marcel

Mar 062021
 

On linux to concatenate multiple PDF files you can use command pdfunite.

E.g. to concatenate three files as all.pdf

pfdunite file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf all.pdf

If command not available, on Debian distribution or derivates (e.g. Ubuntu), you can install it using command:

apt-get install poppler-utils

 Posted by at 4:49 PM
Apr 262020
 
  1. Install Android SDK platform-tools on a PC. After installing, be sure that you have access to fastboot (or fastboot.exe) command.
  2. Connect your Android device to the PC via an USB cable.
  3. Turn the android device OFF.
  4. Boot the android device in fat mode: press and hold Volume Down, then press and hold Power for few seconds. This keys combination works for most of the Android devices, if it doesn’t work on your devices, search on the internet.
  5. With the device in this state on PC run command fastboot oem off-mode-charge 0 . It should work on most devices.

 Posted by at 8:46 AM
Mar 242019
 

Bubbles In Line is a 9×9 board game, played with bubbles of different colors, for Android devices. The player can move one bubble per turn to remove the bubbles by forming lines (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) of at least five balls of the same color.
To score move bubbles on the table to match five or more bubbles of the same color in a line.
Some bubbles have two colors, so they are counted as any of the two colors.
You can move the bubbles between any two squares only if there is a path of free squares.
Path is made of segments in vertical or horizontal direction (no diagonal).
Score:

  • For 5 bubbles in line you get 1 point
  • For 6 bubbles you get 2 points
  • For 7 bubbles you get 4 points
  • For 8 bubbles you get 8 points
  • For 9 bubbles you get 16 points

3 bubbles of random colors will be placed on random free squares after each move.
Every time you score, no new bubbles will be placed on the table.
Game ends where there are no free squares on the table.
Every time when you complete a game you can save teh respective game, have to provide a name.
We will store also info about the score, number of moves and the date when teh game was saved.

Undo: If by mistake you moved the bubble on wrong square you can undo only last move (two consecutive undo operations will not work).

The game has different levels of difficulty, depending by the number on the colors you selected when the game starts:

  • very easy – you selected minimum number of colors
  • hard – you selected maximum number of colors

#1 Start New Game

When you run the application for very first time, the screen with new game will appear. If you already started a game you can reset to a new one choosing “Restart Game” from the application menu.

When starting a new game you can select the number of colors that you want to play: from 6(very easy) to 10(hardest)

#2 Playing Game

The target is to score points making lines of 5 or more bubbles of the same color, as described above. After each move 3 new bubbles will be added on the board on the empty squares.

text, just testing

When will be no empty squares on the board, the game is considered finish, and you can save the game. Saved game include details as: score, date when finish, number of moves, number of colors.

#3 Settings

From app menu “Settings” you can control the speed of how bubbles are moved on the board, and the sound: from “none” to maximum.

 Posted by at 6:53 PM
Jan 162019
 

telenet is an useful tool to test the network connection.

E.g. if you want to test is a web server is still online you will want to try something like this

telnet notnull.ro 80

If you are on Windows 10, by default the telnet command is not available, it has to be installed/enabled, you will get a message like

‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Here are the steps to enable it

  1. Search for Command Prompt and run it as administrator , like in picture below
  2. In command prompt run next command

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TelnetClient

Now the telnet command should work.

 Posted by at 10:44 PM
Feb 242017
 

Allview broken touchscreenFew days one friend just broke his phone touch screen, and the half bottom of the screen  didn’t respond anymore. So, no chance to interact anymore with it.

He wanted to transfer all the files from the phone to the PC, but when the USB data cable is inserted the phone is asking what to do with USB connection:

  • Charge only
  • View photos
  • File copy

He wanted the last option “Files copy” to access the internal storage, but the phone does not respond and starts with default option “Charge Only”. Looks like there is no chance to copy any file.

Fortunately on my PC I have Android Studio installed, and it comes with the “adb” tool (Android Debug Bridge).  It lets you to communicate with the Android devices connected on the PC. Here is what I’ve done to copy the content of entire internal storage to PC.

With bold are the command that I’ve run , and in blue bold are the comments/hints.
First step is to identify the path of the phone storage,
it is different from vendor to vendor and one Android version to other.
C:\Users\mark>adb shell ls -l /
-rw-r--r-- root root 663 1970-01-01 02:00 seapp_contexts
-rw-r--r-- root root 231669 1970-01-01 02:00 sepolicy
drwxrwx--- radio system 1970-01-01 02:00 spdata
drwxr-x--x root sdcard_r 2017-02-24 18:36 storage
dr-xr-xr-x root root 2017-02-24 18:36 sys
drwxr-xr-x root root 1970-01-01 02:00 system
-rw-r--r-- root root 6729 1970-01-01 02:00 ueventd.rc
lrwxrwxrwx root root 2017-02-24 18:36 vendor -> /system/vendor

C:\Users\mark>adb shell ls -l /storage
drwxrwx--x root sdcard_r 1970-01-01 02:00 sdcard0
drwx------ root root 2017-02-24 18:36 sdcard1

C:\Users\mark>adb shell df /storage/*
Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize
/storage/sdcard0 7.2G 4.5G 2.7G 4096
/storage/sdcard1 0.0K 0.0K 0.0K 4096
Based on whet we see above, looks like the storage path is /storage/sdcard0 .
Let's copy it using "adb pull" command.
First the command will build the list of files to be transferred,

then will start transfer and will notify us about the progress status.

C:\Users\mark>adb pull /storage/sdcard0 D:\tmp\bkp_from_allview_internal
[ 24%] /storage/sdcard0/DCIM/Camera/IMG_20141227_141226.jpg: 16%
...
...
/storage/sdcard0/: 1218 files pulled. 0 files skipped. 3.2 MB/s (4717973504 bytes in 1406.642s)

That’s all folk!

 Posted by at 10:07 PM
Feb 052017
 

 Google Play Identical Files Finder Android application.
The main idea was to have a very small size application (apk size is ~1.5MB), to not waste to much space on disk.
Also the application can be moved to external SD card, to save space of internal phone/tablet storage.

It works for all Android v4.0+ phone and tablet devices .

Here is the detailed description about how to use the application.

Step 0

Only if you have Android v6.0+ .

Allow Read/Write on external storage

Allow Read/Write on external storage

First you have to allow access to READ/WRITE photo, media and files.
For older versions of Android it is done/asked when you install the applications.


Step 1

Here we select the folders we want to scan. We can select the entire internal and/or external storage, or can go one level below and select specific folders.
Also we can filter the files by size. If no minimum and maximum size are set, all the files will be search.

Step 2

Create groups of files having the same size.

Create groups of files having the same size.

Start to scan every selected disk and builds groups with files having the same size.

Step 3

Progress status

Progress status

No action is required for this steps. It just shows you the progress status.

Info about total number of groups having files of the same size, how many files we have in the current group, size of each file in the current group.

Step 4

Select files to be deleted

Select files to be deleted

Select files that we want to delete. For each group where we have selected at least one file, the color associated with the group will change.

We can sort the groups by files’ size  or by number of files in group ; both are in ascending order.

We can unselect or select all files.

When we decided what files we want to delete, just press DELETE button.


Step 5

Confirm files to be deleted

Confirm files to be deleted

Confirm that this is the list of files that we want to delete. Info related to the number of files and the total disk size that will be freed are provided.


Step 6 (Android v4.4)

Only for Android v4.4.* (KitKat)

Files from external SD card can not be deleted.

Files from external SD card can not be deleted.

On android version v4.4.* applications are not allowed to write/deleted in other folders except the folder associated with respective applications. So, we can not delete any file stored here. The list with such files are provided, and they have to be deleted connecting the phone as storage device to a PC.


Step 6 (Android v5.0+)

On some devices with Android v5.0+ the files from SD card can be added/deleted/modified only after extra permissions have been added. Such situations are detected by the application and will ask you to grant access to modify data on SD card. After providing the SD Card root the files will be deleted.


 Posted by at 8:33 PM
Oct 102016
 

Short tutorial (to not forget)

  • Install Turtle Sport
  • Connect your Garmin device to PC or transfer the FIT files to your PC
  • After opening Turtle Sport , do next steps:
    1. From Race menu choose Import

      Race -> Import

      Race -> Import

    2. Select Garmin_Device:/GARMIN/ACTIVITY folder

      Select Garmin Device:/GARMIN/ACTIVITY folder

      Garmin_Device:/GARMIN/ACTIVITY

    3. Choose the proper FIT file. Sorting by date may help.

      Choose the FIT file. Sorting by date may help.

      Choose the FIT file. 

    4. A popup will apear, set Save checkbox on and click Save button.

      Set Save checkbox on and click Save button.

      Set Save checkbox on and click Save button.

    5. You may have a short review on the activity, to be sure that it is what you want.

      Review activity

      Review activity

    6. Export the activity as GPX file. HRM data should be in.

      turtle_sport_6_race_export_gpx exchange format

      Export as GPX

 Posted by at 7:02 PM
Sep 252016
 

I’m just putting here this command to remember it next time when I need it.

Problem to be solved

When SD card of my photo camera is full I just upload the photos to my NAS server NSA320 . After that usually I do some cleanup and one of the steps is to move the video (there are not only photos)  files from the the photo/ directory to other location.

Until now I did this step manually, to save time I was thinking to make it automatic.

Solution

This is what I want to do:

  1. Get shell access on my NSA320 , to do this I’ve installed ffp (Fonz fun_plug). It is a collection of packages for NSA320 that includes a ssh server.
  2. After getting ssh access in step 1, I need to create a small scrip to move all the video files from $SOURCE_DIR to $DST_DIR. All video means files with next extensions:
    • .MOV (has to be no case sensitive)
    • .MPG/MP4 (has to be no case sensitive)
    • .AVI (has to be no case sensitive)

I’m using rsync command.

rsync -rav –remove-source-files –exclude ‘*’ –include ‘*/’ –include ‘*.[Mm][Oo][Vv]’ –include ‘*.[Mm][pP][4gG]’ –include ‘*.[Aa][Vv][Ii]’  –prune-empty-dirs $SOURCE_DIR  $DST_DIR

The meaning of the arguments:

  • -r = to go recursively on the entire $SOURCE_DIR
  • -a = archive mode, it means to preserve most of the attributes of the files. For me important was last modified time
  • -v = verbose; I just wanted to have a list with files that have been moved.
  • –remove-source-files = to remove from source dir the files that have been copied to destination.
  • –exclude ‘*’ = by default exclude all files; except the one passed to “–include” switches
  • –include ‘*/’ =  include directories in teh list of files that have to be moved
  • –include ‘*.[Mm][Oo][Vv]’ = include files with .MOV extension; no case sensitive. Similar for .MPG, .MP4, .AVI
  • –prune-empty-dirs = do not copy empty dirs from source to destination

At the end of the command you will noticed something like this:

sent 24287985339 bytes received 8458 bytes 12766356.79 bytes/sec
total size is 24511383985 speedup is 1.01

On my NSA320 it took few minutes to move ~23GB.

 Posted by at 10:18 AM
Oct 162015
 

Few days ago installed STEAM platform on my computer (Windows 10) , just wanted a play a game. The GUI was very very slowly. It took me few minutes just to create and enable an account. Then to browse and install the applications store was impossible. Thens searching on the net I’ve found different hints/solutions. The want that worked for me was to change the settings for Internet Options. Just go to ControlPanel->Network and Ineternet->Inernet Optins, and a popup will appear.  In this new popup select Connections tab and then LAN Settings. After that uncheck the option Automatically detect settings, like in the picture below. After doing this everything was fast, tens of times faster.

Set "Automatically detect settings" off

Set “Automatically detect settings” off

 Posted by at 6:51 PM