SSH tunnel for VNC

If you were on a linux machine, it would be as simple as

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 root@192.168.7.119

Just kidding, don’t login as root, it is all just for tunneling, replace root and the IP of my super top secret server with something suitable

On windows, the most popular SSH client is putty, and to do that in putty, follow the following steps

Open putty, then enter the IP address or hostname of the remote machine

Mobile Development

This is just a summary of the tools you may or may not use for mobile development

Cross Platform

  • Dart-Flutter
  • React Native
  • Kotlin Multiplatform (& compose-multiplatform ;))
  • Ionic
  • .NET MAUI, (Successor to Xamarin.Forms), develop in C#
  • NativeScript: Build mobile apps with Angular, Vue.js, etc !

Android

  • Android Studio
    Kotlin / Java
  • Jetpack Compose : composable functions – define your app’s UI programmatically

iOS

  • Xcode

My flutter notes

This is an unstable post, I add comments here, then move them to their final destination on a separate post, posts are listed on the Dart/Flutter page, so it is completely normal for this post to be empty most of the time !

The reason I am interested in flutter is that it may just be the best option to accompany my RUST programs and fit them with relatively efficient front ends ! again, potentially the best fit FOR ME AND MY RUST PROJECT IDEAS

VSCODE on Android and iOS

Final Result

Well, Yes, my own VSCODE with all my plugins etc… basically the same instance that runs on my computer on an Android or iOS device BROWSER ! I put this here at the beginning so that if this is not what you need, you don’t have to waste your time, but before you move on, think about it as an alternative since it works remotely too 😉 , if not, then move on… don’t waste your time here

What for

For my back pain, I want to be able to change my setting every few hours, and this enables me (With the help of a wireless mouse and keyboard” to use my android TV box, my ipad, and other screens around the house to keep working

Summary

So, I will get to the details, but in summary, you can install Visual Studio Code Server on the same machine that has your Visual Studio Code installed, then you open your VSCODE with a browser

It turned out that someone has already done this tutorial (Here), but i am keeping this post so that you can see the summary before you have to se the video

stackoverflow not opening in firefox

For some reason still unknown to me, stack overflow was not opening on my machine !

Not sure if the issue is cloudflare which seems to relevant to stackoverflow

It started opening when i went into settings (about:config), then disabled network.http.http3.enable then opened the website, then re-enabled it, still waiting for it to stop working again for further investigation, but for now, it is working just fine

LineageOS for my J500H phone

This phone is so old and low on storage space, that if it is left to connect to the internet, the storage fills up completely before you get the chance to disable updates !

I have moved to external storage before, but as you might expect, this would have been a great solution if i had slightly more space on the device itself (Original post here)

For development purposes, I would like this phone to have as low an android version as possible, and the lowest android version of LiniageOS itself is 6 (Marshmallow)

CyanogenMod, the name of LiniageOS before Nougat, but it overlaps with LiniageOS at Android version 6, although Android 5 on the phone would have been more useful for my development endeavors, I decided to go with Android 6 anyways. Which happens to be LiniageOS 13.

The best file managers for Android

There is no shortage of file managers for android, both free and paid

The popular Paid file managers are

  • MiXplorer = Paid, no trial, plugins to add functionality
  • Solid Explorer = 14 Day trial, during trial, you get ads (Root explorer, archiver, Chromecast, File categorization) + Local + FTP, LAN, sFTP, WebDav, NextCloud, etc…..
  • File Commander = 7 Day Trial, during trial there are ads, FTP, LAN, cloud providers, etc…

Free and open source

  • Material Files = Simple file manager, but well done in terms of design and good android development practices, Open source mostly written in kotlin (Github =>)
  • Amaze File Manager = Simple material design file manager, written in both Java and Kotlin (Github =>)
  • NextCloud Android client = Works with the self hosted Next Cloud (But so do unofficial managers) (Github =>)

Free but not open source

  • File Manager by Xiaomi = Has network options (LAN, FTP)
  • Google Files = Basic, supports Google Drive and OneDrive, google drive launches the drive app

HP officejet 7740 Linux drivers

For this printer to work, you will need to install HPLIP

before you do, I would recommend you install the following packages

sudo apt install libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk3-module
sudo apt install python3-numpy
sudo apt install python3-scipy
sudo apt install python3-pypdf2
sudo apt install python3-opencv
sudo apt install ocrmypdf
sudo apt install python3-skimage
sudo apt-get install libleptonica-dev
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
sudo apt-get install libtesseract-dev
sudo apt-get install qpdf
sudo apt install policykit

once done, run the file ./hplip-3.24.4.run

DVD VOB files to MP4 with FFMPEG

Let us start by analyzing our input files and what we expect to find

  • A video stream, the obvious
  • Audio streams for different languages
  • Audio streams that should play together
  • dvd_subtitle

dvd_subtitle

Let us start with the subtitles, the encoder/decoder for dvd_subtitle stream is either dvdsub or dvbsub.

According to documentation, This codec decodes the bitmap subtitles used in DVDs; the same subtitles can also be found in VobSub file pairs and in some Matroska files.

Metroska uses VobSub, vobsub is basically the same as the stream in DVD but in a file with the extension “*.sub”.

So, I have a stream with “dvd_subtitle” on stream 0:3, to extract, I will probably use a command such as

Extracting the subtitle files

ffmpeg -i input.VOB -c copy -map 0:3 subtitles.sub

Now, at this stage, if you want to convert them to srt for example (Or a text base subtitle system), you will need to use a tool that has OCR !! Such a tool is VobSub2SRT =>

Another method after extracting is using an online service such as this one (https://subtitletools.com/convert-to-srt-online) to turn subtitles into SRT