I’ve installed The Chakra Project‘s KDEmod version of KDE4. KDEmod has split packages for KDE, much like Gentoo does.  This appeals to be because there’s a lot of KDE stuff I never use and installing fewer packages means less downloading and upgrading on this dial-up machine.  I’ve installed the minimal set of packages to get a KDE desktop and I’m slowly adding stuff as I see what I want.  This is my first real experience with KDE4, so figuring out what it could do and then what I should install if I want to make it do that is problematic.  I’ve grabbed a Chakra livecd with the full KDE4 to help me figure it out.

I’m not very savvy when it comes to finding the best deals on air travel. I needed to book a flight, and my plan was to try Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz to see who’d give me the best deal and just take that. Expedia was down for maintenance and said it would be back tomorrow; I guess they have to retool sometime, but I’m not waiting until tomorrow.

Travelocity’s site is FUBAR in my browser, Firefox. Ok, maybe not that bad, but bad enough to make it unusable by me. I use a 20-inch monitor, which I love, at its native 1600×1200 resolution. If I let websites decide what font size they’d like me to see, I’d spend a lot of time squinting at the screen. I set a minimum font size to avoid any such squinting. At Travelocity, this causes the options for flight/hotel/automobile to be covered up by the navigation menu. Also, their “From” and “To” input boxes seem to be covering up some important options.

This sucks for them, since I just used Orbitz instead. Sure, I could have used another browser, or another Firefox profile, or just temporarily changed my usual settings. But with Orbitz one click away, I didn’t.

After buying my tickets from Orbitz, I had a look at the Travelocity page in the DOM Inspector. Their not-so-careful web designer would like the font size of the navigation menu to be 11.7 px, whereas with my settings it’s 14 px. That made the menu wrap, and with their line-height setting and some padding, it pushed the “About Travelocity” link down over the top of the options I most needed to get at.

14 px isn’t exactly an insanely large font size. I wonder how much business they’ve lost because of their misconception that the web is a one-size-fits-all environment. Firefox is not the only browser which gives the user decent control — Konqueror, Opera, and Safari all let their users choose a minimum font size, and I’m sure these are not the only ones.

At Orbitz, I had to click through a great lot of pages to get my purchase taken care of. Every page displayed just fine.

The title of this post is a bit misleading. I’m not going to consider these avatars and what’s so annoying about them. If you like them, fine, and keep looking at them. Did I mention I hate them, though? Well, I do. So I gave a little thought about how to best get rid of them. There are many ways, from just turning off images while I browse forums to writing css to hide them. But the quickest way I happened to have at my fingertips was to use Adblock Plus, one of my favorite Firefox extensions.

A quick look at the Gentoo forums showed that all the avatars live in the same directory on the Gentoo site itself, which makes blocking them extra super easy. (That’s right, I said extra super easy.) I went to a forum page, opened Adblock Plus’ list of blockable items and clicked one of the avatar URIs, then changed the filename to a nice generic wildcard asterisk.

http://forums.gentoo.org/images/avatars/*

So now I’ll never see the cute little pictures while I read about Gentoo. Of course, I’d need to do something similar for any forums I want to read, but it’s simple enough that I almost don’t mind.