Developer Tidbits

  Google has a 4th of July weekend promotion where you can get 4 months of free Google Play Music. This is only available to US. So if you are in the Philippines, you can try the following steps to get the promotion. (documentation in progress, trying to retrace how I did it) Download Opera developer browser which has a free VPN. Turn on VPN. Go to wallet.google.com and click on the settings button on the right. Change the country to US and type in any US address. (Zip code 91505 is Burbank, California) Go to play.google.com and you should see the 4th of July promotion banner. Click on that. This will take you to music.google.com. Follow the subscribe instructions and enter a payment method. PayPal worked for me. I had some issues with some accounts that were solved by clearing the browser data and trying again.

Things to do after upgrading to El Capitan Install XCode command line   xcode-select --install Install NTFS Support

The easy way to get started with R is to use RStudio. You will need to install both R and RStudio. Here are the software packages you need to install: Windows http://cran.csie.ntu.edu.tw/ http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ Mac OSX http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/ http://cran.csie.ntu.edu.tw/ http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ You will need access to the internet to download R packages. If you need to configure a proxy, in RStudio, you will need to edit the environment text file: file.edit('~/.Rprofile') In that file, you will need to add the following settings: Mac OSX: Sys.setenv(http_proxy="http://proxy:8080") Windows: http_proxy=http://proxy:8080 Instructions were based from the following articles: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200488488-Configuring-R-to-Use-an-HTTP-Proxy http://www.kenbenoit.net/how-to-set-proxy-settings-for-r-mac-osx/ Once you have set up internet access, you s...

Here's an actual scam attempt that I encountered. The pattern is similar and looks believable. The general steps: Scammer will signify interest in purchasing item. Scammer will say he is working for some non-profit and wants to buy the item for a fiance who is in South Africa. He will ask you to calculate the shipping cost via Fedex and will say he plans to pay by PayPal. Once you give the shipping cost, he will ask for the email where he will send the PayPal payment. He will then say he will make the payment now and ask you to check your email for the PayPal. You will receive an email from service@paypal. If you are using Gmail, this will likely be flagged as a phishing email in the Spam folder. Notice that the email will have typos and will ask that you send the tracking number to ppalonlinecare@mail2consultant.com or something other than paypal.com. The general content of this bogus email is that this is a new PayPal policy and that the funds will only transferred to you o...

While I was organizing my photos, I encountered many instances where the filenames of different photos were the same, so I couldn't place them in the same folder without renaming them. It was fine at first when there only a handful of duplicate filenames, but there had to be better way. There was another scenario where I wanted to insert the year before each video so that I could easily group them. In OSX, there is a built-in tool called Automator, which is found in Applications. Just open it and create an Application. When it opens, just search for rename and drag "Rename Finder Items" to the main window, which will ask you if you want a copy or not. In my case, I did not need a copy. You can change the parameters to something like below. Then save it to your Desktop for easy access. Inserts the year in front of the files. To use this, in Finder, select the files you wish to rename and drag them to the Automator icon that you just saved in your Desktop. I have two...

My Nexus S was on CM 10.2 (Android 4.2) for a while and held off upgrading to 10.3 (Android 4.3) because there was little difference in the upgrade. Kitkat (Android 4.4), on the other hand, promised good performance on devices with as little as 512MB, so I jumped at the chance when the first Nexus S (crespo) KitKat nightlies started appearing on Cyanogenmod. I encountered just one hitch in the upgrade and it was related to the clockwork recovery I had. Here are the steps to upgrade from CM 10.2 to CM 11 Nightly. Backup your phone data Backup your SMS messages. I used the SMS Backup and Restore app. Backup your photos. Just copy the \DCIM\Camera folder to your drive. Backup your phone ROM. Just boot to recovery (Power off, Hold Power and Vol Up button until the recover menu comes up) and do a backup. Download the following files on your PC download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=crespo ( cm-11-20131207-NIGHTLY-crespo.zip ) http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps ( gapps-kk-2...

My car key fell into a street drain where it lay there for at least 5 minutes before somebody was able to fish it out. The first thing you need to do is remove the battery and dry out the electronic parts. I used tissue paper to blot out all visible moisture. When everything appeared to be dry, assembled the key back and tried to open the car. Fortunately, it worked. A couple of hours later, it didn't work anymore. When I checked the battery again, there was a little water and it appeared that there was still moisture inside the casing. The best thing to do here is to find silica gel or a dessicant which you can find inside new shoes or bags. If you can't find any, you can go to a supermarket and buy a pack of rice crackers. I knew One One Rice Crackers had a large pack of dessicant inside. That's the one on the left below. I found the one on the right from a Case Logic bag. Just pack these together with the electronic component of the car key in plastic bag. Seal it and...