Robot.Floss

Today I’m headed from Oklahoma City back to San Francisco. Before I arrived at the airport, I downloaded the User Agent Switcher for FireFox and added a profile for the iPhone. A lot of airports allow free wifi access for iPhones, and the User Agent will allow you to pretend that your computer is a iPhone. And it works perfectly.

I tried connecting to the airport’s wifi without the User Agent addon enabled, and I was promptly asked to pay for access. I turned on User Agent, selected the iPhone profile, and viola! Free wifi. After 15 minutes I’m asked to watch a 15 second add, and then access continues.

Knowledge is glorious.

Here are the iPhone Agent settings you need to use once you’ve downloaded the User Agent addon:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Popularity: 3% [?]

Recently, my parents started to suffer the following error any time they tried to view an image in Firefox (note: not an embedded image, rather just the image by itself):
“The image cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.” Turns out, the nasty little error is caused by Skype’s Firefox extension (my parents had recently installed it). The solution is to disable the Skype extension for Firefox under: Tools -> Add-ons

Popularity: 2% [?]

The newest version of G-Mail has a brief loading screen.

This is fine (though part of me finds it a cumbersome burden), except at times the loading screen can get caught in an infinite refresh. Thankfully, there are two easy solutions.

1.) Completely clear your internet browsers cache and cookies

• Firefox: Tools -> Clear Private Data
• IE7: Tools -> Delete Browsing History
• IE6: Tools -> Internet Options – > General

2.) Surf to the HTTPS version of G-Mail at https://www.gmail.com

I haven’t encountered the problem in a few days, so perhaps it has vanished. But in case you run in to it, I hope this helps.

Popularity: 2% [?]