In the past few months due to Coronavirus many people have been working from home… live streaming or meeting from home, even live TV shows from home..? In this video, the famous Youtube mathematician Matt Parker shows some interesting tips on how one might be more professional at making videos.
Continue reading “Matt Parker explains professional online videography”Microsoft Math Solver review
Years ago if you wanted a program to explain steps in mathematics, algebra or other complex math as a tutor would, you would have to buy a specialized software package built for some specific operating system (I forget the name… it may still be around?) Of course there was always open source software like Maxima to do powerful symbolic (or numeric, or graphing) math, but to know what to do one almost needs a manual, and while extremely powerful it was not helpful for beginners. I recently found a similarly useful free math solver on Microsoft’s site, https://mathsolver.microsoft.com:
Continue reading “Microsoft Math Solver review”Librem announces Anbox working on Librem 5 phone
Yesterday Librem announced in a blog post that the Android compatibility layer, Anbox, is runnable in the Librem 5 Linux phone. They reportedly had to fix a few bugs, and they show a screenshot of a listing of apps – it is odd to notice that most apps shown (Firefox, Music, Camera…) really should have a native Linux application that works.
Continue reading “Librem announces Anbox working on Librem 5 phone”Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip
After you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu machine a few times, you might find that free disk space is low and some Python commands have issues. Programs like Bleachbit can help you clear old packages or cache that you don’t need, but sometimes you need a minor manual fix as documented here. As you may know, Pip is the main package management you’ll use to install packages you use, so this can be problematic.
After upgrading 16.04 to 18.04, I got an error on command line “pip”:
Continue reading “Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip”Easy VPN with DigitalOcean and ShadowSocks
If you are often in a cafe or library with shared internet, it’s best to go through a VPN so any unencrypted traffic isn’t detected by any local hackers – while there are many vpn packages, it is easy enough to make your own and connect to it with shadowsocks. This can give you good performance even on a $5/mo digitalocean server!*
Continue reading “Easy VPN with DigitalOcean and ShadowSocks”Hacktoberfest is coming up!
Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:
- Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
- Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
- Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
- Tunesviewer
- iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
- Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.
There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events
Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!
This may be a back-to-school like no other in recent history. Kyle Rankin, chief security officer of Purism, has an interesting article about privacy as schools start online this year. While many schools use Google docs or Chromebooks, it is important to use your school account which is legally not allowed to be tracking as much.
(If you do use Google docs for education please also check out Autocorrect remover which makes writing much better for English learners!)
Continue reading “Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!”Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features
Once in awhile a package hangs out at an old version even after a system upgrade or two. This can cause odd things like that software portion not working like it should. In my case, an old salbabix ios PPA that was long defunct as Ubuntu 18.04 and later have no problem just plugging in updated iOS devices.
Continue reading “Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features”MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround
For this weekend’s hackathon I worked on a hackathon project I had thought about for awhile… an anti auto correct that should be more like natural paper and pencil, and not automatically show the answer when you click on a misspelled word (not great for learning, Google Docs!) This should be useful for learners especially during a pandemic.
Continue reading “MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround”What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app
What3words is an interesting alternative to sharing around long latitude/longitude numbers, instead share just a few words!
The first step to integrating the api is signing up for a free API key. Then require the library using composer – in the main project folder run:
Continue reading “What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app”