Geekology

Mozilla recently made the Firefox 4 BETA available for download to the public. Installing the BETA would usually overwrite your old installation of Firefox 3, but if you’d like to try out the Firefox 4 BETA and retain your existing Firefox 3 installation and settings, simply follow the steps below:

Download the Firefox 4 BETA from Mozilla’s website, open the DMG file after the download completes, and drag the application from the DMG into a folder other than “Applications“.

Rename the application from “Firefox.app” to “Firefox 4 BETA.app“, then drag the renamed application to the “Applications” folder.

Before running the Firefox 4 BETA for the first time you’ll have to set up a separate Firefox Profile so the BETA doesn’t affect your existing Firefox 3 installation. Open a new Terminal window and type the following command to open the Firefox Profile Manager:

/Applications/Firefox\ 4\ BETA.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager

Read more…

If your website displays telephone numbers, visitors who have Skype installed might see a broken layout.

This is due to the Skype Browser Plugin functionality that parses each webpage visited to find textual telephone numbers and replace them with “Call via Skype” image links:

To keep the Skype Prowser Plugin from modifying your content or breaking your layout, Skype proposes that web developers add the following metadata tag to their websites’ HTML HEAD sections:

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" CONTENT="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE"></meta>

This metatag is supposed to instruct the Skype Browser Plugin to only reformat numbers that are ‘tagged’ with the following HTML comment:

<!-- sphoneid telnr="+27210000000" fileas="Willem van Zyl" -->021 000 0000<!-- sphoneid -->

… but unfortunately it won’t work at all if you’re not using the Transitional XHTML DOCTYPE. Even if you are using Transitional XHTML, you can still expect the metadata tag to only work occasionally so long as you used the exact capitalization, attribute order, and wording above. Additionally, the tag above isn’t valid XHTML (it doesn’t have a closing slash), so its usage is not ideal.

The ‘jquery.geekSkypeRemover.js’ jQuery Plugin:

This jQuery plugin extends jQuery with a new function that will spend a predefined period of time checking for “Skype Call” buttons dynamically created by the Skype Browser Plugin. Any such buttons it finds will be replaced with the original textual telephone number content. The predefined period of time is required since the Skype Browser Plugin might take a few seconds to add the “Skype Call” buttons to the page after it finishes loading.

Read more…

Apple’s iOS4 update provided functionality that allow iPhone Developers to add iAds to their applications.

iAds can make use of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad’s geolocation functionality to serve location-aware advertising to users, but if you’re security-conscious you can opt out of these by following the instructions below.

According to Apple’s privacy policy:

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

To opt out of iAds, open Safari on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and visit http://oo.apple.com/. You will be presented with the following message:

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game by Fantasy Flight Games is based on the popular Syfy TV series of the same name.

The Cylons were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies. And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters. After a long and bloody struggle, an armistice was declared and the Cylons left for another world to call their own.

Forty years later, they returned, and brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The remaining humans, led by the crew of the Battlestar Galactica, fled in hope of finding a new home, one known by legend as Earth.

Humanity’s only hope lies in finding Earth’s location while fighting off the unrelenting Cylons. But as resources run low, it is discovered that the enemy can now appear human and has infiltrated the fleet from the inside.

Gameplay

Designed for 3 to 6 players and lasting 2 – 3 hours, each player chooses to play as one of 10 characters from the TV series (including William Adama, Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, Saul Tigh, Sharon Valeri, Gaius Baltar, Galen Tyrol, Laura Roslin, Tom Zarek, and Karl Agathon), each with their own skills, abilities, and weaknesses.

Read more…

In the the Unix Bash shell the “&” (ampersand) character is a control operator used to fork processes.

According to the man page for Bash:

If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background in a subshell. The shell does not wait for the command to finish, and the return status is 0.

If the ampersand character is added to the end of a command, Bash will execute the command as a background process and assign a Job Number in addition to the usual Process ID (PID) to it:

Willem-Van-Zyls-MacBook-Pro:~ willem$ sleep 60 &
[1] 66984
Willem-Van-Zyls-MacBook-Pro:~ willem$ sleep 30 &
[2] 67001

In the above output, the “[1]” and “[2]” indicate the Job Numbers and the “66984” and “67001” indicate the PIDs.

To see a list of all running jobs, use the “jobs” command:

Willem-Van-Zyls-MacBook-Pro:~ willem$ jobs
[1]-  Running                 sleep 60 &
[2]+  Running                 sleep 30 &

To terminate a job, use the “kill” command and a “%” (percentage sign) with the Job Number appended:

kill %1

A lot of people are excited at the prospect of this week’s Soccer World Cup, but for me there’s nothing more exciting than this month’s annual E3 Expo. If you’re reading this blog you’re probably a geek and already know about E3, but if not, read on!

The E3 Expo runs from June 15 – 17 this year and is the world’s ultimate gaming expo. Every year E3 showcases all of the latest games, handheld devices, and video game consoles. I know, I know, I lose my breath sometimes when I think about it too… But enough of this jibber-jabber, on to the good stuff that I think you should look forward to.

New games from various studios will be revealed for the first time at E3 (most of which are currently kept under wraps) but you can see a list of the titles announced thus far here. This is only a partial list, however. There will be several surprise announcements once the expo starts!

Parrot’s AR.Drone

First on the list we have a new gaming experience that has been in development for years and will soon be released for the iPhone. The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter with WiFi capabilities that can be remotely controlled with the iPhone’s orientation and motion-sensing capabilities. It features two cameras that stream content to the iPhone’s screen, and it offers solo and multiplayer augmented reality games. If you want to know more, read about the AR.Drone on Parrot’s website.

Read more…

Although there are several free video downloading services available online, videos can easily be downloaded from YouTube by using just Safari and a free video conversion utility.

Open Safari, then browse to the YouTube video you want to download.

When the video starts downloading, click on Safari’s Window menu, then choose “Activity“.

The Activity Window that appears will list all files loaded from the website. Find the entry with the largest file size (it will be several Megabytes in size), and double-click on it.

Safari will open its Downloads Window and start downloading the file you double-clicked on as “videoplayback.flv“.

To convert this Flash Video file to a movie file, open it with Quicktime Player X and select the File menu, then choose “Save As“. Enter a file name for the video, set the format (“Movie” for MOV, “iPhone” for M4V), and click on the “Save” button.

If you need to convert the video to another format, you can do so by importing the MOV or M4V file to iMovie or a video converter like VisualHub and exporting it from there.