Tuesday 23 March 2010

Disabling ProCon Latte

Note: this post is for educational purposes only, i'll not take any responsibility for anything.

So you've come in to work Monday morning only to find someone's installed the ProCon Latte web filter add-on on Firefox, now you can't check up on FaceBook statuses, the new bands on MySpace, the trivia on Twitter or those adult art sites that no-one else understands but you. You can't uninstall it from Add-ons, Procon itself in 'Tools' is password protected and about:config is disabled, what to do...what to do?
Simple...
  • Shut down Firefox.
  • Go to your programs menu and start FireFox up in Safe Mode (just click continue in safe mode at the pop-up).
  • Type about:config into address bar (click on i'll be careful i Promise)
  • In Filter field type procon.password then enter, (you should now see a single line with a long series of characters at the end).
  • Right click on it and click on Reset in the pop up menu,it should now say 'default string').
  • Restart FireFox normally.
Now if you click on Procon in the Tools menu it should pop right open, you can now uncheck 'Prevent Being Disabled Or Uninstalled' and remove it entirely via FireFox's Add-Ons menu.

Saturday 20 March 2010

A Quick Piece About The TV B Gone On Stripboard



Well as you may or may not know i dabble (and fiddle) in Electronics & Microcontrollers so after having met the US hackers Mitch Altman/Jimmie Rodgers at a Fizzpop workshop and successfully built a AVR ISP programmer i thought i'd have a bash at making a TV B Gone on stripboard from scratch. Here it be (well attempt #2 t.b.h) , the main circuit was pretty much built 'on the fly' with a homebrew LED driver being a PNP transistor powering 2x IR emitters in series (my calculations are a bit ballpark so it's probably under powered). Does the job though, just a shame the 3xAA batteries that power it dwarf it and spoil the illusion hence them being cropped out the picture.

(PS: The ongoing competition in geek circles with these things appears to be in ever increasing the range, so hang around for the TV-B-Gone bazooka, coming to a Nielsen box near you soon!)