear my cookies once more and use the User Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox to gain access. Simply switch the agent to crappy old Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and enjoy the videos…

My crummy ISP decided they’d give me 3 days of downtime, so sorry for the lapse. Shame, as I had a nice little run of posts going…

It seems to be a widely known face that the real strength behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser is in the wide range of extensions available. Whilst Opera might have more core functionality, Firefox has the potential to be the superior browser, especially now the memory issue is fixed.

But if I could only choose four Firefox extensions, what would I choose? Here are my choices in the usual reverse order:

4. DownThemAll

I find this extension so useful when on a fast line. My internet connection seems to be around the 12Mb area (I don’t know the actual speed, as I get the thing for free) and when your downloading you often find that you get nowhere near your connections actual speed. Using any download manager will do the trick and bring those speeds back into line, but why bother with an external manager when you can have one specially built for your favorite browser?

3. Adblock Plus

Whilst Adblock seems to still be the more popular extension, Adblock Plus is by far the superior option for removing adverts from your internet experience. Whilst Adblock requires manual blocking of advertisements, Adblock Plus uses a set of continually updated set of filters to do the blocking automatically. In addition, the extension can — not by default — attempt to regain the space that would have been taken up by the advertisement.

2. Nightly Tester Tools

Now although this extension is designed to help testers when using the nightly ‘Minefield’ releases of Firefox, this tool has one major feature that all users of Firefox would find useful — force Firefox to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it. Now why would you want to do this? Well unlike Internet Explorer, which seems to get large updates every now and again; Firefox is updated with bug and security fixes pretty regularly. When this happens all of your extensions will be disabled, as they are signed as being compatible up to the last version released; although many extensions are updated within hours of this occurring, many extensions are not. In addition, users may still be able to use extensions that were abandoned by their creator. Please be careful whilst using this extension, as it could cause problems with your browser.

1. NoScript

Everyone hates pop-ups and there are even worse things than pop-ups on the web these days. Thankfully Firefox’s built in pop-up blocker does a good job in removing pop-ups, so do Internet Explorer and Opera, but browsers with blockers just happened to be a double-edged sword. Since a large portion of their pop-ups were annoying anyone anymore, whoever it is that likes to make the damn things decided to work out how to get round all these blockers. Instead the internet (which is serious business by the way) is infested with Javascript based advertisements. These damn things can either block 99.9999% of the bloody screen, follow your scrolling of the page, follow your mouse (by now you start to wonder why they haven’t got the message,) jump out of no-where when you click a link, and steal your first wallet. Ok they might not steal your wallet, but they frustrate me more than pop-ups ever did.

So you could just turn off Javascript, for sure that would kill the little fuckers, but you wouldn’t be able to surf half the web either. So that’s where NoScript comes in and saves the day. NoScript turns off Javascript for every site and lets you whitelist the sites that you do want to allow to use Javascript. Thus you no longer have to view the annoying advertisements, plus you can still do your internet banking. Between NoScript and Adblock Plus you can truely reclaim the web.

What would your choices be?

Yes, that does sound confusing, but you can hide a .rar achive ‘inside’ a jpeg picture file. You can use this to stash away some files you don’t want other users on your computer from seeing. Alternatively you could just use encryption, but this is a quick and easy way to do things, that lets you hide files effectively from normal users. Be warned that it is possible to find the files with tools such as enCase… Thanks to Helpero for this nice tip.

I’d love to toss in some demonstration pictures, but my computer is currently running Ubuntu and I would need to install Windows to do so!

Basically, with this method you can open the file as either a picture or a rar archive. So a normal user will just double click the file and it will open as a picture, whilst you can drag it into Winrar (or any alternative) and it will open as an archive.

Here we go:

1. Find your .rar archive and put it in the same directory as a jpeg picture (I will use C:\ as it is easy to work from there. You can then just copy and paste the file to a better directory.)
2. Open a command prompt by clicking Start, then clicking Run, and typing ‘cmd’  in the Run box and click ok.
3. In the Command window (CMD window) that has appeared, type your directory should already be in the C drive other wise you will need to navigate their. If your CMD window starts in a different directory you can either direct the window their using DOS style commands, or just use that directory for the process (simply move the picture and jpeg to that folder.)
4. Enter ‘copy /b input.jpg + secret.rar ouput.jpg’ without quotes in the CMD window and press Enter.

Remember input.jpg is the picture you are cloning and secret.rar is the file you are hiding. Output.jpg will be the file that has the winrar archive hidden inside.

Open the archive in Winrar to make sure you got everything working correctly.

I am sure everyone and their dog  knows about Firefox 2’s severe memory issues. Version 2.0 was meant to use more memory than previous versions, as it was designed to cache pages in ram dependent on the amount of ram in the machine. Now this was all well and good, but something went wrong and Firefox 2 decided it didn’t like to give memory back — thus, our friendly browser turned into a memory hog.

It’s good to see that Mozilla have targeted the memory issue with Firefox 3, and beta 3 fixed over 350 memory issues:

Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

I’ve done a little test, by running both Firefox 2.0.0.12 alongside Firefox 3.0b3 for about 20 minutes to see how each handled memory under Ubuntu Gutsy. I think this image shows some quite conclusive results:

That’s around half the memory usage for Firefox 3.0b3! Quite remarkable, I am sure you may have different results, after all Firefox is designed to use more memory if you have it — secondly, you will be browsing different sites and using different extensions to me. In this test both browsers had Adblock Plus! and NoScript installed, but turned off.

I’ve noticed Firefox 3 is much more responsive and I do like the extension searching function (sorry Mozilla, I’ve been around since 0.6 so I’ll keep on calling them extensions.) The only problem I have with the browser is the new UI, the Linux look is sub-par — Firefox 2 has a much nicer interface. Whilst the Windows ‘keyhole’ button looks horrendous and so does the attempt at a keyhole on the Mac. Mozilla should provide the old interface with the browser, as the new one fails to deliver. The idea behind the keyhole based button is all well and good, but it needs to be implemented much, much better to be effective; I can see many users simply downloading a Firefox 2 based theme to get rid of the ugly button!

The Dreamhost support wiki seems to be lacking in information on general connectivity with Linux (especially for Evolution!) I would guess this is due to the lack of Dreamhost users that use a Linux variant such as Ubuntu, plus those that do will know what they are doing. I’ll be demonstrating the IMAP settings needed for email to work in Evolution, Ubuntu’s default email client, if you are using Thunderbird the settings are exactly the same as those in Windows.

Setting up the SSH FTP on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon couldn’t be easier; however, you need to know a small amount on the setup of Unix servers. Otherwise you’ll end up in the root of the filesystem and on the Dreamhost server, for security reasons, you can’t seem to access the ‘home’ directory from root as a normal user. I am sure it won’t take you long to understand why.

Basically all you need to do is go to ‘Places’ then ‘Connect to Server’ in the main menu thingy. From here you can follow this picture:

I’ve just found that my old AOL email account, from when I used AOL for dial-up internet, still works! Don’t point and laugh at the fact I had AOL internet, they were the first in the UK to offer a fixed monthly rate dial-up browsing, so I didn’t have to pay every minute for laggy Quake and hours to download a demo. Although, I did still block the phone line!

Anyway, my AOL email account states I have 806 new email, and a glorious 6 spam! My gmail account (my junk mail box that I use for all forums, sites, and anything that wants an email address,) is now up to 651 unread messages and 264 spam messages! So that’s around 1600 unread email that I’ve managed to collect. I am pretty sure you don’t want to see any titles though, you know what spams like!

The University of Birmingham offers three wireless networks to connect to: EDUROAM (where the same settings can be used at different Universities), the Guest network, and UOBWLAN (the University’s own network.) Since official support is limited to just Windows and Mac users, there is no guide on how to connect an S60 based mobile phone such as the Nokia N95 or N82 to any of the networks. UOBWLAN uses an extremely secure setup, which makes configuring external devices (even Windows based Laptops) rather difficult; thus, getting my Nokia N82 to connect to UOBWLAN took a lot of time and effort. As even though I had a good grounding on the settings from using the Linux and Windows instructions, I needed to run a number of configurations before I got it working. Thus if you would like to use this information on your own site, please give this site credit for the information, as this is — at the time of writing — the only site with this information. (Now I know of one more site with the information.)

Sadly I only own one device with a digital camera — my mobile phone, so I cannot offer any images to help set this up on your device. Matthew has kindly let me use the images from his site, I’ve uploaded them on here as his site is hosted by his ISP… and they could get grumpy with bandwidth if I hot link them

The key security features/methods used on UOBWLAN are listed below, obviously if your device does not support all of them you will not be able to connect to the UOBWLAN network. As far as I know all of the Nokia S60 devices with wireless networking support all of these features. Both N95, N95 black, and the N82 are confirmed to work, so I would presume any newer phones by Nokia will support all of these standards and more.

• WPA Enterprise
• PEAP
• Authority certificates
• MSCHAPv2

To set up the connection, it would be best to be in an area where you get signal for the wireless network. Then define the access point and edit the access point using my settings.

On the main page for the connection

Connection name: UOBWLAN

Data bearer: Wireless LAN

WLAN network name: UOBWLAN

Network status: Public

WLAN network mode: Infrastructure

WPA security mode: WPA/WPA2

Homepage: None (Not really important)

Now go to WLAN security settings, this is underneath WPA security mode.

Set this up as follows:

WPA/WPA2: EAP

WPA2 only mode: off

Now go to EAP plug-in settings, this is underneath WPA/WPA2

Make sure there is only a tick next to EAP-PEAP. To enable and disable different EAP choices use Options (most likely your left main button) then choose disable the item will no longer have a tick by its name. Now select EAP-PEAP use Options and choose edit, alternatively your main button (depressing the joystick/d-pad) will do this. You should now be in a screen titled EAP-PEAP Settings. This has two tabs Settings and EAPs, in settings you need to choose:

Personal Certificate: Not defined

Authority certificate: Cybertrust Education… (This is all my phone displays of the name, the full name is probably Cybertrust Educational Certificate, or something to that extent. If you do not have this certificate, you need to follow the Linux instructions to get the certificate in *.per format. You can download the certificate in Windows and right click it and their should be an option to open the cerficate [it might be manage I am running Ubuntu, but I will update this later,] and export it to *.ber and *.per your phone accepts one of these modes.)

User name is use: User defined

User name: Your adf user name goes here, it is usually in the form abc123 where abc are your initials and then three random numbers. It is the same user name you use to log in to my.bham.ac.uk.

Realm in use: User defined

Realm: Adf.bham.ac.uk

Allow PEAPv0: No

Allow PEAPv1: Yes

Allow PEAPv2: No

Now press right on your phones joystick/pad to go to the EAPs tab. Disable all the EAP options apart from EAP-MSCHAPv2 (so that there is only a tick beside EAP-MSCHAPv2.) This is done in exactly the same way as you disabled all the settings bar PEAP earlier. Now click on EAP-MSCHAPv2 to edit the settings for this and use:

User name: Your adf user name, this should be the same as what you entered in the Settings tab. Remember it is what you use to login to my.bham.ac.uk

Prompt password: No

Password: Here enter your adf password, remember it is what you use to login to my.bham.ac.uk.

Now if you exit everything, provided the phone saved the information (double check after leaving,) you should be able to connect to the UOBWLAN network. Sometimes my phones built in browser messes up and can’t connect, I find using Opera Mini solves this and it is better than the built in browser anyway. If you’re having any troubles with this, please use the comments for support.

If you, like me, live in Opal student accommodation or any student accommodation that uses Ask4 broadband, you will notice you can access freeview television through your web browser. This is a very nice addition; however, it seems they do not want us to connect via any other means than through our web-browsers. I personally found this restrictive, but there is a way around this. Using this setup will allow you to stream their IPTV to others (which I would not reccommend as Ask4 would not be happy,) or download the live TV broadcast to your computer. Effectively like setting up your own Tivo! Finally, you will be able to mess around with the settings of your media player to get better image quality, this is highly beneficial when watching sport as the IPTV stream is poor for fast moving images. I find watching Match of the Day to be rather difficult using their setup.

First you can try the ‘easy method’ I am not sure if it will work for everyone, or even anyone. It could just be down to the server cache that I am able to go this page that I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Click that link please, and try it out. If you have gone to the normal page you need to use the second method, described below, otherwise you can skip the next paragraph.

Otherwise you need to install the User Agent Switcher for Firefox. Go to the portal page (where there is a link to the TV page.) Now set the Firefox plugin to use the option ‘Opera 9.2 Windows Vista.’ This will fool the server into thinking you are using an unsupported browser, so you will get access to what I like to call ‘The Magic TV Page’. Try going to the TV page and you should go to a page link that in the picture below:

You should now be at this page:

When you select a channel from the dropdown menu and select ‘Play’ the port will change, this is effectively sending a steam to your computer on the network. All you need to do now is set up a media player to do so. It is easiest to do so with VLC, which also provides methods for saving the stream; however, I have successfully watch TV using Totem and I would presume Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Media Player Classic would be able to do the same. You do need to keep this window open for the stream to be sent, that is the only drawback I know of so far; however, this will let you use all the fancy image and aspect ratio enhancements your player has. If you were to use Media Player Classic and FFDShow you could get a really good picture with this method.

 Here is how I set up VLC, you should use similar methods with all the players. Not all media players can handle streaming video of this type, I couldn’t set up MPlayer or Xine, but that might be my own inexperience with those players.VLC is just good as it is easy to save a stream to disk, which means you can record those programs you wanted to watch whilst revising…

I hope you found this tutorial useful, thats 406NotAcceptable 1 - 0 Ask4Broadband.

It really makes you wonder what school the googlebot went to… I mean, you write a post about SEO and hits and you get an advert stating ‘Do you want to start a blog’ even better on the side advert I get ‘Buy a Jeep NOW!’ My post on the ‘Tire Swing’ picture gets a nice ‘Master WordPress: One to one, or classroom courses For levels from beginner to master!’ advertisement. Where the heck did that come from?

I know you can calibrate the adverts to make them more relevant, but isn’t targeted adverts the point of Adsense? I could understand adverts for window installation (you know the ones you look out of,) when you post about Microsoft Windows, but this is silly.

Buying the googlebot some glasses (aka calibrating the adverts) is probably good idea, especially when you make peanuts.