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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One-line UTF-8 encoded text files in Total Commander…

adminsoftware0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

…are not correctly detected by it’s internal Lister viewer.

They’re detected as binary files in this case and if they contain any character from outside Latin range, Lister will most likely display such characters incorrectly (Total Commander does not do automatic UTF-8 detection in binary mode). According to TC’s author this is a correct and expected behavior.

Lister needs at list one line brake to correctly detect text file as UTF-8 encoded.

New Outlook’s calendar meeting with default signature

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

One of many wrongs, fuckups and things that are missing in Microsoft Outlook is the fact that you can’t set default signature for every new calendar meeting invitation, as you’d do for any new email message.

Things gets even worse as you dig through the problem and realize that Outlook developers were stupid enough to force you to design a whole new meeting template instead of just giving you an option to enable or disable this feature (as — again — it works in case of emails).

This guide is a redesigned version of this Stack Overflow answer (or actually this comment).

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HP LaserJet Pro M426fdn settings and factory reset

adminhardware11 Comments
3 min. reading

When running my HP LaserJet Pro M426fdn for the first time I didn’t removed touchscreen foil and my finger slipped over when selecting location of my printer. I ended up with having proper language but location set to Estonia and some reports (like Google Cloud Print configuration leaflet) printed in cyrylic.

Unfortunately, due to extreme stupidity of HP engineers you can only change language of your printer using standard configuration menu. But, in order to change location of the printer you have to perform a full factory reset of your hardware.

And here my problems started, because none of the solution I found seemed working on my printer.

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Add one or more folders to .zip archive

adminLinux0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

To add single directory (with all files and sub-directories) simply execute:

zip -r zip_file_name.zip name_of_your_directory

To add all contents of current directory (again, recursively) call instead:

zip -r zip_file_name.zip *

While to add two or more directories (but not all) in current directory — list them:

zip -r zip_file_name.zip directory_a directory_b directory_c

Call just zip to see all switches, options etc.

Limit Android-based device functionality to an absolute minimum

adminAndroid0 Comment
2 min. reading

If you ever need to turn some Android-based device (like a spare tablet) into single-function device (like auto-started browser with precisely selected website and all other functions disabled) then there’s a great article at Android Enthusiasts that explains in quick, sharp words, what you need to achieve this (some time and cash).

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chown: Recursively change owner of all files and folders

adminLinux, QNAP0 Comment
2 min. reading

Sometimes QNAP changes file owner to admin:administ (actually to admin:administrators — admin user in administrators group) which may cause some troubles on certain FTP operations when you’re logged in to QNAP’s FTP server with user different than admin (using this user to operate on FTP is a quite great mistake and you should always use other, less privileged user for this).

Using chown command you can easily fix this.

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Access website via IPv6 address

adminhardware2 Comments
< 1 min. reading

There are several ways, how one can access a website. Using domain name (i.e. http//www.example.com/) is one of most popular. We can also use IPv4 address (i.e. http://216.58.194.174/). In certain situations URL can be “enhanced” with port number, login and password etc.

A bit less known option is to access an URL using IPv6 address. You only need to enclose it inside square brackets i.e.:

http://[49d7::2e27:fe80:fe0d:d8ff]/webservices.html

Edit: Thanks to Foo Bar for correcting an obvious, yet fundamental mistake to this article.

Save search results to file

adminsoftware0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

When you press Alt+F7 in Total Commander, you have access to really powerful search functionality. Unfortunately, the Load/Save tab allows loading and saving of search parameters, not the search results.

However, there’s a hidden gem that allows you to copy search results to clipboard and then you can paste them to Notepad and save them to file. Just press Ctrl+C when list of search results is focused. A single “blink” of window will tell you that contents are copied to clipboard.

Solutions for Google Chrome loosing all passwords…

adminGoogle0 Comment
4 min. reading

…and other synced data.

If you purge your local sensitive data in one of computers (i.e. on shared PC) while you’re logged-in to your Google account then — due to some serious stupidity in Google Chrome — you will purge the same set of data from your Google account as well. Each device that syncs data with this account will, as a result, purge its local sensitive data next time it contacts Google servers.

This article presents a list of solutions you can try to apply in situations like this.

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Replace all sound-like expressions in subtitles [updated!]

adminregex0 Comment
9 min. reading

This article covers manual fixes to subtitles. You may consider some automatic tools instead.

I’m as big fan (maniac) of perfectly crafted movie subtitles as I’m a regular expression newbie (ignorant). I simply don’t understand them and I’m pretty scared of each attempt / need of using them. Mostly because most of such attempts fails! :]

Until today, my biggest problem about movie subtitles were “sound-like” expressions. Manual removal of 100+ lines out of 400+ subtitle files wasn’t and option. Today, I said to myself, that I’m going to sit by the computer until I don’t figure out a regular expression, which I can feed into Notepad++ and replace all of this junk-like (at least to me) text out of each of my movie subtitle.

So I did. Finding proper regular expression for such extremely easy task is a snap of fingers for every regular expression freak. For regexp-ignorant, like me, it took no more than five minutes, so I managed to get on time for diner back home.

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The solution for Windows Update error code 8024200d

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

If your Windows Update process hits the wall with error code 8024200d then you may find really strange solutions, including suggestions to restart all services and boot system in a clean mode.

The truth is that error 8024200d means nothing more than the fact that Windows Update downloaded a malfunctioned version of update. And this is the only reason on why it is not able to install it.

And the solution is as simple as — install it manually by yourself.

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Prepare Windows 7 installation USB stick

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
3 min. reading

I’ve got brand new Intel NUC Kit. With powerful processor, lots of RAM, M.2 disk and… absolutely no way to install Windows 7 except for using properly prepared USB stick. And so, for the first time in my life, I have a no-DVD computer and for the first time in past seven years (since I started using Windows 7) I was forced to figure out good, old Windows 7 USB installation way.

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Use own photos as desktop wallpapers in Windows 7

adminMicrosoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

Using own images as desktop wallpapers in Windows 7 isn’t that easy and obvious task, because most of the time clicking Browse... button in Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization > Desktop Background simply brings no effect.

And there are many solutions to workaround this problem. Of which the brute-force one I prefer the most.

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Disable CSS transitions and animations… temporarily or permanently!

adminCSS, JavaScript, jQuery2 Comments
3 min. reading

There’s a fairly easy way to diable all transformations, transitions and animations introduced in CSS3, which often are being used in a nasty way, just as Flash animations were used ten years ago and as .gif images were used twenty years ago.

This can be done purely in CSS, when disabling them permanently or with a little bit help from Javascript (actually jQuery or Zepto), when willing to disable them just for some time or event.

This article also show how to set styles for absolutely every element in document.

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