Google please do not redirect me just because I am traveling

I am traveling a lot for my current job taking me also outside of The Netherlands into Belgium and Germany from time to time. Lately I spent a lot of time around the Brussels in Belgium, which is the French speaking part of the country. As a result all the searches I perform using the Google search bar plugin within Firefox get redirected to a French version of the Google pages and the search result favor web pages written in French.

Since I can hardly speak or read French I find myself constantly typing in a URL for a (in my case) Dutch localized version of Google to do my searches. This totally defeats the purpose of Firefox’s search bar.

Look for a file named google.xml. On Windows systems this file is located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. On Mac OS systems the file is inside the Firefox.app. You can get to the file by right (or control) clicking on Firefox.app and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’ from the menu. Within the new Finder window navigate to /Contents/MacOS/searchpulgins.

By default (Firefox 3.0.6) the file contains the following information (except for the Image tag, data for the image itself has been removed)

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" 
     template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

Edit the content of the file like below (bold text indicates the changes made to the file)

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" 
     template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <Param name="hl" value="en"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

This little change ensures that you are still being addressed in English although you are still redirected to a localized Google page. If you totally want to prevent the redirect to happen you could, instead of using “http://www.google.com/search”, use something like “http://www.google.nl/search” or any other of Googles localized search pages.

Using Foxmarks to synch to iPhone/iPod Touch

For some time now I have been using Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronized between several machines I am using. At first Foxmarks, as the name implies, was for Firefox only. About 3 months ago Foxmarks put out betas for both Internet Explorer (Windows only) and Safari (Mac only). The beta period is now over (February 2, 2009) and you can now download Foxmarks for the mentioned browsers from the Foxmarks site.

By just using the Foxmarks software you will be using the following synchronization setup



Since Foxmarks allows for synchronization with Safari, it is now also possible to synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch. For this you will need a MobileMe subscription. The synchronization setup will then look like this



On the Mac side you need to setup for Foxmarks and make sure the Foxmarks synching is running

and for MobileMe you have to enable the Bookmarks synchronization

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side you have to setup MobileMe synchronization (visit this page for detailed information on setting up MobileMe)

I have only had two issues with Foxmarks so far;

1. Dividers in Firefox sometimes get replaced with “———-”. Normally Foxmarks does a good job keeping dividers being dividers in Firefox
2. At some point in time I ended up with two ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’-folders

Both issues are easily solved and never resulted in loosing any of my bookmarks and I am almost certain it was caused due to me playing around with some settings (MobileMe and Foxmarks for Safari) on two machines.

I am only using the bookmark synchronization of Foxmarks, since I am using 1Password to keep my passwords save and secure.

Sharing a hotel WiFi connection over WiFi

For my daytime job I am spending a lot of time in hotels, which btw starts to suck big time. To be able to keep in touch with the rest of the family and do a bit of gaming I usually pay for 50 hours worth of WiFi access which last me through the whole month, well at least most of the time it does. Since I am also an avid iPhone user I turn on the roaming feature from time to time, which to no surprise results in a steep bill from T-Mobile.

So I started to think about this. So I am paying to have 50 hours of WiFi access and I pay T-Mobile for the roaming charges. I started to poke around in the System Preferences panel of my MacBook Pro. Like I suspected by default there is a possibility to share connections from one network card to another. Great.

Now I only needed to find me a nice little wifi router to become part of my standard traveling kit, which is starting to show more and more Apple logos. Quickly I laid my eyes on the AirPort Express. This little gadget was just what I was looking for, great form factor and the right price.

This sunday I was visiting the Media Markt in Rotterdam and I saw some of these beauties lying around. There were even some demo models at a discounted price (€80), so I just had to pick one up. And since my last to bills from T-Mobile both had around €80 of roaming charges, this was a no brainer. Since I had to go abroad the same day I could test the device almost immediately. Which is good since waiting to start playing with any gadget is not one of my strong points.

It turns out to extremely simple to create a private (or public) WiFi access point using the AirPort Express. It only took me two steps (excluding the normal setup of the AirPort Express, which to be honest I don’t for sure now is there is such a process, since mine had already been used to demo the unit). Anyways, here is what I had to do

1) Enable network sharing for your active network card. In my case I had to enable sharing from my built-in AirPort to the built-in ethernet card

    Enable ‘Internet Sharing’ and select the correct ‘From’ and ‘To’ network cards

2) Open up the AirPort Utility application and perform a manual setup for the AirPort Express to create a wireless network

    Press the ‘Manual Setup’ button

    Within the section ‘Wireless’ choose ‘Create a wireless network’, set a network name and provide security information

After these two simple steps I could whip out my iPhone and have it join the newly created wireless network.

Apple, thanks for making my life so easy!!

Tip: When you buy a demo model for any wireless device be sure to ask whether or not the store employees have specified a password for the device. In my case they did, luckily the password as written down in the instruction booklet of the AirPort Express.