Snowmans Blog

Beating Facebooks Forced Update - for now

It seems Facebook is determined to force a drastically new layout upon all it's users, whether we like it or not. And many of us don't. There are numerous groups dedicated to opposing this change, with some of them having more than 2 million members. If you had several million customers who complained about a change would you still force it on them?

For the time being there is a way to keep using the old layout. This was posted on a Facebook group, but it was overly complicated and involved downloads that are not needed, a toolbar that's not needed, and restarting Firefox which isn't necessary. This only works in Firefox/Mozilla.

All you really need to do is "spoof" your user agent. And there is a tool to do this. Get the "User Agent Switcher" here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

This is an official add-on downloaded from the mozilla website. Install this, which should be easy. You may need to restart the browser once after installing this, I don't remember. I've had this for a long time now.

Next you just add a new Agent. From the drop-down menus at the top of Firefox use Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options. Choose User Agents, the second of two choices on a list. Then add one. A small pop-up opens with a bunch of fields, just add "MSIE 5.5 (2000)" with no quotes to the Description and User Agent fields, the rest can be empty. Now close this and go back to the browser.

Any time you want to switch, use the Tools -> User Agent Switcher drop down menu and choose your agent. Most of the time you probably want default, but when using Facebook choose the MSIE 5.5 (2000).

Now, while using the new agent, go to this link:

http://www.new.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.new.facebook.com%2F%3Ffbnew_opt_out%3D1&h=8bec68bc94899ac0e7f953b7794601aa

This opts you out of the new layout. Bookmark this or put it on your desktop since you may periodically be switched (against your will) to the new layout. If so, just click this link to go back to the old one.

When you're done with Facebook just switch your user agent back to default.

This is not a security risk. Some instructions include complicated directions for additional downloads and toolbars - you don't need any of that. Just an add-on right from the Mozilla site.

Happy surfing on Facebook! At least for a while, until they undermine this fix.

Break Away from the Herd

PISCES (Feb 19 - Mar 20): Break away from the herd. Those who follow you may be attracted by your potential success but could disappear in a crunch.

Thoughts on Employment

There's a reason I gave up working in the business world rather quickly. However, while people often envy my avoidance of the 9-to-5 routine and the good points such as the times I get to spend outdoors they rarely appreciate the sacrifices that go with it. To quote a song by blues musician John Mayall:

"You call us the privileged few...
If you think what we do isn't working...
Then you don't understand what we do ...

We picked out a life that's a gamble...
We gave up the nine to five..."

John Mayall Band - New Year, New Band, New Company

So life can often be tough, and there are certainly gambles, but at least I'm not like this:



I couldn't help laughing when I saw this!

Personal Update (Journal) - Sept 15 2006

So what's been happening over the summer? Obviously I haven't had time to do this blog thing, and I've probably slipped further out of sight than usual.
... Read more ...

Welcome to the Blog

Well, since it's all the rave these days I just had to set up a blog. Actually I already have another one going at avalanche-blog.com where I post specifically about snow avalanche topics. This one will be for personal and varied use.

At first I thought I'd use it for political commentary. Which I will, but there are other good uses too. And I'll set up different sections so it's easy to sort out different things. I think some will parallel the topics and organization of my personal website and others will fall outside that.

Two things I hope to use this for are keeping friends and family updated on what's going on in my life and summarizing website updates. This way they can read whatever interests them, and how ever much they want. I'm really too busy to do a lot of things I'd like to and unfortunately staying in touch with friends has fallen by the wayside in favor of efforts that have some chance of contributing to my economic survival. I also only get to work on my personal web site now and then so maybe I can use this blog to summarize changes now and then.

Of course the real question is whether I'll have time to blog at all or not. It's quite likely that I will post fairly often at times, interspersed with other long stretches of time when I'm just too busy. We'll see.

I'll make the next post about the Sections and update that as they evolve.

Comments on anything, or just quick greetings in passing, are welcome as comments. I think I've set it to require review of all comments before they appear, but I should get an email that something was submitted. I set this up and ignored it for quite a while only to discover that my test posts had thousands of comments promoting viagra, cheap university degrees, and other sundry items.

Jim