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This is a tweak guide for the popular Battlefield 2. This game can be hard on your system, this guide provides tips for smooth play.

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Imagine using your iPod and a regular old microphone to record studio-quality audio. Or sitting on a commuter train and playing Othello, Pong, Tetris, or Asteroids. All this and more is possible when you install Linux on your third-generation or earlier iPod. Best of all, one soft reset, and you’re back in Apple’s iPod operating system, listening to your tunes.

This has been around for a while, but this is the best article I have seen on the subject. And honestly, this is just cool.

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The other day I was commenting how Gmail did not have a mobile client. Then after reading through the Gmail hacks article in Make Vol. 1. I noticed there is user created Gmail wap site, not endorsed by Google of course. All you have to do is download Gmail Mobile from sourceforge.net and install it on your web server. One capable of PHP.

Don’t have a web server or you can’t run PHP? Well if you trust giving your password out to someone else you could use GmailWireless.com. Also not endorsed by Google.

I tested this out on my Vizaweb account and Sprint Sanyo 8100 phone. Works like a charm.

Found these excellent suggestions for speeding up Firefox. And they actually work!

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to 0 (zero). This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

A new extension for FireFox allows you to see when new Gmail arrives. I have tried this extension with FireFox .9.1 and it works great.

Download the Gmail Notifier 0.3.1

I thought it would be really cool if I could install FireFox on my USB keychain and take my browser with me. All my bookmarks on the go and I could run Firefox even when it’s not installed on the PC I am using. Well I found that other people had this same idea. After some tweaking I got Firefox to run from my USB drive and store all my settings there.

1. After installing FireFox 0.8 on my PC, I copied all the files (except the uninstall directory) from the c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox directory to the bin folder on my USB drive.

2. The next step is to create the folder “Application Data” on the root of the USB drive. This will give you the bin folder and Application data folder on the root.

3. I then created the following batch file to run the FireFox application. This is important as it will ensure your settings on stored on the the thumb drive as opposed to the local drive.

================== FireFox.bat ============================
set USERPROFILE=%cd%
set APPDATA=%cd%Application Data
if exist “\bin\firefox.exe” start %USERPROFILE%bin\firefox.exe %1 %2 %3

The next steps are optional, but recommended. Open FireFox. Click tools - options - privacy. Set cache to 0 (default is 50MB). This will save space on the drive. Now go and customize Firefox with some of the script found here. My personal favorites are Ad Blocking, Disable blinking elements, and Disable marquee tags.