Saturday, July 30, 2011

HOWTO Remove the annoying floating ads from Gmail's Preview Theme

Problem
Gmail's Preview Theme without floating ads.
You switched your Gmail theme, and you find the floating advertisement annoying.

Solution (for Chrome)
Modify Gmail's stylesheet to prevent the ads from floating.
  1. Install the Personalized Web Chrome extension.
  2. Go to Tools -> Extensions.
  3. Find the Personalized Web section and click "Options".
  4. Click "Add New Rule".
  5. In the "Match URLs" textbox, input "mail.google.com".
  6. In the "Add CSS" textbox, input:
    .mq {
        position: relative;
        bottom: 0px;
        left: 0px;
        margin: 0px;
    }
  7. Click "Save".
Reload Gmail to see the effect.

FAQ
Q: Why not just disable the advertisement in the first place?
A: Nothing in life is free; Google is providing us with this free service in exchange for displaying ads.  It's a fair deal.

Q: Does this work on Firefox?
A: No, but you can just google for steps on using a custom CSS.  You may use the same CSS from Step 6.

Required packages for building an Android OS on Ubuntu

Problem
You're trying to install the required packages for building a complete Android Operating System from scratch. Upon pasting the commands from the official documentation, you get the following error:

E: Couldn't find package lib32ncurses5-dev
E: Couldn't find package lib32readline5-dev
E: Couldn't find package lib32z-dev
E: Couldn't find package mingw32


Solution
The list of required packages for building an Android OS is wrong. The correct packages are:

sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential \
zip curl zlib1g-dev libc6-dev lib64ncurses5-dev \
x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib64readline5-dev lib64z-dev \
libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib tofrodos


Note: This has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). YMMV.