This was first a post about one about:config entry in FireFox I wanted to remember. But now there are several, so for easy reference, I am going to just put all of them into one post.

Fixing Accidental Page Zooms (FireFox + Logitech G9x)

I’ve got the Logitech G9x, and I use it with the “microgear” off so my mouse wheel spins free. Unfortunately, I also use Ctrl+click a lot to open tabs, and my free spinning mousewheel triggers the page zoom when I hit Ctrl. If you accidentally zoom all the time like me, you’d like to disable that key combination. And you can. Just go to about:config and find mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action and change it from 3 to 0
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action = 0

Keeping New Tab Jumpstart from stealing focus

One of the “features” of New Tab JumpStart 0.5a5.4 turns out to be a major annoyance. It steals the focus from your location bar to its own tiny non-awesome bar. You can fix it with:
mlalevic.jumpstart.focus_on_search = false

September 7th, 2010 | Mental Note: Add Category | No comments

A few days ago, I learned about a map visualization libary called Polymaps from FlowingData (Design advanced online and interactive maps with Polymaps). This weekend, I resolved to play with it and come up with something useful.

The Texas Tribune has a neat Flash based map of county-by-county election turnouts. My goal for this weekend… make a Polymaps version. My version can be found here: http://crccheck.com/map/.

The data source I found for counties didn’t let me limit it to just Texas, so a lot of counties outside Texas end up getting colored. The data source for the election data is from the Texas Tribune, and the only processing I had to do with it is to change the case to make it consistent with my other data source. I guess I could have just made it case-insensitive too.

Chrome renders the map much better than FireFox. It supports the SVG title element and takes less CPU.

August 23rd, 2010 | Nerd | No comments