A word about crafting in games

admingames0 Comment
5 min. reading

Crafting is a computer games-related aspect in which game player needs to gather certain elements, puzzle pieces or resources in order to develop a new object. It can be found in:

  • fantasy games (mixtures, elixirs, spells),
  • war-games (armour and weapons modifications),
  • survival games (food crafting, tools creation, healing).

In most cases, in order to create these you need:

  • resources (which can be found by exploring game, doing quests or purchasing),
  • knowledge (either learned yourself or by using NPCs-offered services),
  • sometimes money (for paying for these services).

It is mostly popular in RPGs and MMOs.

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Install Optware (IPKG) on QNAP TS-210 with QTS 4.x

adminQNAP13 Comments
4 min. reading

With introduction of QTS 4.x:

  • there are a lot of changes in QNAP’s Control Panel, including the fact that “Application Servers” component is gone,
  • neither Optware nor IPKG or QPKG elements are available for download in the “App Center”.

This causes my “Installing Optware (IPKG) on QNAP TS-210” (6,5 year old!) article to be completely outdated.

Currently then only way to install Optware is to go through Manual instalation as described in QNAP Wiki.

Since I went through this guide and can confirm that it is working, I will be enough nasty to copy-paste that article here (removing stuff not related to QNAP TS-210 and fixing some bugs).

To go through these steps you need a shell access to your QNAP. Using the PuTTY is the most obvious answer.

But wait! There’s a much better way. QNAP introduced a gem called “shellinabox“, available in App Center (or here or here). I strongly recommend to use it, because with it, you need a web browser!

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Convert Webex’s WRF files to some other video format

adminmedia0 Comment
3 min. reading

I had some serious troubles converting Webex’s video session, saved to .wrf file, to some other video format (namely, .mp4). I have ended up using Webex WRF2WMV Converter, but only after contacting Webex support (mostly due to a lot of incorrect information on their website).

To avoid others wasting the time the same way, here is a short memo on this topic.

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Using Sieve for server-side mail filtering

adminservers0 Comment
5 min. reading

If your mail server supports Sieve mail filtering language, you can use a simple text scripts to enable powerful mail filtering and management that is applied directly on server-side. This allows you to create filters that will works client-independenty (a true saviour for those enforced to use Microsoft Outlook).

Sieve has no variables, and no loops (but does have conditionals). Thus, it is limited to simple filtering operations.

But that is enough for:

  • developing simple anti-spam system,
  • managing and organising mails, but auto-moving incoming messages to corresponding folders,
  • rejecting certain e-mails automatically (i.e. if they’re too big or contain invalid attachment).

Here you will find some general info and a few simple script examples.

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The “Couldn’t agree a key algorithm” error in Git for Windows

admindev, VCS0 Comment
2 min. reading

When trying to perform any authentication-related operation in Git for Windows you may hit the wall with:

Couldn’t agree a key algorithm (available: list of available methods)

Some people says (here and here for example, but also in many other places) that this is due to your PuTTY not being up-to-date and ordering getting latest version of PuTTY as a cure. You’re lucky, if that works for you! :>

I wasn’t that lucky and it turned out that in case of my Git for Windows TortisePlink was actually the problem.

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Using FreeBusy functionality to schedule meetings easily

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
15 min. reading

The FreeBusy solution helps you organise and schedule meetings much easier, because you can see when invited employees or friends are already busy with other meetings and when they have free time slots.

It is a (less known) world standard, so it is supported by many mail clients and calendars (including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird). And, in addition, it is secure, because only time frame and no other details are published and shared with other parties.

To use this solution, you need a mail client or calendar that supports FreeBusy solution either directly or through some kind of plugin. All that is needed to start using FreeBusy is around 5-10 minutes for initial configuration. Once correctly configured, you need to do nothing else. Your time slots are automatically exported to FTP server and free/busy slots for other employees are automatically read from FTP server.

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Use Gmail with different account than in Chrome [updated!]

adminGoogle2 Comments
4 min. reading

There’s a well know bug in Google Chrome that forces you to use the same Google Account (let’s name it account A) both in Google Chrome and in all Google apps that you have run in this browser. Logging-off this account in any of Google apps causes immediate log-off in Google Chrome as well and also causes your Google data synchronisation to stop.

This may be obvious and convenient in most cases, but fails completely in certain scenarios.

For example, I am using Google Chrome in my office and I am syncing all Google data to a separate account B (to have i.e. separate set of bookmarks, for my work only and to not mix them up with my private bookmarks), but when opening Gmail, I want to be logged in to account A (private one), because I’m checking my private e-mails this way (I am using Outlook for office e-mails).

There’s a workaround for this problem (“best answer” here). However, it turned out to be not working for me.

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Always display certain pages in mobile mode

adminGoogle0 Comment
2 min. reading

I pretty much like and enjoy Wikipedia in mobile version, even when browsing it on desktop PC. I would like to see it that way anytime. I asked about this on two Stack Exchange sites and got a great answers that this is possible both in Wikipedia itself and in browser.

The second solution maybe thus used for virtually any website, not just for Wikipedia.

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Git workflow for modern projects

adminVCS0 Comment
15 min. reading

After four years of a break for doing some management stuff and other non-development tasks I have decided to get back into coding (or at least to start thinking about getting back to it). First thing was to prepare development environment in general and refresh git flow knowledge in particular.

This article is a mixture of both my old article about Git+Gerrit workflows and Git workflow for Yii 2 contributors article. I assumed minimalist approach to make it possible to use this new workflow for virtually any Git-based project. Thus, I have purged most of, if not all of the things that are specific to Gerrit and Yii2.

Before continuing with this article, make sure that:

In addition, you may want to change the Git Bash’s prompt to something, you are more familiar with.

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Compare of some family-like or child-control solutions

adminApple, Google, Microsoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

Having kids in these digital days may become a challenge. Especially, if you wish your sibling to get their hands on their first device — either a PC, Mac or some mobile stuff. Challenging, because soon you’ll discover how much you don’t know and how better your kid is than you! :>

Limiting access time and reviewing what is she or he watching, playing or reading is a must and soon you face the problem of remote family control.

Hope that this article will help you in this adventure.

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ISO image locked in Windows 10

adminMicrosoft1 Comment
3 min. reading

After 25+ years of glorious development of Windows, witch-doctors at Microsoft village finally managed to discover that you can mount .iso image as fully-featured drive directly in system and you don’t need extra tools for this purpose:

The same group of maniacs smoked out too much weed and figured out that it will be so cool to not automatically unmount this image during system reset or shutdown.

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My private Windows 10 check-list [updated]

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
33 min. reading

Let’s say that I don’t like Windows 10. Mostly for the fact that a lot of things there are simply unusable or hard-to-use in the default configuration. And need to be changed in order to make them more usable. Since I have quite a few PCs to manage and have to go through this procedure on regular basis, I made my personal list of things you have to disable, uninstall, tweak up or change in Windows 10.

Look for the information in the corner — half an hour of a quick reading! This is really long and detailed article!

Update! Note that this article, written in April 2018 and targeting Windows 10 1511, is year later little bit outdated. If you’re using Windows 10 1903 then you may find certain things on these lists OK or otherwise not needing any change or tweak up.

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My private Microsoft Office check-list [updated]

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
10 min. reading

Whether it is Office 2010 or 2013 (haven’t tried newer and already forgot about earlier) and whether it is on Windows 7, 8.1 or 10, the set of my preferred configuration options and elements is usually the same. So I decided to write it down here to keep track of it whenever I have to fresh-install Microsoft Office anywhere.

This article covers only configuration of each Office component that I use. For other things that I usually do or change during fresh-install of Office, please, refer to this article.

Note that this is an updated version of this post that includes items in the check-list for:

  • Office 2013 under Windows 7,
  • Office 2013 under Windows 10 and
  • Office 365 under Windows 10.

All of these versions ships with sometimes completely different configuration sets (even for Office 2013 under two different versions of Windows) and thus you may find many options listed in this article missing or already set to desired values.

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Remove garbage from Windows 10

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
5 min. reading

Even after years since initial publication, being mature and stable operating system right now, Windows 10 comes to your computer literally bloated with unnecessary stuff. And you need to clean it up by yourself. Certain things can be uninstalled “the normal way” (i.e. using Add/Remove programs panel). Some other requires more sophisticated moves.

Update! Note that this article, written in August 2018 and targeting Windows 10 1511 is now (October 2019) a little bit outdated. The general difference is that many things listed here as not removable the usual way in 1511 may be easily uninstalled using Add/Remove programs panel in Windows 10 1903.

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Google Calendar: Quickly edit new event’s details

adminGoogle0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

By an accident I have discovered a handy feature (bug?) in new Google Calendar’s interface:

  1. Point your mouse pointer to desired date and time.
  2. Press left mouse button and then quickly right mouse button.

This will add a new event to your calendar and redirect you directly into editing that new event’s details (without need of moving your mouse toward “More options” button and clicking it).

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Shift+click on taskbar to quickly open program’s copy in Windows 7

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

So far, to quickly open a new copy of already running program or task I was doing this:

Right-click on program’s item in Windows taskbar + select name of that program from the context menu. Turns out there’s an even faster way of doing so: Click on program’s item while holding Shift button pressed.

Works in Windows 7. May work in other versions (though not tested). You may safely ignore this post, if this is absolutely obvious for you (wasn’t that obvious for me).

Show closed Jira tickets as last

adminVCS0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

For some of my JIRA filters (and for JIRA lists on some of my Confluence pages) I need to display all closed JIRA tickets as last and all in progress in the beginning of list. Using ORDER BY status failed because Closed isn’t neither first nor last status name when ordering status names alphabetically.

Searching Internet also didn’t help, but I managed to find a cool workaround:

ORDER BY resolution DESC

It assumes that any JIRA ticket in progress has resolution set to Unresolved which in JIRA means “empty value” and causes all tickets with such resolution to be displayed first and all tickets with Resolution != Unresolved to be displayed as last.

Replacement for mb_strimwidth() which is part of php-mbstring package

adminPHP, WordPress0 Comment
2 min. reading

One of blogs in my WordPress network is using some old, free theme that was using mb_strimwidth() function. This function is part of php-mbstring package which turned out to be disabled by default in my hosting configuration for PHP 7.2 (it is enabled by default for PHP 5.6).

After enabling PHP 7.2 in my hosting configuration it turned out one of my blogs stopped showing content (showing those damn two small smilies instead). After enabling wp_debug mode it turned out that theme was using mb_strimwidth() that was part of disabled php-mbstring package.

The mb_strlen is not part of that package, seems to be part of core PHP and can be used as a workaround.

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Tasker: An ultimate automation tool for Android

adminAndroid0 Comment
2 min. reading

Meet Tasker, a state-of-art automation tool for Android that can:

  • turn on GPS when Google Maps starts; turn it off when Google Maps closes,
  • show a list of your music apps when you plug in headphones,
  • turn off pattern lock while on home WiFi,
  • read incoming text messages aloud,
  • even more,
  • a lot of more,
  • even a lot of more.

It isn’t free (of course!). I costs… 5 bucks. But it is worth every damn cent spent on it!

And, if above is still not enough for you…

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Quickly forward Outlook message as a file

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

If you wish to forward any Outlook message as a file you can use copy/paste features:

  1. Find and select (on message list) message that you want to forward as a file.
  2. Press Ctrl+C to copy selected message to clipboard.
  3. Hit Ctrl+N to start a new message (or Ctrl+R to respond to some other message).
  4. Click anywhere within main text window (or press Tab three times to get there).
  5. Press Ctrl+V to attach copied message as a file (paste it from Clipboard).

That’s all, folks! :>

Sometimes, I need to forward message no x in my message list as a file attached in response to message no x-1 (the next coming in, since I have message list ordered by date). For this reason I use an ultra fast combination of: Ctrl+C | ↑ | Ctrl+R | Tab+Tab+Tab | Ctrl+V | Ctrl+Enter.

Handy regular expressions

adminregex0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

This is just a memo for myself to remember all regular expression that I often use:

  1. Remove sh*t from movie’s subtitles (there’s a longer article on this topic here):
  2. Other:

Surround with / for JavaScript (and JSON?). Thus first example (\(([^)]+)\)) becomes /\(([^)]+)\)/.

Probably no use for anyone else except me, sorry! :>

Getting rid of forsaken “winmail.dat” sent by Microsoft Outlook

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

In many situations or scenarios Microsoft Outlook, instead of regular (consumable by other mail clients) meeting invitations can start sending “windmail.dat” instead. This is a proprietary format that other mail clients (like Thunderbird, Mac mail clients, web clients) ignore as not readable.

List of situations and configuration switches that may cause Outlook to behave like this is long. And so is the solution list. In my case only the most aggressive solution worked.

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Say bye, bye to website screenshot stuff. Chrome DevTools 62 are here!

admindev, Google0 Comment
3 min. reading

If you’re using any kind of software or browser’s plugin for capturing entire website, viewport areas longer than current screen or just a small pieces of website then with new Google Chrome DevTools 62 you can say bye, bye to all of them!

You can now capture screenshot of selected node (which includes capturing entire page, as I’ll show you) directly in DevTools in Google Chrome 62.

It is said that you can also capture a screenshot of selected part of viewport, but I managed to get this working only two times per ten on less than 10% of websites. Thus, I decided to not write about it.

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