PayPal exchange rates

It is very surprising that it is so hard to find actual PayPal exchange rates.

If you search the net for this query, you’ll find a bunch of useless results. With the one pointing you directly to PayPal page titled “Where can I find PayPal’s currency calculator and exchange rates?“. It tells you to go to Wallet and click Currency Calculator. This is completely pointless page, not updated for many years (shame, PayPal!). Currency calculator is gone and no longer available in the Wallet for years.

Finally, I have found a webpage that can do the actual currency conversion using PayPal exchange rates!

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Digging cryptocurrency using AWS premises…

…is COMPLETELY NOT PROFITABLE AT ALL.

Don’t you ever, never consider this, unless you don’t have a better option to loose your money!

I have managed to dig out 2.21 USD:

While spending… 260 USD for this:

It cost me hundred times more than I actually earned!

Use SonarQube to debug PHP code

Installing and using SonarQube Community Edition to debug your PHP code its fairly easy. But in involves a number of steps, spread among few docs, so I decided to write myself this little memo to compile one single step-by-step flow for this.

I assume that I’ll be using SonarQube to check quality of my PHP project (though SonarQube supports dozens of languages). This project is stored locally and directly accessible (this article does not cover dealing with repositories or embedding SonarQube into your release pipelines).

I am using XAMPP to host my PHP projects locally, but that part doesn’t play any significant role here.

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Help! My computer goes to sleep 1 minute after I lock it!

Imagine yourself situation, in which you strictly told Windows 11 that you don’t want it to go to sleep under no circumstances, no matter what happens, as long as it is wall-connected and not battery-powered:

And suddenly you realize that 60 seconds after you lock your Windows with Win+L, it goes to sleep anyway.

What now, Bill? Stand back…

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Normal.dot Word 365 template with macros and settings

In Word version prior Word 365 all you needed to do in order to customize Normal.dot template (i.e. change macros, styles, keyboard shortcuts) was:

• Start Word with an empty doc or double click Normal.dotm in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates
• Change anything you want
• Hit F12 and save new template under New.dotm
• Exit Word, delete Normal.dotm and rename New.dotm → Normal.dotm

This thing is one of many simple and obvious things that Microsoft made really difficult in Word 365.

If you have such file (personal template) that you have been using for years (like I do) and if you try to open it in Word 365 to add some new modification and then you save it then you will find that everything you changed (now and earlier) will be lost. For some stupid reason known only to Microsoft freaks.

Here is how to have modified Normal.dotm with all your settings in Word 365.

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Your eyes are tired? Night Eye to the rescue!

Windows 11 finally introduces nearly full, system-wide support for black / dark user interface. It’s Microsoft, so you can’t except 100% success (Properties-like, delete confirmation and other system dialogs are still terribly and painfully white), but still.

Then the question comes: what about websites? Everything is so (peacefully to your eyes) dark… until you open your web browser and navigate to a first website.

The answer is: Night Eye browser extension.

They offer you a three months long free test period, but believe me or not, you only need just a few days (or sometimes even a couple of hours) to fall in love so deeply that you simply can’t imagine life without it!

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Additional keyboard layout available in Windows

If, after installing Windows 10 or 11 and some languages, when you press Win+Space you see some additional keyboard language (the one that does not belongs to any installed language):

Then the solution is as simple as:

1. Install that language (English (United Kingdom) in the above example)
2. Go to language details and install the keyboard layout (Polish (Programmers) in here)
3. Uninstall the whole just added language language pack

After that pressing Win+Space should reveal only languages and keyboard layouts that you have actually installed in your system.

Source: How to get rid of US language in Windows 11.

Install selected Office 365 components

You cannot change which items will be installed along with Office 365 when you are running a regular installation file. But you can use Office Deployment Tool along with customized configuration file to install only these components that you really need.

This article is a copy of this guide updated for Office 356 Home Premium.

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Export PuTTY settings or sessions out of Windows Registry

PuTTY stores all sessions in Windows Registry, not in a file, so if you want to export these and import on some other computer or account then follow these steps (source):

1. Press Win+R to run Registry Editor in Windows
2. Type or paste the following (and hit Enter to confirm):

regedit /E "C:\Trash\PuTTY Settings.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham

Adjust path after /E switch to match your expectations.

Execute the following (instead of above):

regedit /E "C:\Trash\PuTTY Sessions.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions

if you wish to export just sessions, not the entire configuration of PuTTY.

Double click exported .reg file in order to import sessions or settings on a new computer.

Source: How to Export and Import Putty Settings (by TechEarl -May 27, 2018)

The quickest way to add RestAPI to your Yii 2 app. Part 2

As explained in the previous article, the example given in Yii 2 Guide about turning regular MVC apps into RESTful one is of a low quality, as it mixes certain things (refer to the previous article for details).

This article deals with this problem and show how to enable REST in Yii 2 Advanced Project Template by adding REST UserController directly to frontend application in that template and thus allowing to server User model through RESTful approach.

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Reducing PowerPoint presentation’s file size using brute-force method

Since Microsoft is Microsoft and the software produced by this company may surprise you in many ways, it may happen that the ideas given in the previous article turn out to be not enough. And file size of your PowerPoint presentation will still be too big.

In this case a more brutal method is needed.

Since every Microsoft Office document is in fact a .zip archive, we will try to reduce file size by direct modification or manipulation of the content of this file.

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Block all traffic from Russia to coming your site

Whether you want to say “no!” to Putin’s war or you just want to block Russian hackers from attacking your website, the solution is as easy as:

1. Connect to your website via FTP and download current version for .htaccess file from there
2. Make a copy of this file, just in case…
3. Go to Country IP Blocks website
4. Search for Russian Federation and check the checkbox next to it
5. Scroll the page all the way up and make sure that Apache .htaccess Deny is selected
6. Click Create ACL button and copy all the content from ACL Results list that will appear
7. Paste it at the end of your .htaccess file and save the file
8. Upload it back to your website via FTP overwriting the existing file

Sure, this is not the ultimate solution. Use of proxy servers, Tor networks, botnets and other techniques for spoofing actual IP address will get them through your “so called firewall”. Also, IP address assigmnets changes often, so Country IP Blocks database might already be out-dated (if fact, it is). But, hey!, it’s always something. As good for the start as anything else. And surely better than doing nothing.

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Start Office 365 apps with a document

Office 365 off-line apps brings new start-up behavior of showing a summary screen instead of starting with an empty document open. If you like the “old” behavior then there’s a very easy way to achieve this:

1. Open Word / Excel / Power Point
2. Go to Options → General → Start up options
3. Uncheck the Show the Start screen when this application starts item
4. Click OK to confirm

Restart app to see the effect.

Testing rigor — test stages and types

I don’t generally do testing and my knowledge in this area is minimal, so here’s a short memo on this topic.

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Reverse dates in filenames using Total Commander’s multi-rename tool

Multi-rename tool in Total Commander is fantastic (when you know how to use it) and it saved my ass (before manually renaming many files) in many scenarios, including some very specific or even weird ones.

This scenario is one of such.

I had dates written directly as a part of filename, i.e.: Document name (DD-MM-YYYY).jpg, but (as shown) starting with day and ending with year. I had to reverse them, but only dates, keeping the rest of file untouched — i.e. Document name (YYYY-MM-DD).jpg.

At first, I thought that this time I will be forced to do this manually. But, I recalled multi-rename tool’s documentation and its small part about backward characters counting (i.e. from end of filename).

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Doing IT in Switzerland

I have a chat with a HR guy from Switzerland. He gave me some wages for the IT (May 2021; post-COVID!):

• Project Manager: 720 CHF per day (650 EUR per day | 775 USD per day | 60k INR per day | 3 000 PLN per day)
• Technical Writer: 600 CHF per day (550 EUR per day | 650 USD per day | 48k INR per day | 2470 PLN per day)
• DevOps: 300 CHF per day (275 EUR per day | 325 USD per day | 24k INR per day | 1 235 PLN per day)
• Business Analyst or Software Develoeprs: same as Project Manager above
• QA tester or ITQ trainer: same as DevOps above

Most likely gross, but still… Swiss IT is doing good. Really, good…

Various wako problems with Alt+Tab and Microsoft products

Ever since Windows exists there was a very handy Alt+Tab combination to quickly switch between open applications. Nowadays, when people are using many screens for single computer it might be less often used, but still is very familiar and handy.

Not for so long time, but still for quite long, Microsoft is doing everything to make that simple, obvious and easy to understand combination work as wrong as possible in their products, so from time to time you may run into a really weird behaviour. For example:

• Pressing Alt+Tab in Excel 2010 or older, when two or more workbooks are open does not work (user focus remains in the same workbook there wanted to switch from)
• Pressing the same combination in Microsoft Edge causes focus to shift through tabs rather than active applications.

Fortunately these inconsistencies and workflow breakers exists only in certain Microsoft products and are easy to fix.

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Force Microsoft Edge to safe images with .jpg instead of .jfif extension

There are million of guides in the Internet on how to correct this stupid default behavior that happens in Microsoft Edge nearly every time and in Google Chrome from time to time. But all these solutions requires you to read through long block of text or watch 2-3 minutes long video while solution is actually ultra-fast.

1. Start > type regedit > hit Enter
2. Paste Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\image/jpeg to address bar > hit Enter
3. Double click on Extension > paste .jpg > hit Enter

And… you’re done! Restart Edge to see the effects. No more .jpg files saved with stupid .jfif extension.

Uploading MIME-conflicted ebooks and files to WordPress

Starting with 5.0.1 version WordPress introduced an additional security check, where file’s MIME type must match extension. So an attempt to upload any executable file file with .jpg extension will fail with:

Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons

This can be a real pain when trying to upload certain ebook format, because this is exactly the case — a MIME-type conflicted with extension (at least as seen by WordPress). For example: Kindle’s .azw3 files declares itself (content; look inside) as BOOKMOBI. Or .epub format which has application/epub+zip as MIME-type and being a modified version of .zip file or actually a regular .zip file with some predefined content.

There are some ways to workaround this (discussed here), however, not all of them works, sorry!

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Removing some lines from .srt subtitle files

The .srt format seems to be most popular for storing subtitles for corresponding video files. It is very flexible (allowing you to define begin and end of displaying each phrase to the level of single frame).

One big disadvantage of this format is that it is indexed. Meaning that each following line has a consequential numbering. You cannot simply delete let’s say line number 511 (as you would do in case of .txt or other subtitle file formats), because you’d have to renumber manually all following lines. Which, in case of modern movies, can have up to 1000-2000 lines.

Thus, if you wish to get rid of some line or lines (i.e. sound-like sentence) you must either use some designated software that will do the auto-renumbering of the following lines (not covered in this article) or do this manually, keeping some tips in your mind.

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Quickly find shortcut-related commands in Word

The Ctrl+Alt+D keyboard shortcut in Word 2010, for inserting endnote, was pissing me off quite much. I wanted to un-assign or re-assign it. But I had a real trouble finding it among all keyboard shortcuts. Mostly, because Word sometimes is using totally misleading codenames for corresponding operations.

By an accident I found a quick workaround to this problem.

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Restore not working Windows Spotlight

Windows Spotlight is a Windows 10 feature that displays you a beautiful images on your lock screen along with some location’s information and from time to time, some tips. On contrary to some users, I really like this feature and prefer to have different lock-screen image each day instead of the same dully picture.

When Windows Spotlight stops working there are several solutions in order to restore it.

If you’re lucky, the simplest one will give you expected results and you’re done in a matter of seconds. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up messing up with Windows PowerShell, for which you need administrator privileges.

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