Posts published by: Alejandro Liu

Anti Roboto skills

Losing your job to robots is no longer a sci-fi fantasy. Some estimates say, robots may take over more than five million jobs across 15 developed countries. Machines could account for more than half the workforce in places like Cambodia and Indonesia, particularly in the garment industry. While such information has led many people to seek out higher-tech ...

stop procrastinating

We are all guilty of procrastinating from time to time--here's always something more interesting than the work in hand. We usually think it's no big deal, since deadline is our biggest inspiration, and we do our best work when we're inspired. We may even joke about it. However, procrastination is a massive waste of time as it turns out. A survey in 2015 found that on average, a person loses over 55 days ...

manage busyness

Former United States President Dwight Eisenhower was responsible for putting together one of the most important yet fundamentally simple to understand concepts in time management. Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle is a tool to help decipher what tasks need to be addressed more immediately than others. Anyone who uses the principle will be better able to organize and orchestrate their ...

Kivy

Today I want to briefly write about kivy. kivy is an Python library intended for developing Mobile Apps. It is a cross-platform library that runs on Android, iOS, Linux, OS X and Windows. It is licensed under the MIT, so it is free and open source. Kivy is the main framework developed by the Kivy organisation, alongside with Python for Android, ...

Fixed drive letters for removable USB sticks

If you use multiple USB drives, you've probably noticed that the drive letter can be different each time you plug one in. If you'd like to assign a static letter to a drive that's the same every time you plug it in, read on. Windows assigns drive letters to whatever type of drive is available. This can be annoying especially if you use backup tools or portable apps that prefer to have the same drive letter every time. ...

Portable Console

portable console Set scrolling region: printf "\033[1;24r" Reset scrolling region: printf "\033[r" However, it is easier/better to do: ...

Xnest

This trick lets you run X-Windows within an X-Windows session. This is kinda like running VNC. It is useful for testing scenarios. #!/bin/sh Xnest :1 -name "Bla" -ac -geometry 800x600 & sleep 1 export DISPLAY=:1 ...

Building Signed APKs

Building signed APK's for Android is easy if you know what you are doing. This article goes over the preparation steps and the additional build instructions needed to created signed APKs. Preparation First you need to have a keystore. Use this command: ...

Archiving DVDs and CDs

Since now I have a Android TV I put away my HTPC and with that the capability to view DVDs or listen CDs directly. So I converted my entire CD and DVD library to media files and stored in my home NAS. Since we are talking hundreds of DVDs and CDs, I was using some tools. CD ripping For CD ripping, pretty much everything can be done with abcde. ...

MariaDB Quickest Quick start

This article outlines the bare minimum to get a MariaDB or MySQL database up and running. It covers a CentOS/RHEL and an ArchLinux installs. Make sure your system is up to date: ...

Jaxon: Call PHP classes from JavaScript using AJAX

Jaxon is an open source PHP library for easily creating Ajax web applications. It allows into a web page to make direct Ajax calls to PHP classes that will in turn update its content, without reloading the entire page. Jaxon implements a complete set of PHP functions to define the contents and properties of the web page. Several plugins exist to extend its functionalities and provide integration with various PHP frameworks and CMS. ...

Building chroots with yum

Building CHROOTs with Yum in a single command: yum --releasever=7 --installroot=/chroot/jail2 -y install httpd Will install httpd with all its dependancies. If you are on x86_64 and want a 32 bit chroot: setarch i386 yum --releasever=6 --installroot=/chroot/jail32 -y install httpd ...

My WordPress plugins

For my own purposes I have written a number of WordPress plugins. S3Copy - Makes backup copies of your pictures to an S3 Compatible server. I use sirv.com myself. It also mangles tags so files are server from the S3 bucket. wptools - A collection of WordPress related functionality. ...