Login as root user to Raspberry Pi

nullRaspberry Pi0 Comment
2 min. reading

As in this article, you cannot login as a root user in Raspberry Pi (neither locally nor via SSH), because you don’t know the default’s root password. In this article, I’ll show you how to change it to be able to login to it, but only locally (still no SSH access), which is good.

Again, as in here, you should never, ever access or use root account. Instead you should use pi user (after changing its default password) and elevate it to superuser with sudo su or by casting sudo in front of each console command.

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Various wako problems with Alt+Tab and Microsoft products

nullother0 Comment
4 min. reading

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:

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

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MEGA — file sharing and cloud storage far above average

nullother, VCS0 Comment
7 min. reading

The IT world grows, big data becomes your everyday’s pal. Whether you are a developer or project manager, you need to store more and more data each and every day. Getting a good quality and reliable solution becomes a bit challenge. To help you with that I wanted to tell you a bit about MEGA service.

I found it by a complete coincidence (I am not getting paid for this post!) — a friend has shared a file with me. I dug into details and found it interesting. In my opinion MEGA is far better than most file sharing services and can challenge even well known cloud storage options like Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive.

So, what makes MEGA that unique? In short: command-line tool, NAS support, mobile apps, browser’s extensions and many more.

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

nullother0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

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.

keepachangelog.com of your stuff?

nulldev, VCS0 Comment
3 min. reading

I am not intend to tell you that you should keep a change log of any piece of software that you ever develop. This is as obvious as the fact that sun shines and fire burns. If you don’t understand this or disagree then you’re certainly at the wrong address.

However, with this article I am going to tell you about a specific way of keeping history of changes to your software. The one that keepachangelog.com suggests. The one that I immediately fell in love with.

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Temp Mail and Temp Number for QA purposes, but not only…

nulldev0 Comment
5 min. reading

The Temp Mail and Temp Number services were originally created (according to their owners) to lift of your problem of being bloated with stupid newsletters and SPAM emails and text messages, when you use your actual mailbox address or phone number in order to register to some service.

With these services you can totally forget about such pains because you’re getting a fully working email address or SMS receive-enabled phone number that will self-destruct after twenty minutes or so.

If you are a developer you may already catch an idea that you can use this for a QA purposes.

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All Raspberry Pi default logins and passwords

nullRaspberry Pi0 Comment
2 min. reading

I don’t like unnecessary blah, blah and I don’t like blogs bloated with ads, so I decided to steal this source and transform it into a simple list of default logins and passwords on various Raspberry Pi bases and clones.

All the glory (copyright and authorship) goes to tutorials-raspberrypi.com.

You read more about users at base Raspberry Pi (no clone) here.

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Put significance on tens and ones or round to a negative precision [updated!]

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

I had a situation in Excel where tens and ones are the only significant parts of a any number. For some Polish language-specific issues I have come with the situation that no matter how big number is, I need to know the value of its last two digits or last digit.

For example:

21 --> 21 and 1
56 --> 56 and 6
160 --> 60 and 0
1122 --> 22 and 2
679014 --> 14 and 4
1053405 --> 5 and 5

Learning the fact that ROUND(), ROUNDUP() and ROUNDDOWN() functions in Excel can be used with a negative precision parameter helped me solved this issue.

I am not too good in Excel, so maybe (update!) there are prettier solutions. This one works, however…

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Introduction to curl

nulldev, Linux, PHP, Yii0 Comment
3 min. reading

This is just a barely memo about very, very basics of curl. Since curl fetches URLs and data from some endpoints, it can be used for a variety of reasons. I am using to for a very basic (and quick!) API calls tests.

If you’re on Linux, Unix or any of its clones or if you’re on Mac then you most likely have curl. If you’re on Windows, but you’re using Git for Windows (or some similar tool) then you have curl.

So, let’s jump into that basics. Be warned — you will not find here anything that you wouldn’t already knew.

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Developing applications for Raspberry Pi or Linux

nullCordova, dev, Linux, Raspberry Pi0 Comment
5 min. reading

Depending on: project’s scope, business expectations, your knowledge and Raspberry Pi’s role you can develop software for RPi in mainly three ways:

  1. Turn Raspberry Pi into API-like webserver with node.js and do all the programming in clients.
  2. Develop a HTML/CSS/JS application
  3. Develop an native Raspberry Pi app

All of the above require you to:

  • Develop a regular Linux app
  • Optimised to use hardware and computing power of Raspberry Pi
  • Run it in Raspbian OS or any other Linux distribution of your choice

And, if you really want to get your hands dirty and truly have no limits then you must forget about Linux and start thinking about Ultibo (there’s a separate article for that).

Developing in Ultibo (or similar complete embedded development environment) requires a lot of expertise, development knowledge and practice. And simply isn’t an option for all. Especially, if you only need to build a quick-and-easy app for RapberryPi. For these purposes this article lists details about RPi development.

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Pluralized and non-pluralized rules for the same REST controller

nullPHP, Yii0 Comment
3 min. reading

The quickest way of adding REST support to your Yii 2 application is to add REST controller to it and configure REST rules. Just a couple of line and framework will do all the dirty stuff for you “behind the scene”.

If you do this then your REST rules will have pluralize property set to true be default meaning that even though you are using controller’s name in singular (i.e. UserController, PostController etc.) your REST URL rules will have it in plural, i.e. GET /posts/12, DELETE /posts/13 etc.

Since I am a purification and perfection maniac, I wasn’t pretty much satisfied with the idea that:

  • I have plural routes when fetching, deleting or updating single record (when pluralize = true) or
  • I have single GET /post router when fetching all records (when pluralize = false)

In other words, I wanted a solution that will give me:

  • Everything in singular (i.e. GET /post/12, PATCH /post/77)
  • Except listing all the records, where I will have plural (i.e. GET /posts)

The solution turned out to be quite simple…

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The smallest Linux for Raspberry Pi?

nullLinux, Raspberry Pi0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

There are dozens of articles similar to this, so I treat it just as another quick memo for myself:

  1. You can create custom Linux-based system yourself with tools like:
  2. A ready out-of-the box solution is Core Linux / pi Core:
    • some info: here, here and here
    • very modular, add whatever you need
    • smallest version is claimed to have only 10 MB with GUI!
  3. Smallest Rasbian OS is 0.5+ GB in size so is out of option.

And if anything above is not for you then maybe a… non-Linux solution for your RPi?

Ultra-fast animated screen capture with LICEcap or ScreenToGif

nulldev0 Comment
3 min. reading

Up until now I was using fabulous ScreenToGif to quickly capture animated screenshots for bug reporting. It truly is — as its homepage says — free, compact and powerful. It comes with handy installer, but also with portable version. And capturing is ultra-easy with it.

Today I discovered LICECap and immediately felt in love again…

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Developing for Raspberry Pi with Ultibo

nullDelphi and Free Pascal, Raspberry Pi, Ultibo0 Comment
13 min. reading

Building apps that will be run on Raspberry Pi will require you in most scenarios to:

  • Develop a regular Linux app
  • Optimised to use hardware and computing power of Raspberry Pi
  • Run it in Raspbian OS or any other Linux distribution of your choice

If you:

  • Can’t or don’t want to base your solution on Linux
  • Need to have nearly no limits and full fexibility
  • Want to learn something really cool

Then you need to get your hands dirty, forget about Linux and start thinking about Ultibo.

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Raspberry Pi-based computer for 80 USD or less?

nullRaspberry Pi0 Comment
5 min. reading

The variety of original Raspberry Pi editions and thousands of its clones may be a little bit overwhelming.

If you have a problem selecting proper gear box for your scenario or solution this article may help a little bit. I’ll suggest basic components (Raspberry Pi 4’s version, some case and SD card) and a good looking, promising operating system.

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File upload blocked despite ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS set to true

nullother, WordPress0 Comment
3 min. reading

Some file types are reporting its MIME type different than it is associated with given file extension in WordPress database. Such file upload will be blocked for security reasons (.epub file in my case):

X.epub: Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons

A special ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS flag is used in WordPress in such situations. You should try it first. If you still have not satisfying results (i.e. you still can’t upload a file of certain type) then it may mean some MIME table changes made by either your plugin or theme or even a nasty bug in WordPress itself.

In all cases, using must-use plugin with some small filter should solve the problem.

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Disable automatic restarts in Windows 10

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

Windows knows better then you when to restart your computer. And Windows 10 is the most qualified in such knowledge. That’s why in some scenarios you may lost 40+ tabs open in your browser and a lot of programs running, when your Windows decided that it must be restarted right now.

There are many approaches to preventing Windows 10 from auto-restarting itself:

However, the solution that worked for me is “Disable Automatic Windows 10 Restarts” script at GitHub.

Increasing “Max upload file size” in WordPress the right way

nullWordPress0 Comment
8 min. reading

To all those disbelievers — yes, uploading 1 GB or bigger files to WordPress is possible! :)

And you don’t have to play with some workarounds like uploading files through FTP and hard-linking them with your post. You can upload large file right in WordPress built-in file uploader.

However, a lot of steps may be needed before you will be able to achieve this.

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Uploading MIME-conflicted ebooks and files to WordPress

nullother0 Comment
4 min. reading

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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Batch-change value of thousands of cells in Excel sheet

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
6 min. reading

There are milion of ways on modifying many cells’ value in single pass using… formula. But, what about a situation, when you need to perform only a single one-time bulk-change of value in many Excel’s cells?

I had a situation when I was preparing some IT project’s budget. Since I am an IT geek then writing amounts in thousands like 1,30k USD was no problem at all. However, this solution had two falls:

  • Some accounting freak, having nothing to do with IT, had problems understanding that “k” means thousands
  • Cells itself had to use some custom formatting of ##0,00k USD in order to add that damn “k”

Thus, I had to do a one-time recalculation of most of cells in my sheet to multiply their value by 1000.

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Factory reset Kindle with semi-frozen screen

nullhardware0 Comment
5 min. reading

The steps for performing factory reset of a Kindle are quite easy:

  1. From the home screen, select Menu.
  2. Select Settings.
  3. Select Menu again then select Reset Device.

The problem appears when your screen is frozen and you don’t see anything or almost anything.

I had this situation that only tiny part of my screen was still responsive. I wasn’t able to see most of the menu and settings sections, but at least I managed to see:

  • When my Kindle is awaken
  • When its menu is or isn’t opened up (I didn’t see many menu items though)
  • Which page of Settings I am currently at

This allowed me to figure-out a key combination needed to blind-reset my Kindle.

If your Kindle has a completely dead screen and you don’t see anything of above then sorry, this article won’t help you.

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Change page size when scanning in Windows 10

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
5 min. reading

If you’re scanning images using Window’s native drives and software (i.e. not those provided by your scanner manufacturer) you may often hit the wall of not being able to change scanned page side due to fact that corresponding list is disabled:

In this article I’ll show you how to change this value (page size). But, keep in mind that this will be a one time solution. As far as I know there is now permanent solution for this problem.

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Can’t enable BitLocker for pendrive or USB removable drive

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

If your pendrive or removable drive (after selecting it in This PC) has BitLocker button disabled (in Protect section of Drive Tools tab) or if you can’t see it listed in BitLocker itself then it is (currently) not supported. Most guides you’ll find will tell you that the destructive way of formatting drive is the only option.

That turned out to be not true, at least in my case. Simple deactivation of pendrive’s partition using DiskPart solved problem.

Of course you need Windows 10 Pro, because “lower” editions of this system does not have BitLocker.

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