Mmmm blog.

Well Apple/iPhone, it really was a magical ride.

This video’s author explains it well:

The first iPhone captivated the world because the interface was so well done, so snappy, so interactive; it was like nothing before it. Of course it was, it was an Apple product. That, right there, is why I buy Apple products.

Unfortunately they kept coming out with new phones. With faster processors. And they wrote all their software updates for these phones, with little attention to deprecated models. I don’t really use third party software on my phones, I honestly don’t even use ringtones. I just use my phone for SMS, web, maps, and occasionally as an actual phone, so the 3G model was more than I ever needed. 

Except over time, it’s fulfilled my needs less and less. And it’s not because my needs have grown. It’s not because I’ve installed a bunch of laggy software. It’s because Apple’s firmware has become bloated, with respect to the processing power of the 3G iPhone. I just installed iOS 4 two weeks ago, and at this point, I’d be happy to roll back to the first firmware I ever had, just to have that original speed again; forget about the copy and paste, I don’t need it that badly.

I understand that technology moves. If I could be bothered going back to the original firmware, I would give that a go.

But I can’t be bothered, and why should I.

iPhones are becoming like computers—you have to understand the hardware specification and the software you run to understand why the iPhone 3G is now slow (and crap). If I’m going to be subject to that, I’d prefer to run on a platform where I can actually have a bit more control over the hardware and the software.

Being part of Apple’s magical walled garden means that everything is supposed to be warm and fuzzy. Except for iPhone 3G users, that’s no longer the case.

That’s why I’m going to buy an Android phone next! Woohoo!

When I came back from my trip to Australia, I noticed all my Google searches from Chromium were searching Google Australia (google.com.au). This sucked, because I wanted to use google.co.uk again to get local results.

There’s many articles on the internet about changing the Google “base URL” in Chromium. After reading some, I visited www.google.com/ncr (“no-country-redirect”) to get Chromium to read the new base URL. This worked, but then I was stuck searching google.com.

Finally, I gave up Googling and decided to hack it myself.

Manipulating cookies

From what I read, the base URL for Google can be fixed by clearing all your cookies and then visiting your local Google. However, I didn’t want to clear all cookies for all my sites - only the ones for Google.

Chromium doesn’t have a cookie manager built in, but thankfully the developers had the wise idea of using sqlite as the cookie storage backend. This means it is relatively easy to manipulate the cookies you want using sqlite.

Opening Chromium cookie database with sqlite

Firstly, I quit Chromium. Next:

dsimmons:~ dan$ cd Library/Application\ Support/Chromium/Default/
dsimmons:Default dan$ sqlite3 Cookies
SQLite version 3.6.12
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> delete from cookies where host_key like '.google.co.uk';
sqlite> delete from cookies where host_key like '.google.com';
sqlite> exit
dsimmons:Default dan$ 

All done! My Google cookies are gone.

Upon restarting Chromium, I went to “www.google.co.uk”, restarted Chromium again, and voila! Searches from Chromium now use my local Google.

It is also good to know that cookies in Chromium can be easily manipulated using basic SQL:

sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> .tables
cookies  meta   
sqlite> select * from cookies limit 5;
etc. 

Have some fun!