How To Enable SPDY 3 In Firefox 15

Firefox 15 now supports version 3 of SPDY, an open networking protocol designed to reduce latency of web pages but is not turned on by default. This post will provide the instruction to enable SPDY 3.

Type in address bar, about:config and then search for spdy. Now you will see a particular preference name network.http.spdy.enabled.v3 which is by default set to false.

All you have to do is double click on that preference name to change its value to true. This will enable version 3 of SPDY in your firefox 15.

Note that SPDY v3 will bring support for flow control, update the compression dictionary, and remove wasted space from certain frames, along with other minor bug fixes.

Also, note that the version 3 of SPDY is included for the first time in firefox 15 and might not be fully stable.


Read more...

How To Automatically Start Firefox In Private Browsing Mode

In this post, I will provide the instructions for few of the methods to automatically start firefox in private browsing mode.

Method 1

Go to Edit -> Preferences and then select the Privacy tab. From the History dropdown list, choose the Firefox will Use custom settings for history and then check the Always use the private browsing mode option.

Method 2

The second method involves changing the firefox configuration which can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar. The first method described above essentially changes one particular preference name browser.privatebrowsing.autostart in background and this second method involves doing that background job manually on our own.

Once you open about:config configuration page, search for private and from the resulting list, modify the boolean value of browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to true by double clicking on it.

I hope this helps. If you got any other method, please drop it as a comment. :)


Read more...

How To Manually Install Flash Player 11 In Linux

This post will provide a step by step instructions for installing flash player 11 plugin in ubuntu 11.04 and other different versions and distros. This will be helpful for everybody who are having trouble with the software center like I had.


Make sure no firefox process is running and then fire up the terminal and type the following commands in order:

mkdir -p ~/flash && cd ~/flash

wget http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

tar -zxvf adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

sudo cp -r libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

sudo cp -r usr/* /usr

Once you have finished copying the shared object and other necessary files in their respective target directories, you can open the firefox and you're good to go. :)


Read more...

Bypass Android Pattern Lock In Easy Steps

Android devices has this security feature known as pattern lock which prevents the access of other people in your device. One of the senior members at XDA has revealed a way to bypass this pattern lock feature completely.

There have been several attempts on finding different methods for bypassing pattern unlocking in the android devices. Early methods were tracking the smudges on the screen and guessing since human are more likely to use the patterns they have already seen.

This method, posted in XDA developers forum by m.sabra, requires the USB debugging to be enabled in the android device and then you can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge), a part of Android SDK to easily bypass the pattern unlock with few lines of commands. The user has revealed two methods for bypassing this, the first one involves running few SQLite queries and the second one requires deleting the associated key.

You will need to download the Android SDK in order to continue with this hack.

Method 1:

adb shell
cd /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases
sqlite3 settings.db
update system set value=0 where name='lock_pattern_autolock';
update system set value=0 where name='lockscreen.lockedoutpermanently';
.quit

AND/OR

Method 2:

adb shell rm /data/system/gesture.key

You can either choose one of the methods or perform both of the methods (method 1 first and method 2 second). Be sure to reboot once you perform any of the above mentioned methods.



Users have said that this method is not working on the latest Android Jelly Bean and other custom ROMs such as Cyanogen Mod. But, earlier android versions are vulnerable to this hack.

Even if the USB debugging is disabled, you can still run these methods if custom recovery was installed in the android device. You will have to mount the working partition. Just go to 'Mounts and Storage' and mount /data. Then you can follow the above methods to bypass the lock.


Read more...

Download Youtube Videos From Command-Line With Youtube-dl

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and few more sites. All it requires is the Python interpreter version 2.5 or higher, and it is not platform specific.

This small tool is simple and offers everything you would love to have, but not the GUI. It supports several websites listed as below:

Supported sites

YouTube.com.
YouTube.com playlists (playlist URLs in "view_play_list" form).
YouTube.com searches
YouTube.com user videos, using user page URLs or the specifc "ytuser" keyword.
metacafe.com.
Google Video.
Google Video searches ("gvsearch" keyword).
Photobucket videos.
Yahoo! video.
Yahoo! video searches ("ybsearch" keyword).
Dailymotion.
DepositFiles.
blip.tv.
vimeo.
myvideo.de.
The Daily Show / Colbert Nation.
The Escapist.
A generic downloader that works in some sites.

You can download the tool from GitHub. For more information about the tool, check the documentation. The standalone executable for windows is also available for download from the same github repository.


Read more...

How To Easily Install EasyInstall In 64 bit Windows

Easy Install(easy_install) is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages. Easy Install gives you a quick and painless way to install packages remotely by connecting to the cheeseshop or even other websites via HTTP. It is somewhat analogous to the CPAN and PEAR tools for Perl and PHP, respectively. This How To will guide you in installing the easy_install utility easily in windows.

First download the ez_setup.py file.

Run the above script by typing in command prompt the following:

python.exe ez_setup.py

Once the script finishes, new directory "Scripts" will be created in the python installation directory and it will contain the easy_install.exe file in that directory.

Now all you have to do is add the Scripts path to system's Environment Variables to access this tool easily.

Right click on computer, go to properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables, System Variables and edit the "Path" variable by adding correct path to the Scripts directory.

I hope this helps :)


Read more...

Why Alias Command With Itself

Aliasing the command to itself to suppress the original functionality of the command and provide it new added sets of functionality can come quite handy for linux users and administrators.

If you have been using linux shell for a while, I'm pretty sure you are now familiar with the `ls` command, if not I think you have just learnt to use man pages. Probably you've been using `ls -l` command to list files with the files size as well. Too bad, you won't just be able to instantly make the sense of the file size displayed using this command so why not alias `ls` command to always provide human readable file sizes. So here is my alias:

alias ls='ls -lh'

This is what I always want to see as the output with `ls` command. The same kind of alias can be used with `du` and `df` commands. There are number of other cases where aliasing a command with itself is good choice.

Another example is the less command. By default, you need to press q to exit less which can be quite annoying if the entire content can fit in a single screen. However, adding -F flag will gracefully quit after displaying the content if the content fits in a single screen. So I have my alias for less as below:

alias lesss='less -F'

If something shoots in your mind, feel free to share here as a comment :)


Read more...

Stack-based Directory Switching For Easy Reversal

So how many times have you used the `cd` command repeatedly to go back and forth of two or more directories. Probably you are already familiar to the `cd -` command which lets you switch between the current and the previous directory. But, many times this current and previous directory switching restriction will not suffice and hence a better option in such case is to use the `pushd` command instead of `cd`.

For example, just use the `pushd somedirA`, `pushd somedirB`, ... and like that. Now if you need to switch back, you can just use `popd` command and you'll be switching back easily. The `pushd` command saves the current directory path and then cds to the supplied path.

If you dig more, you'll come to know about the -n and -N switches you can combine with these commands so I will let you explore on this. Also, you can use the `dirs` command to view the stack of directories. If you are some computer student or enthusiast, you have already gotten an idea from a famous data structure called stack. Anyway, I hope this comes handy sometimes like it does to me :)


Read more...