Iterative Excellence

Something that I didn't find obvious when trying to connect my iPhone to an old router using WEP security (which isn't really that secure, but sometimes recycling old pieces of kit is the right thing to do) - is how you specify a password.

I kept trying to connect, using the password I had configured the router to use, however the iPhone simply wouldn't connect. Eventually after a bit of searching I discovered the trick:

• Use the 13 hex digits of WEP key1 (generated from your passphrase) but PREFIX it with a $ for the iPhone. e.g. $3a01e1071e5054c9c30d01e3e1

Apparently this is some Apple convention, which is totaly obscure...

Labels: iPhone, tips

I've long been a fan of the Firefox web browser. I know that on a Mac many people use Safari - and I tried exclusively using Safari when I first got my Mac, however I missed the huge catalogue of browser extensions that are available in Firefox, and I also couldn't get used to how bookmarks work in Safari.

I'm not saying that bookmarks are perfect in Firefox - but in Safari I never really got comfortable with the layout of bookmarks (it doesn't seem to map onto a simple folder metaphor - e.g. I never worked out the difference between the Collections and Bookmarks "top level folders" in the manage bookmarks window). Somehow it all seemed a bit cumbersome - when all I really wanted was to categorize a few pages. Firefox is much better in this respect, particularly with its Awesome Bar and keyword tagging (where I mainly don't bother with folders and just keyword tag - particularly now that the XMarks extension suggests tags for me). I will say that my only complaint is that if I want to simply view all my links with a particular tag - its not so easy. There is "recent tags" but if it's not so recent then I'm a bit out of luck. You can open the "Organise Bookmarks" window and then start filtering - but having another window seems a bit cumbersome - I guess I miss being able to type something like - tag:iphone in the awesome bar...

Of course its this kind of thing that Add-On's are designed for - and there is a tag filtering add-on called TagSifter (which has a nice Tag cloud), however its not yet available for Firefox 3.5. However you can get around this by editing the manifest of an add-on and manually changing the MaxVersion requirement. But there are a few tricks to be aware of when using a Mac - as follows:

1. Download the add-on to disk (you may ironically have to launch Safari to do this as the plugin may indicate it doesn't support Firefox 3.5 and so won't let you install it - or right-click and use save as...)


2. Append .zip to the .xpi file, which will let you use the Finder extract the add-on into a folder


3. In the extracted folder, locate the "install.rdf" file, and open it with a text editor. Find the line: em:MaxVersion= and change the number to 3.5.*


4. The following is the important part on a Mac - you need to re-compress the extracted folder, however if you right click on the actual folder you end up with everything being zipped one level too deep. Thus you need to select all of the files inside the folder and then right click and select Compress. You will get a .zip file inside the folder which you can then rename to something like -3.5.xpi and then you can move your new file into the parent directory.


5. Finally, you should now be able to drag your new .xpi into Firefox and it will prompt you to install the new add-on

Hopefully this helps anyone else who upgrades to Firefox 3.5 and still has 3.0 extensions that they want to use in the newer version. I found this worked for both TagSifter as well as another favourite add-on, DuplicateTab.

reference: forums.mozillazine.org

Labels: firefox, Mac