Like most other carriers, Verizon has crippled its phones (in this case the Motorola v710) to better suit its services and partener deals (incidentally, I finally got my $25 credit from the class action settlement involving the v710's crippled Bluetooth). Most annoyingly, it does not provide a way to change the homepage. The default homepage is some joint venture with MSN that contains lots of images, loads slowly, and is generally useless. It has a bookmarks sub-page, but it's annoying to get to and use (e.g. none of the bookmarks have access keys).

Thankfully, it looks like there is a hidden way to change the homepage. This page incidentally mentioned this while talking about how to use your own proxy with the phone. Specifically, the steps are:

• Go to the menu (upper middle button)
• Quickly type 073887*
• Use 000000 (that's 6 zeros) as the security code
• Select "Web Sessions"
• Select the "VZW" entry (it should be locked)
• From the menu, select "Copy Entry" and name your copy (the name does not matter)
• Edit your copy and change the homepage field as you see fit
• Select the entry and pick "Set Default" from its menu

I initially considered something like the mobile Google Personalized Homepage, but I decided that was too heavyweight. Instead I created my own mini start-page has that is less than 1K in size.

Russell has stopped blogging, and seems to want people to unsubscribe from his feed. Not content to only return a 410 Gone status code*, he has also inserted a seizure-inducing image into a item with an ever-changing GUID. I'm not sure if this falls under "clever social hack" (since not all aggregators support 410 - including Reader to some degree) or "ugly perversion of HTTP."

* The Reader crawl logs suggest that initially his "unsubscribe now" feed was returning a 200 status code, which made this less interesting.

Gmail has a seemingly simple but actually powerful filtering system. The "Has the words" input field can be used for arbitrary queries. However, the one line input is very cramped when trying to filter multiple mailing lists at once. A textarea would be more appropriate.

Initially, this seemed like a job for Greasemonkey. However, since the filter input form is created dynamically, it's hard to detect when it's visible without resorting to polling. Instead, it seemed easier to find the right node with a CSS selector like input[name="cf1_has"]. Then, XBL can be used to replace the input node with a textarea node (styled appropriately). All that's really necessary is to insert the following in userContent.css:

@-moz-document domain(mail.google.com) {
  input[name="cf1_has"] {
    display: none;
    -moz-binding: url(http://persistent.info/files/gmail-filter.xml#filter);
  }
}

The XBL file is pretty straightforward (it didn't look like I could use the <content> element to insert the textarea, since that would've placed it as a child of the input node).

For the paranoid (or merely careful), it's best to make a local copy of the XBL file, otherwise you're always going to be loading code from my site. I tried to use a data: URL, to make things self-contained, but it didn't seem to work.

Firefox 1.5.0.2 was just released. This contains a bug fix (perhaps bug 265740, perhaps this security issue, perhaps something else) that gets rid of the crashes when using my Greasemonkey scripts, especially label colors and conversation previews. I have been running with all scripts enabled for the past couple of days and have not had any crashes. Hopefully the same is true for everyone else.

I have also updated the preview script with the latest Gmail IDs, in a similar manner that the macros script was updated.