If you've ever seen this box below your Firefox tabs, then you've encountered Firefox's location aware browsing ((C) Kai Hendry)

You may not have realised it, but the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox include a geolocation feature to enable location aware browsing.
This allows you to give permission to share your location with websites, and is on by default.

Websites will use your location so that they can tailor information to your local area. For example, a high street shop could automatically show you where your nearest branch is.

It works by collecting information about your computers IP address and wireless access points that your computer can see and comparing it to a database to estimate your current position. The default database provider is the Google Location Service, although that can be changed to another geolocation service provider.

Location Aware Browsing is designed to protect your personal information: You have to manually approve each website that requests your location, and all communication with the geolocation service is anonymised and encrypted. However, if you don’t want the feature to be active at all, you can disable it.

You can stop this warning from appearing again, but I smile every time I see it, so I've kept it

First, open a new browser tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar. This will show a warning because you’re accessing advanced settings, so acknowledge it and continue.

Type “geo.” into the filter box at the top of the page to only show geolocation service options. In Firefox 3.6.8 there are four settings related to geolocation. Find the setting called “geo.enabled” and double click on it so that it’s set to “false”. You have now disabled location aware browsing and can close the about:config tab, but if you ever want to re-enable it, all you need to do is change geo.enabled back to true.

Of the other settings, “geo.wifi.uri” is the most interesting, as it determines the location service provider to access, whilst the other two are used by the Google Location Service.

What do you think of this service? Does it bother you that it’s on by default? Do you have any privacy concerns or are you happy with the steps already taken to protect your privacy? Why not add your thoughts in the comment section.

I went through all the settings but couldn’t get it to sound.

Eventually I found the solution on this forum: when selecting what alarm sound to play, on the multiple choice menu,

A screenshot of the Alarm Sound Menu on my HTC Hero

use the volume control to adjust the Alarm Volume (this is different from Ringer Volume). Turn up the alarm volume to the desired level and test the alarm again.

Adjusting the Android Alarm Volume

It should work now.

This works for the HTC Hero, and I expect will be the same for other phones using the Sense UI. It may also work for other Android phones, based on my fiddling with the Android emulator. Does it work for you? Why not tell us what phone it worked for in the comments below.

EDIT: (13/03/2010 09:10) Made introduction a bit clearer about the nature of the problem (alarm goes off but without sound) and added final paragraph about what phones this may work for (potentially all Android phones if the emulator is anything to go by)

I was using the eclipse AVD and SDK manager to upgrade, and since it wasn’t working I went looking for an alternative.

One idea suggested on Google’s Adding SDK Components page was to cd into the tools directory and run the android command on the command line, but this didn’t work either as it couldn’t find the correct path for the SWT folder:

Starting Android SDK and AVD Manager
SWT folder 'lib\x86_64' does not exist.
Please set ANDROID_SWT to point to the folder containing swt.jar for your platform.


This was rubbish as it did exist, and setting ANDROID_SWT in my environment variables didn’t work either.

Out of sheer desperation, I downloaded the latest SDK tools, deleted my old SDK and installed from scratch.
The latest SDK tools release (revision 3) doesn’t come with any pre-packaged Android platform, but it does come with a new standalone SDK updater: SDK Setup.exe on Windows.

I initially had the same issue with the new update tool, but unlike previous versions this had the option to force the updater to use HTTP instead of HTTPS. Since the problem was with SSL, I forced it to use HTTP and lo’ and behold, it worked perfectly!

• find
• wc

We’ll use the find command to locate all the files (and exclude directories and other non-files) and then the wc command to count the files.

Find has many options, but we will only be using the type option:
find . -type f

The . indicates the directory to search in and can be replaced with any absolute or relative path. This command will also find files in subdirectories. To exclude subdirectories you can use:

find . ! -name . -prune -type f

The ! -name . -prune will ignore any directories that are not the current one.

The find command will give us a list of all the files we want to count, to count the number of entries in that list we must pass the output to wc to count it.

By default, wc will count words, newlines, and bytes. Since the output from find is a list of files, each separated by a newline, we can tell wc to only count newlines by using the -l argument: wc -l
Combining this into a single command, we get the final command to find count the number of files in a directory excluding sub-directories:
find . ! -name . -prune -type f | wc -l

(Of course, if you want to include sub-directories, simply remove the ! -name . -prune arguments and use:
find . -type f | wc -l instead)