How to sync thunderbird with icloud calendar

If you're one of those Apple users who want to use the open source Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, you might feel that the calendar is one thing you're missing.  There are two general methods to sync the calendar to Thunderbird.

One is something which is widely popular and involves subscribing to a read-only view the iCloud calendar and the other is a bit involved but gives you Read-Write access to the calendar. iCloud calendar supports the IETF standard known as CalDAV which is all really nice but it doesn't provide users an easy access to it's URL, which can then be added to Thunderbird.

Start off by creating a new app (or skip if you already have one) from this URL - https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage

Then click on: App-Specific Passwords

Share mouse keyboard between Mac and Windows without KVM

Here's a problem that really got me flustered for some time. I was using a Mac OSX Ventura (13.x) from work and also a personal Windows 11 but I wanted to use them at the same time - when I'm taking a break from work - for example. However I wasn't aware of how to get my input streamed to both of them and switch between then whenever I like. After a lot of research I was able to find something that worked and that was free and open source!

I could have bought a KVM switch, but why spend money when technology and FOSS can solve my problem.

share keyboard mouse across 2 or more laptops

 In my last work place - ClearedIn, I had a strange problem of having too many laptops. Initially I started off working on a beautiful Acer Laptop (Aspire 5) with Windows 10 installed but then soon realized the laptop is of no use when doing a lot of computation tasks, i.e., joining a video call on teams when chatting on slack and simultaneously working on code. So I got another laptop - hp Pavilion this time, which was way better than the Acer one. However now I had a problem, I had 2 laptops and I wanted to use both at the same time.

I was using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. It was a pretty messy situation, but I did feel very important! Now when I had to take a break on my personal laptop, which is by the way a Lenovo Thinkpad p52 running Windows, I had another set of keyboard and mouse. Now don't forget the monitors too. I was in a mess.

Screenshot editor cum manager in windows 10

The default screenshot tool in Windows 10 is a lot better than the older ones for sure, but it doesn't really provide the kind of usability that other 3rd party screen shot editors provide.

Today, I'm sharing my favorite tool for screenshot management in Windows 10 and it's free to use and easy to use: GreenShot

Here's some of the reasons why I love this tool so much.

Software jobs in Kolkata West Bengal

 A few days I witnessed the re-election of the local state government in my country. The fight was as usual brutal and crass, with the main opponents being the currently ruling party, headed by the nation's only woman chief minister of a state, against the party that is in power at the national level, headed by a new entrant leader with a promise of change and development. The state has been marred with accusations of not being able to provide infrastructure to facilitate jobs for the youth for a lot of years now. I, being a computer software engineer, have faced similar issues as well. I have had to travel cross country to get a job that I thought I deserved doing. Scarcity of Software jobs is a reality to me in this state of West-Bengal and for many others who have migrated outside the state even though they would rather stay at home.

Post-COVID-19,  the situation has changed and I'm at my home state, working from home which is incidentally, a luxury that few can afford in these testing times, outside of the IT-sector. I'm part of a new young start-up, ClearedIn, where we're trying to tackle online spammers and make the web a safer place. It's been more than a year I'm working from home, at Howrah (a town near the major city Kolkata), which is where my roots are from. For the past few years I've been trying to find a job near my home town, and I've never been successful but it seems like from those failures, I've learned quite a bit. This post is dedicated to those who are still trying and I'd like to list out companies that hire IT professionals.

In completely random order here some that I have compiled.

Microsoft Windows Linux

Linux on Windows

It's 2021 and we've seen the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic.. and now I discovered Windows Sub-system for Linux, yes, Windows support for Linux. Guess it took a global pandemic for Microsoft to get Linux run on Windows!

Well, it's not really Linux, and for purists, this is more of an emulation, kind of like docker, but for Windows. However it feels fast and almost native. Good enough to support most user-mode programming languages out there. The support started from Windows 10 version 20262, so to get started, install Windows 10 and keep upgrading until this version is reached.

The Techgig C Skill Test

I used to consider myself to be pretty good in C, so I decided to try out the world's biggest programming contest platform, TechGiG (Look here: https://www.techgig.com), or so they claim to be. I wonder why I hadn't dabbled in this platform all this years since the platform seems to be existing for quite some time now. I do remember some 5-6 years ago I had dabbled a bit in the website and then stopped, I wonder why, can't really recall.

So I decided to give it a spin. I decided to try out the TechGig Skill test. Here's what I found while attempting the test.

There were 25 questions and I got 6 wrong and 19 correct. I wonder which ones I got wrong. Also considering some multiple choice answers didn't really answer the question. Also, I really wonder what a Java Question was doing in a C Skill test! Take a look:

Being the Java n00b, I might have messed that up. Moving on to one of the brilliant CHTML Questions in recent times.

That's an amazing blend of HTML and C. Amazing HTML coding skills are the feature of the tests in TechGig, since this sort of goof-up is pretty common.

Let's move on to the wrong answers now. I got this wrong apparently:

Well, I do pride myself in such questions, but seems like I have forgotten how printf handles the parse string! Well, what does ideone think?

Dear! O Dear! Ideone might have got it wrong too! Wait, maybe TechGig was wrong? Dare I say that!

Let's move to the next incorrect answer by me. Here we go:

Well, well, well. Seems like I've forgotten the basics of pointers! :( What does ideone think then ?

I think I've caught on by this point. I'm quite a C n00b also. Shall we see the next incorrect answer by me ?

This was quite tricky, so it's possible I might have messed up here. But really ?

By this point I'm convinced that the compiler used by ideone is perhaps broken. Or maybe it's TechGig that sucks?

I'll leave it to you, the reader to figure that out.

Open numbers in whatsapp without saving as contact

Whatsapp Number Opener

Say you want to make a whatsapp conversation with someone for temporary purposes but in order to do that you need to add that person as a contact first. Now adding someone as a contact is by itself a security risk as you can potentially expose your display picture and status to that person. If this is someone with whom you are involved in a transaction, then you'd not want to save this contact just for one time communication. Well, then what is the solution? How do you text this person without saving their number first?

Clipboard Manager for Windows - Ditto

After my post on Clipboard Management here, which was basically clipboard managers on Linux and Unix-ly operating systems, here's one on Windows.

This cheeky sounding software is named Ditto and is a blessing for all Windows Users.

 Here's a screenshot:

So what this does, is keep track of your last copied items! Works with images as well.

Download ditto from here or from the Ditto Project page: https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

Enjoy!

ConEmu - A better windows command prompt

So this is a little article and a software review for one of my indispensable Windows Utilities, that is still relevant in the Windows 10 world - ConEmu. The terminal emulator, which is a large improvement over the Windows CMD, is a must have utility for anyone working on (or stuck on) any of the Microsoft Windows based operating systems. Whats even better, is that, this is Open Source.

So if you are looking for an alternate command prompt, take a look here:

 

Cool features include, multiple tabs, configurable history and of course the animation when it opens or closes!

For more screenshots go here. 

To download a binary go to the website: https://conemu.github.io/en/Downloads.html

Fast download with Golang

Hey all, people keep saying about how great the concurrency is in golang. To be honest, I am pretty much a novice in this.

So just wrote a download accelerator in golang using it's much awesome parallel feature, the source of which can be found here: https://github.com/rghose/go-parallel-downloader

Here are a few results:

URL Downloaded	Time taken by wget	Time taken by Golang
http://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.2.5.1/macosx/vlc-2.2.5.1.dmg	1m3.375s	0m26.609s

This was with GOMAXPROCS=2, threads = 5  with Chunk Size = 10 KB

So well, the chunk size of download did make a lot of difference, since the number of connections to download the thing would decrease, too many connections does not help in speed up

ADB Disable bluetooth on non-rooted devices

Here's a script to disable Bluetooth from non-rooted devices:

adb shell <<__eof
  input keyevent KEYCODE_WAKEUP;
  wm dismiss-keyguard;
  am start -a android.bluetooth.adapter.action.REQUEST_DISABLE;
  is_open=`dumpsys window windows | grep -E 'mCurrentFocus|mFocusedApp' | grep 'com.android.settings/com.android.settings.bluetooth.RequestPermissionHelperActivity'|wc -l`
  if [ $is_open = 0 ]; then exit; fi
  sleep 1;
  input keyevent KEYCODE_DPAD_RIGHT;
  input keyevent KEYCODE_DPAD_RIGHT;
  input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER;
  exit;
__EOF

No warranties!

Install mp4box on centos

Google behaved rather strangely today when I wanted to see how to install "Mp4Box". Yum search gave naught, so I decided to google this. On the hindsight maybe I needed better yum search fu for this.

As I was searching through the ways of installing MP4Box on Fedora / Centos I came up with installation instructions that asked me to build the application from source. Even the official website:  https://gpac.wp.imt.fr/mp4box/ provides no explanation on how to do it. They just have the official windows, debian and ios installers. It also offers an explanation to build from source on other linux-es.

While all this confusion is going round, the dude who had the requirement to simple and install gpac, since that is the name of the project! Well, guess what, it worked. So, here's how you install MP4Box on Fedora or CentOS :

Clash of Clans on laptop computer

Okay this seems to be a click-bait but really not. Android Developers would know how painful it is to get the default android emulator up and running, not considering the pain that eventually follows when the actual application begins to run. It takes ages for the emulator to run even in a decent configuration PC or MacBook.

Now, I wasn't sure this could be done until my sister brought up the topic. She plays Clash of Clans on her laptop! Wow!

So, I decided to google. I knew about genymotion but it's a paid service, and then here's one emulator which actually worked for me on Mac OSX - BlueStacks.

Check this out:

Pretty cool huh!?

Selenium ChromeDriver Install Script

Hello Folks,

As I was trying to instruct someone how to install Selenium Webdriver on OSX, I realised that there were no good scripts to automate this task. There were instructions, sure, but none of the were a copy and paste solution. Not that I encourage copy-paste, I found this rather inconvenient though.

So here's a script install selenium chromedriver for any unix osx or windows computers (assuming cygwin) -

In case, the github plugin did not work the URL is here:

https://gist.github.com/rghose/106ae71639c6f9ce9076a260a5614b94

Enjoy!

Showing Images on the terminal

So I just found a post on Hacker News where someone installed FreeBSD on their Mac, apparently because of this cool terminal thingy called Terminology. It can apparently show images on the terminal, using something called the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries), which are basically a  set of graphics libraries on the Enlightenment Window Manager. Now being the lazy dude I am, I decided I am not going to spend hacking UEFI today, rather why not spend hacking iTerm instead? I know iTerm shows me beer emoji when I do brew installs.

So surely, there must be some way of showing images right?

Well here we go:

Right on! Here's the amazing script which does this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnachman/iTerm2/master/tests/imgcat

Happy Hacking!

One line youtube video downloader

Okay, so this might be illegal in certain places. I just decided to try this out for fun, and here we have it, download youtube videos with 1 line of shell script (and some perl)

The script looks like this:

curl -H 'Upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' -H 'Cache-control: max-age=0' -H 'Accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8,bn;q=0.6' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36' "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II3L1noJlYQ" | gunzip | egrep -o 'https%3A%2F%2F[^\.]*\.googlevideo.com%2F[^,\]*' | perl -pe 's/\%(\w\w)/chr hex $1/ge' | head -n1  | xargs wget -O out.video

One line.

Get it here:

https://github.com/rghose/youtube-downloader

Free SQL Query tool for SQL Server

I found this rather nifty tool: dBeaver which is pretty awesome for database queries, an alternative to RazorSql which the folks at my company used. Now, RazorSQL is not free and requires a license after the trial period ends, so I kept searching for an alternative which works. After fiddling around with thing like Squirrel and the likes, dBeaver impressed me majorly.

The tool is Eclipse based, so a bit slow to startup but apart from that, the software kicks ass!

Here's a few screenshots:

Hope you find this useful :)

Omniauth OpenAM Gem

Hello people, here's presenting a brand new gem!

For folks, who think they hit a jackpot, think ruby. Yeah, well, this is an omniauth gem for Ruby on Rails people for openam. There has been an outstanding request for this gem on the requests page and here it is:

https://github.com/rghose/omniauth-openam

You can get the full list of omniauth gems here:

https://github.com/intridea/omniauth/wiki/List-of-Strategies

For those who are still confused, omniauth is one of the marvels of ruby which provides options for authentication options to devise based on external providers. I am still a newbie here, so pardon me please.

OpenAM database connectivity with MySql

This post comes after a long time. I had been really stuck with my project in creating a Single Sign On implementation. I was working with an amazing piece of software, OpenAM, formerly OpenSSO, currently maintained by the Forgerock community. 

My setup: I used Tomcat with Mysql and OpenAM 11.0.0 running on Centos

So first things first, install mysql-connector-java for your operating system and you should get a jar file. Here is what I got on my box:

# rpm -ql mysql-connector-java | grep jar
/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java-5.1.17.jar
/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar

Now copy this to your tomcat installation directory. At "$CATALINA_HOME/lib" and restart tomcat.