Friday, February 19, 2016

Prevent websites from hiding UI elements in Firefox browser window

This is freaking annoying
I find it very annoying when websites disable the menu bar, back and forward buttons, navigation bar, or bookmarks in windows. Banking websites and Paypal both have pop-up windows that 'castrate' my browser.

The JavaScript / HTML code that does this is quite straightforward; this is a comma-separated properties list of string tokens that define the new window behaviour:
window.open ("url","title",
"toolbar=no,
status=no,
scrollbars=no,
resizable=no,
location=no,
directories=no,
copyhistory=no,
menubar=no")

It took some digging, but Firefox allows you to disable modification of the attributes of windows with a little bit of about:config magic. Simply search for disable_window_open_feature as shown below, and double-click on the attributes that you don't want websites to be able to enable or disable. My preferences are to manually set the following properties to true:

  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.personalbar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar
  • dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar

Saturday, February 6, 2016

LibreOffice: Interpreting CSV money "$XX.XX" as numeric value

For as long as I can remember using LibreOffice, I found that CSV files did not seem to be interpreted in a way such that monetary values preceded by a dollars sign (e.g. $12.34) would be interpreted as a numeric value. For example, when highlighting multiple numeric values, LibreOffice very conveniently shows the sum of the values in the lower-right area of the window.

The fix is simple. Check the box "Detect special numbers" as shown in the image below:


After this fix, LibreOffice very nicely formats any negative numbers in red ink.

Hurray! Now I'm all ready to analyse my 2015 expenditures!

Monday, February 1, 2016

Chase Ultimate Rewards sale item: Kohl's card 10% off

As part of my quest to hunt for cash back credit card bargains:

As of Feb 1, 2016, I had about $100 of Chase Ultimate Rewards built up, and noticed the Kohl's cards are currently 10% off.