Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

Got Tech? Will Hack.

Mac: Camera not available

My Macbook Pro sometimes doesn’t detect it’s web camera when I’m trying to join a video call and it’s painful to have to reboot the machine to fix it. A simpler way (especially if you have root access to your machine) is to kill VDCAssistant from the command line.

sudo killall VDCAssistant

Once you’re done, restart the application that was attempting to use your web camera :)

Removing uTorrent ads

When BitTorrent bought over μTorrent, they promised users that all adverts would be optional. They have, however, made it harder and harder to hide the adverts including now a set of hidden options. Thankfully users have found how to access those hidden options.

Turn off ALL Ads/Featured Content/Bundle Crap in μtorrent/Bittorrent:

Options > Preferences > Advanced

Turn ALL settings to false:

  • bt.enable_pulse
  • distributed_share.enable
  • gui.show_notorrents_node
  • offers.left_rail_offer_enabled
  • gui.show_plus_upsell
  • offers.content_offer_autoexec
  • offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled
  • offers.featured_content_badge_enabled
  • offers.featured_content_notifications_enabled
  • offers.featured_content_rss_enabled

Options > Preferences > Hold Shift+F2 while clicking Advanced (Hidden fields)

Turn ALL settings to false:

  • gui.show_gate_notify
  • gui.show_plus_av_upsell
  • gui.show_plus_conv_upsell
  • gui.show_plus_upsell_nodes

Source: Forum

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Mass renaming file extensions with PowerShell

PowerShell is one of Windows’ most underused tools in my opinion. In many cases it rivals if not betters support that bash scripts provide.

If you want to remove the extension of a file (say removing ‘!ut’ from file names), it’s a simple one line command.

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Mass downloading Google Drive Files

Has anyone ever shared with you hundreds of Google Drive files instead of sharing the directory? It happened to me today and I noticed Gmail clips the HTML part of the message at 102 KB. Usually Gmail provides a way to download all attachments (Google Drive or otherwise) or the ability to save them on your Google Drive from where you can mass download them. If the email is clipped, you can only save a subset of these files into your Google Drive so no mass downloads. Bummer.

It’s simple enough to fix with some Scala magic. First you should

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IDEA IntelliJ 14 is out

Yes, you heard that right! I just got notification from the asset management team at ThoughtWorks that IDEA IntelliJ 14 is out and we get free upgrades (since we have an upgrade subscription). If you haven’t seen the features already, you should check it out! It looks like an upgrade worth making, especially since it’s free ;)

So go ahead and upgrade now!

Use Spotify internationally (again)

If you don’t mind using Spotify in a browser, you can use Hola Better Internet.

Admittedly, it’s not as cool as using the Spotify client on desktop but it’s certainly a lot simpler (and quicker) than managing proxy settings yourself ;)

ExpandRegion on Sublime Text

Once you get used to the JetBrains suite of IDEs pressing Cmd/Ctrl+W for expanding selection becomes second nature. This leads to closing tabs on most applications such as text editors which is of little consequence since you can train yourself to use a different short cut.

My favourite text editor (Sublime Text) does not have this feature built in but it seems I’m not the only one who misses the expand region feature. Go grab your copy of ExpandRegion by Aron Woost from GitHub with full instructions on how to install on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Developers beware of OS X Yosemite

It’s been a bit over 24 hours of using OS X Yosemite and I’m liking all the UI sugar it’s added. So far, my regular applications work fine after the upgrade but the IDEA based IDE set (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine etc.) seem to have a problem which has been also reported by IDEA.

Tread lightly. You have been warned!

Desktoppr Downloader v1.0

I recently found Desktoppr, a service which has an insane number of curated wallpapers. What’s even better is that they come with an easy to consume API.

To fulfil my insatiable need for good high resolution wallpapers, I wrote a script to go through the thousands of pages of images they have, find the ones that are “right for my desktop” and download them. I define “right for my desktop” as being at least the same resolution as mine and if higher then the same aspect ratio. If your’s is the same, feel free to use this script

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