Tag: how-to
- Linux DIY: How to identify your MTP file-transfer device (such as smart-phone) in Bash (27 Oct 2019)
In the good old days, USB file-transfer between your laptop and smart-phone used to happen through the much easier “mass storage” mode which works just as if you had inserted an external pen-drive. But these days, most smart-phones and tablets have shifted to the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). Unlike a... - Python recipe: Combine multiple images into one PDF (24 Oct 2019)
Many a times, you come across the need to combine multiple image files (.jpg, .png, etc.) into one single portable document format (.pdf). Maybe, you have a bunch of handwritten notes which you want to organize into one file. Doing that is very trivial if you know python. To being... - How to enforce conventional commit messages using git hooks (14 Jun 2019)
Conventional git commit messages are not just nice to have but great to have. In fact, once you get to know them, you’ll start feeling that they are essential in any serious programming project. Consider the difference between following two commit messages for instance: git commit -m "added social login... - Linux DIY: Creating a multiboot USB drive with ISO images of multiple distros (11 Sep 2018)
Though I’m not a distro-hopper exactly, I keep trying live versions of popular linux distros like debian and ubuntu every now and then, and while I generally use the “dd” command which works right out of the box, today I thought that instead of burning a new ISO image each... - How to make your Xubuntu 16.04 desktop look and behave like Ubuntu-MATE (18 Jul 2018)
Xubuntu is one of the most popular among the “lighter” distros as it hardly consumes 200MB when idle and even older machines are able to run with acceptable performance. Ubuntu-MATE which is based on MATE Desktop (a GNOME-2 fork) is also a similar competing distro though its debatable whether its... - How to create a Server-less Google Drive client using only HTML and JavaScript (09 Jul 2018)
A few days ago, I had to work on a project of this kind and the information and documentation available on this topic was quite bewildering. As a result, I decided to write this article in order to make everything available at one place. Almost everyone knows about the Google... - How to use Bash+rsync to automate your periodical backups on Linux (04 Mar 2018)
Linux is all about simplicity. Simple and time-tested tools like iptables, netstat and rsync can be called for help for basic tasks instead of untrusted third-party tools as happens in case of Windows. If you are a desktop user, then taking frequent backups of your data to a pen-drive or... - How To Make Your Ubuntu Desktop Faster (19 Sep 2017)
The usual advice you get when seeking a more resource conserving distro is to use a lighter spin-off such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc. However, not many people know that even a “heavy” distro such as Ubuntu LTS with the default Unity Desktop could be made much lighter by uninstalling some... - Flask Recipe - RESTful CRUD using sqlalchemy (25 Jun 2017)
RESTful apps are a thing these days. When your application’s userbase gets quite large and the client could vary from a laptop to an android device to an iOS device, it pays to keep the backend code separate and use the server only for making RESTful calls using HTTP methods... - How to create a Google Drive App in PHP (02 Jan 2017)
This is the second article in the drive series for web programmers that aims to explain how to use the Google Drive API in your web applications to access files/folders on behalf of your logged-in users. One of the basic tasks here is to authenticate to google and access the... - How to create a Google Drive App in Flask (29 Dec 2016)
This is the first in a series of articles for web programmers that explain in detail about using the Google Drive API in your web applications to access files/folders on behalf of the users of your application. In my last project, I had to develop a python flask app for... - How to create a screencast in Xubuntu using ffmpeg (19 Jul 2016)
In this article, I’m going to describe how to create a desktop screencast recording with or without audio in Xubuntu 16.04. With little changes, however, it should work on other distros too. The first thing to do is to ensure that your headphone microphone is enabled in Xubuntu audio settings.... - How to Unbrick and revive a totally lifeless Xiaomi Mi-Pad (13 Jul 2016)
Last week, my brand new Xiaomi Mi-Pad arrived via Flipkart and no sooner did I have it in my hands, I started installing useful apps like Greenify, ES File Explorer, etc. Two days went by and I was disappointed to learn that it doesn’t support a USB Dongle (Data Card)... - How to deal with frequent disconnects of 3G USB Dongle on Linux Desktop (28 Jun 2016)
One of the major issues on linux desktop these days has to do with 3G USB dongles/modems. In many countries like India, a USB dongle still remains a major way to access the Internet. The latest versions of network-manager has solved most of the issues relating to the basic recognition... - How to add HTML tag highlighting to Geany (07 Nov 2015)
Ever since I bid farewell to Windows after they introduced that horrible Metro interface in Windows 8, I had been on the lookout for FOSS Linux alternatives that can run easily on my ubuntu 14.04 machine. One such lookout was a replacement for Notepad++ as I always need a handy... - How to know whether my blog post will attract traffic or not (10 Jun 2015)
One of the evergreen topics for discussions in the blogging world is SEO, and especially the various ways of attracting bless of the all-pervading search engines to one’s own site or blog. There are various ways to approach this problem, some of the popular ones are: Using meta tags like... - How to host a Flask app on Openshift (06 Feb 2015)
Note: This article may no longer be relevant as Red Hat has recently changed the openshift stack with docker and kubernetes. Openshift free tier is an excellent way to host your python web app for staging or testing, and you can even host a low to medium traffic production site.... - How to make your ubuntu machine thank you for its battery life! (21 Apr 2014)
Ever since I bought my Toshiba Dual-core Notebook and installed ubuntu on it, I was disappointed by the fact that how quickly it used to heat up and the battery started draining. Add to the equation, the Indian summer of 40 degrees Celsius plus, and you soon have your fans... - How to host your own mail server using Google appengine (30 Dec 2013)
Google has an outstanding habit of bringing the power of elites to the masses. Firstly, they took over the world of smartphones with android, and now the buzzword everywhere is Google Appengine. Once you get the basics of GAE and start looking beyond your first HelloWorld application, you will start... - How to create a Python app in Google App Engine (06 Dec 2013)
Whilst the official pythonic reference for Google app engine is the way I learnt how to build my first GAE app, I found it a bit frustrating to go through each and every link and understand large topics like caching and data stores in detail just to build a small hello world pythonic app in Google... - How to create android dialogs in a reusable manner (01 Dec 2013)
Creating dialogs is a very common need in your app to show a dialog box to the user in order to fetch a value, be it a mobile, desktop or even a web application. Furthermore, the values can range from anything like simple OK-Cancel dialog results to a list of... - How to uniquely identify your Android device in code (28 Nov 2013)
My last android project involved tracking each device where the app is installed and storing the information to a database. It is quite a common need to uniquely identify your android device in code. Now, had it been a PC, it would have been easy to track the MAC-address of... - How to Generate PDFs in Python for Google App Engine (26 Nov 2013)
One of my last projects based on google app engine and python involved storing form data in GAE datastore and generating PDF documents that the user can download. Whilst data storing was the easier part as google’s big data API it is pretty well documented, the trickier aspect was to convert...