Computing Trivia

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Truth is Gone, Now Trust is Going...

On the day "alternative facts" were offered to provide an alternative reality, truth went out the door. Later this fascinating statement was reinforced with another that "truth is not truth". Talk of careless talk. Now consider this, computing is leading the way in offering alternative realities. AI offers ways to alter reality. With so much reliance on apps and social media, a good percentage of our reality comes down via apps and the Internet on our LCD screens. Its all digital. Digital is fairly easy to manipulate. But that's not my concern today. My concern is a trend in which the individual is slowly and surely losing sovereignty over their digital assets and identity. Consider this: Email used to sit on desktop PCs downloaded via POP3. Now its all in the cloud. And its so massive, the thought of downloading it all to a local drive is insane. And anyway, how do you secure it? How to you search it? So we yielded sovereignty to Google. Google is the...

Some Neat Apps in 2018

2018 is gone. Gone with the wind. Here's a few apps that I found very useful: Google Keep I discovered this one by accident. It keeps your notes. That's not very interesting except it stores them in one repository on the cloud no matter whether you enter the notes on your phone or via web. Very very useful after keeping notes on my phone and losing them when the phone crashed and had to be factory-reset. You can install as an app from the Google Play Store . I presume an IOS version exists as well. 4K Downloader This one was so useful, I paid some $$ for it. It downloads Youtube videos unattended and you can set the quality and the download folder. It even detects if your video link belong to a playlist and downloads the entire playlist. I even downloads new videos automatically if you subscribe to the channel. And it can do 8k. And its on IOS and Linux And it can download from other video sites And more. There is a free version that works fine as long as yo...

Importing Contacts into Google Email and Android Phone via .CSV File

Adding a large number of contacts to an Android device can be quite a challenge. Here's one way to reduce the pain. First, on the device, add a Google email account. Follow the instructions here . Second, prepare a spreadsheet that conforms to the Google templates here (big) and here (small). The small one has minimal fields hence less of a headache to fill up. The bigger is the full scale template with all the bells and whistles you could wish for and more.... Do not change the spellings of the column headings in any way. Enter the names, groups and phone numbers of the contacts and save as a .csv file (any spreadsheet program worth its salt can allow you to do that including Excel, LibreOffice Calc etc.). Open the site https://contacts.google.com/ in a browser. Select Import on left hand panel as shown below: You will be prompted to select the file containing contacts (the spreadsheet you just prepared) and the Import Contacts label (create a ...

How to Use CSS Within SVG Embeded in HTML

There are six ways of embedding SVG in HTML . However, not all are equal neither are they well-behaved. In this article the issue at hand is how to style embedded SVG with an external style sheet. The three components of this set up include: 1. The SVG file 2. The HTML file 3. The CSS file Using <object> to embed SVG This is quite easy. The <object> code within the HTML file will look like this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> </head> <body> <object type="image/svg+xml" data="test1.svg"/> </body> </html> SVG A simple SVG [ test1.svg ] is shown below: <?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="style.css"?> <svg width="400" height="300" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1"> <rect height="100" width="100" id="nrb1" /...

How to Recover Android 7 Icons

I lost my dailer. Hmm? But its still installed and active in the Settings > Apps menu. So where is it? Android 7 is too smart for its own good. Try searching the alternative vertical swipe home menu. How do I access this vertical menu? Have a look the image below. The button surrounded by a red square changes from horizontal swipe home screen to vertical swipe. While in vertical mode, the blue bar on the top right allows you to rapidly scroll up and down the list of apps. To return to horizontal mode, use the Back button circled in red. If you scroll in vertical mode and find your icon, move it back to original position by pressing for a second or two, drag it into the desired position then release it. Cheers. Happy mobing. The Messiah is coming. See proof here .

How to Set Up Youtube for Live Streaming - Part II [Multicamera Live-Streaming Events]

In order to live-stream with multiple cameras with Youtube live, you need to set up at least one event . Then add cameras to this event. Each camera is associated with a stream . A stream consists of the address of the streaming server and the stream name/key as we saw in setting up smartphones for streaming and setting up Youtube for simple live streaming . Once the events, streams and cameras are set up, you switch to the Live Control Room from where you can preview the event, monitor the live stream through video and statistics (analytics) and turn off streaming. The Control Room interface includes an indication of stream health - whether the server is receiving data from you encoder and at what speed. The steps involved in setting up for multi-camera streaming are as follows: 1. Sign in to a verified Youtube account . Verification requires that you have observed the rules for Youtube accounts and have not infringed on copyright in the la...