Problems to Solve » web

Firefox 3.6 won’t open on primary monitor [solved]

jordan314 — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:42:11 +0000

Firefox 3.6 has been driving me nuts by always opening on my secondary monitor, no matter if I drag windows over, restart, delete user preferences, etc. Every time I hit command N, the new window opens on my secondary monitor.

This is a known bug with Firefox 3.6.

The work around for now on OS X anyway is to drag a firefox window to your primary monitor, hit the green plus button to maximize the window, and then hit the green plus button again to restore it. Now windows should remain on the primary monitor.

Make Google Maps actually geo locate you in Firefox 3.5 [soved]

jordan314 — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:10:05 +0000

One of the most exciting features about Firefox 3.5 is its geo-location capabilities. But when I installed 3.5 and went to google maps, it didn’t automatically geo-locate me nor was there any option to.
This blog has a bookmarklet you can place on your toolbar to click to geo-locate you in google maps. Create a new toolbar bookmark, edit it, rename it “locate me” and paste in this code for the address:

javascript:function sv(s){document.querySelector("#q_d").value=s};sv("Checking...");navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(a){c=a.coords;sv(c.latitude+"%20"+c.longitude);document.forms.q_form.submit();},function(){sv("Rejected!")});

Then when you go to google maps and click “locate me”, you can search for businesses near you wherever you are.

Thanks, John Ath!

Sync Firefox bookmarks to the iPhone with Foxmarks

jordan314 — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:30:00 +0000

I’ve tried a few browser bookmark syncing services in the past, but I’m really impressed with Foxmarks, for their Firefox, Safari, and IE support.
As a bonus, once I set up foxmarks for Safari, and then synced my iPhone, my firefox bookmarks transferred to my iPhone.
Lifehacker recommends an app, O-Marks, for using foxmarks to sync your bookmarks over the air:
http://lifehacker.com/5051271/o+marks-syncs-your-foxmarks-bookmarks-to-your-iphone
But I find just opening up Safari every once in a while and syncing the iPhone works well enough for me.

Submit to Tab in Firefox [solved]

jordan314 — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:41:19 +0000

One thing I miss in Safari was if you held down command when you were clicking submit in a form (such as a google search), it would open the results in a new tab.

One thing I like about Firefox is it’s super extensible. I found a decent replacement here:
Submit to Tab
Hold down control on PC or command on mac and click Submit and voila. I wish that command return worked for forms, and that it worked with the google search bar, but meh, it works well enough.

Send list of open tabs to URL list, text file or clipboard [solved]

jordan314 — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:00:04 +0000

I’ve always wanted a Firefox add on that would send me a list of my open tabs in an email so I could look at them later. No, I don’t want these bookmarked, I just want to read them later. Read it Later comes close, but I’m finding myself never actually coming back to read those later.

I thought of this again tonight when I had a zillion tabs open for a research paper and thought I’d do some googling. Ideally I wanted to export a list of tabs with both the URLs and titles of the pages so I could list them in my bibliography. In the past I’ve had to re-google the pages I used to reference them.

I did find what looks to be an awesome citation management add on for firefox called Zotero. This add on has many features but was overkill for my needs – it stores PDFs and documents, attempts to capture citation information from web pages, and lets you take notes. But as far as I can tell it does not just save the title and URL of the web page you’re browsing, and instead tries to parse that page itself for citations.

Finally, a search for ‘firefox tabs urls titles’ did it: I found Send Tab URLs 2.0 for firefox which is freaking perfect. You can get a plain, numbered, or bulleted list and send it to yourself via your OS’s email or gmail. Even better, you can just send it to the clipboard. So simple and yet I’ve been longing for this for so long. It works perfectly, I paste it into Word and voila, I have a bibliography. Thanks, Alex Eng!!!

How to bypass Pandora’s vague search function [solved]

jordan314 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:27:35 +0000

For a couple weeks now I’ve been wanting to create a Pandora station specifically for Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major. I want to find more classical music that sounds like this. Now that Pandora supports classical music, I would try typing in “Bartok” into the search function, but I would get Bartok’s symphonies. I tried typing in “String Quartet bartok” but got no results because that is neither just a name of a song nor just an artist. “String Quartet No” got me intresting results, but the autosuggest listings did not give me Bartok.
Finally I figured it out: While listening to the Bartók station, I clicked on “about this artist” to go to Bartók’s page. From there I could navigate to the specific album and track I wanted, and then do “Create a Station” based on that track. Now I’m finding all sorts of cool string quartets.

Try it, it’s awesome.

Google sort by date bookmarklet [solved]

jordan314 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:54:29 +0000

Based on this URL hack to sort google results by date, I made a bookmarklet:
javascript:location.href =location.href + '&as_qdr=d';
Now if you google search and then click this button, it will sort your results by the newest date. Works in FF and Safari.

USPS Tracking package hack [solved]

jordan314 — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:15:33 +0000

If you’re as obsessed as I am about tracking some packages, you’ll get sick of typing in your tracking number and submitting the form over and over. But if you go to:
http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/InterLabelInquiry.do
it doesn’t work because the form used a POST method.
Well, on the previous page, the form input field was called strOrigTrackNum. Some sites let you post a form via the GET method, so let’s see if this works:
http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/InterLabelInquiry.do?strOrigTrackNum=[your tracking number]
Yup! Worked fine. Now you have a URL that you can bookmark to quickly track your shipment.

Read Safari on the iPhone while lying down (rotation workaround) [solved]

jordan314 — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:45:46 +0000

As neat as the accelerometers on the iPhone are for switching between portrait and landscape modes, it gets to be annoying as hell trying to read when you’re lying down. You naturally hold the phone sideways when you’re lying down, and then the screen rotates, turning the text 90° away from you in landscape mode. You rotate it back and it rotates the screen 90° away again. The makers of the eReader application have already noticed this was a big issue and corrected it with a lock orientation setting. Safari, however, still does not have this.

I just figured out a workaround: lie down and turn the phone horizontally so that it goes into landscape mode. Then, continue rotating the phone upside down. Unlike the photo application which will display photos upside down, Safari will only rotate 270° and will remain in landscape mode, so you can comfortably read google reader in bed.

Sync iPhone with Google Calendar and Outlook [solved]

jordan314 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:38:35 +0000

I have too many calendars. I’ve managed to consolidate most of them though:

First, I synced my work Outlook calendar (on my PC) to my gcal with the fantastic app Google Calendar Sync. I gave it my info and told it to sync both ways every hour.

Then, I subscribed to my google calendar in iCal: First, in google calendar, click on Settings, Calendar Settings, Calendars, [your calendar], Calendar Address: and click on ICAL. Copy this URL, and then in iCal, paste it into Calendar: Subscribe… and have it update every hour.

And you’re done! My iPhone will only sync when I connect it to the computer, which is fine with me, but you can either subscribe to mobileme for push calendar notifications, set up text messaging alerts with google calendar, or use the web-based iphone version of google calendar in Safari.

-edit-
Edit: The events show up as separate calendars on your iPhone.

It looks like this currently does not work with mobileMe. You can convert the items to your personal calendar in iCal by exporting them and then importing them. See macosxhints workaround here.