Fight for the Internet 1!

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Firefox with Feedly rss/atom subscribing

I use Feedly for consuming my RSS/ATOM feeds, and I use Firefox as my primary browser.

Here is a useful article on setting up Feedly to be natively available within Firefox for subscribing to a website within the Firefox menus.

http://hackerspace.lifehacker.com/add-feedly-to-firefoxs-feed-handlers-list-829563457

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Firefox Memory Leak Problems -- Refresh Firefox

So I've been experiencing major memory leaks with Firefox since version 36. Using around 1.7GB of memory and very slow sometimes for certain pages. Google searches revealed that yes, there was a major leak. It was supposed to be fixed.

Now in late version 37, the problem still persisted for me.

(WARNING: Always backup your firefox profile before testing other version!)

I tested using their version 38-beta8 candidate. Problem still was around. I tested their alpha version of 40, but still it persisted.

More googling revealed a new solution I hadn't tried: Refresh Firefox


Refreshing cleans out all prior add-on settings and caches.

Here is how to do it.
  1. Click the menu button and then click help .
  2. From the Help menu choose Troubleshooting Information.
  3. Click the Refresh Firefox… button in the upper-right corner of the Troubleshooting Information page.
  4. To continue, click Refresh Firefox in the confirmation window that opens.
Source taken from here:Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings | Firefox Help


The good news is this worked. My memory usage is down a lot, and pages are loading much much faster.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Getting Tox to work with Pidgin in Fedora 21

Quick guide to getting the encrypted instant messenger service Tox to work with Pidgin.

General information for those who need to look elsewhere when this guide isn't enough:
Website     http://tox.dhs.org/
GitHub      https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl.git
Maintainers Jin^eLD
Most of these commands should be run through a console.

1) You need to be using Pidgin 2.10.10 or later.

2) Make sure your firewall has trusted ports for the Tox account settings you prefer. The default port is 33445.

3) In case you haven't already, install the build tools you'll need:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install libtool autoconf automake check check-devel
4) Install the plugin build dependencies:
# For ToxCore
yum install libvpx-devel opus-devel 
# For Tox-prpl
yum install libpurple-devel
5) Build and install libsodium (a dependency for the ToxCore). Grab your release from here: http://download.libsodium.org/libsodium/releases/. For this guide I used version 1.0.2. The compile instructions are the standard ones.
./configure
make
sudo make install
6) Grab the version 0.4.2 release of ToxCore from here: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/releases . This is the old API of Tox which is compatible with the current Tox plugin for Pidgin. The new API is not supported yet.
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make check # My network test didn't pass but that's okay. Move along.
sudo make install
 
7) Grab the tox-prpl plugin from here: https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl . The latest version (as of posting now), includes a minor but important fix from on Feb-26.

At this point you should quit / exit Pidgin. Make sure it's not running for this stage.

git clone https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl.git
cd tox-prpl
autoconf -i
# Note that here I had a library path problem,and had to manually specify where the libtoxcore.pc file was located on my system. Some users may be able to get away with just doing plain old ./configure or may need to set a different PKG_CONFIG_PATH= value.
./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
make
make check

Almost done!
mkdir ~/.purple/plugin
If you get an error saying this folder already exists, that's fine. Move along.
cp build/.libs/libtox.so ~/.purple/plugins/
8) Start Pidgin back up.

9) Next create a Tox account in Pidgin, using these options. This fix is from here: https://github.com/jin-eld/tox-prpl/issues/36#issuecomment-75612106. See that bug-report for details on why you need this workaround.

In the Pidgin Tox account creation window, enter this settings under Advanced tab:
Server: 194.249.212.109
Port: 33445
Server key: 3CEE1F054081E7A011234883BC4FC39F661A55B73637A5AC293DDF1251D9432B
Done!