Disable Firefox Prefetching
I love the Firefox web browser. Even more than Opera. However, Firefox tends to be a memory hog. The reason for this is that once you load a web page and begin viewing it, Firefox begins prefetching the pages that are linked to the page you're viewing. I can only assume that this is intended to make subsequent pages you click on load faster. This feature would have been great twelve years ago when everyone was on a 56Kbps dial-up modem but in today's world of multi-megabit broadband it really isn't needed.
One very undesirable effect prefetching has is to swell the amount of memory Firefox uses. Don't believe me? Load up four separate web pages in four tabs and leave them idling over the weekend. When you come back, don't be surprised if you see that the Firefox executable is using nearly 800 Megs of RAM. Yikes!
Even though you're probably reading this on a quad core Xeon with 4 Gigs of RAM, you may as well disable prefetching so you can put your memory to other use. To do this, first open a new tab or window. Next, in the location bar, type 'about:config' (without the quotes). This will bring up a list of internal Firefox preferences. You can tweak many aspects of the browser but we're interested in disabling prefetching. In the Filter field, type the word fetch. You should see a screen similar to the one below:
Simply double clicking the 'network.prefetch-next' value will set it to false (disable prefetching). Restart Firefox and look in amazement at how much less memory it consumes.
Now that it uses less memory, why not make it faster? Try this other tweak here.
How to block the obnoxious Apple January Software nag screen in iTunes 7.6
Looks like Apple is turning into the IRS. Now they're nickel and dimeing you after your purchase. As if their users don't pay enough for pretty hardware that does the same thing as a beige box PC... Ok, seriously Apple, why the need to annoy the shit out of your users by nagging them to buy software for the iPod touch that comes free with the iPhone? OK, I'm done complaining (for now).
I'm usually hesitant to upgrade the software on my iPods since they rarely add new features and are more commonly used to clamp down on users (see the iPhone bricking debacle) or refresh DRM but I thought the 1.1.4 update might be worth it. So lo and behold, I plug my 16 Gig iPod touch in, hit the upgrade software button and let it do it's thing. Afterwards I expect to just have to resync all my content back to it but what am I greeted with? A nag screen telling me to buy a bunch of crap software I don't even want. I gave myself a day to cool off before figuring out how to block this since the only options are to "Take me to the iTunes store" or "Remind me later". So much for choice when it comes to Apple, huh?
Here's a quick and dirty way to block this annoyance. Be warned though, that it will likely block some or all of your access to the iTunes store, but you don't really buy crippled music anyways, do you?
Pop open a terminal and type "sudo vi /etc/hosts" (without the quotes) and hit enter. You should see two to four lines with 127.0.0.1 and possibly ::1 and fe80::1 if you're using IPv6. Type GG to go to the end of the file and insert the following:
127.0.0.1 ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net
Hit ZZ to save the file and exit. Now type "sudo dscacheutil -flushcache" to flush your DNS cache. This effectively prevents your computer from using the iTunes store, which is precisely what happens when you plug your iPod Touch into your docking cable (By the way, thanks for including an actual dock with the IPT Apple. Real elegance there...) and it loads a web page inside iTunes that nags you to buy the January software. You'll get an error message about the network connection to the iTunes store being refused but you only have to hit OK to be dropped back to the iPod management screen.
Obviously all Apple has to do to disable this is to change the hostname you connect to but they wouldn't really do that to further annoy you, would they?
It does appear that when you do actually buy the software, a file called nikita_receipt.plist is placed in /private/var/mobile/applications. I'll be looking for a way to add the necessary data to that file. For now I'm not sure since all plist files seem to be just a binary blob instead of the XML format they used to be in versions of OS X past.