Tag Archives: tools

A Small iPhone to Android Survival Guide

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Here are a few tools that I discovered to ease the transition from the iPhone world (iCloud, iTunes, Contacts, etc) to the Android world. These tools help you to approach the same level of comfort that you have with your iPhone (although it’s certainly not a complete experience).

So far I’ve installed the following :

  • iSyncr : lets you sync your iTunes content audio and video – needed to sync your music
  • Swiftkey : this keyboard has predictive input and allows you to swipe your words, which is way faster than pecking the words out – the iPhone really should have this type of input as well !
  • MX Player : plays all the videos I’ve thrown at it, has all the codecs
  • 1Password : it’s a weak “read-only” solution so you’re not able to add new content to it, but at least I still have all my passwords with me when I need them – free.
  • 1Weather : a good weather forecaster, but there are several ones around
  • Kindle : the ebook reader from Amazon

Here are a few links from similar iphone-to-android-switchers :

I love iFixit ! Highly recommended !

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Last week the HD in my mother-in-law’s hand-me-down iMac went the way of the dodos and crashed, loosing all the information on it.

Did you know you can burn a copy of Ubuntu (I used 12.10) to a CD and it will load and boot on a mac, even with EFI firmware ? This helped me verify that the disk was indeed dead and non-salvagable (it was the /Users directory that was totally destroyed !).

The 24 inch screen is still great, the CPU (an 2,16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo) is a bit slow nowadays but still more than good enough for surfing and showing photos and playing music, so I figured why not replace the hard disk and save some money ?

I visited iFixit.com and checked if they had a repair guide for that particular iMac model and sure enough it was there. I bought the necessary hard drive and Torx screwdrivers, and I have just now succesfully replaced the failed 500 GB disk with a 2TB disk.

When I subsequently booted from the Snow Leopard disk, it couldn’t see the drive, but a quick trip to the disk utility made it show itself, and I was able to format it and continue the installation – everything is just fine, thanks to those iFixit people !

Note that iFixit is a free service, but you can help them out by buying repair tools or hard disks from them, or writing your own guide.

I figured I could help point some people in the right direction – they have an amazing amount of DIY repair manuals !

PS – for those who break the temperature sensor on the HD or the wires (I didn’t) : there’s a software solution for that !

AIR Badge plugins for WordPress take away all the hard work!

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This is soooo cool.

Creating an AIR badge for an Adobe AIR application is a bit of a hassle, but the following 2 WordPress plugins really do take all the work out of it. Any post where you want to add an Air badge, you’re done in 3 minutes.

You’ll need either one of the following plugins:

- The Original plugin, made by Peter Elst, which is easy to use
- The Updated plugin with built-in click tracking (requires a bit more work)

I decided to use the original plugin, and you need to do just 3 things to use it.

  1. install the plugin (in your admin menu, just go to the plugin section and use the “search plugins” button to search for “air badge”
  2. upload your .air file to the server (if you want to use the wordpress “Add Media” uploader, you might also need to install an additional plugin called “PJW mime-config” and add .air to the list.
  3. create your badge by writing the following magic words between the words ‘airbadge’ : application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg

You’re done ! Admire your work (and that of the guy who made it possible, Peter Elst)!

Python Package Manager

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Python Package Manager Logo

Python Package Manager Logo

The Python Package Manager is here, a visual tool for the python developer to find and install all the necessary packages.

It shows you what is already installed on your system, with the option to deinstall the packages, and by typing into the search box you can find additional packages and install them, all graphically. It’s supposed to be cross-platform, but the homepage of the developer only provides a windows download option.

I just hope this gets used and keeps being supported, as it is a lot handier than using the command line ! I do think you still need easy_install and wxpython/wxwidgets though…

AWStats Tool that creates custom IIS log format lines

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I recently ran into a problem where I needed to read a few IIS logs to find out the number of visits during the day. The tool I wanted to use was AWStats, a  free log file analyzer tool that can create some handy reports.

If you need to read an IIS log file where the admin has set up a custom log method, this tool for AWStats is very handy: in the top of your IIS log file it states which are the variables it uses. By selecting these on the web page, you get a custom awstat log format line that you can just copy / paste into your awstat config lines.

Disk Usage on a Mac : Omni DiskSweeper is now free !

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Remember my post about using some bash scripting to find out the sizes of those space-consuming movie directories ?
The Omni Group has decided to make a few apps free to use from now on – one of those is the OmniDiskSweeper application, which is quite a nice tool to use !

After selecting a disk to scan, it gives you a very clear overview of your directories and their respective sizes, and you can then drill down in them.

A handy delete button is provided as well…