Tag: Utilities

There’s life without Google. Or iCloud. Or Facebook.

2014-03-08 rolfje 5 Comments

Regular readers of this blog already know that I am not using dropbox, and I was an Evernote user, but recently decided it became to dangerous and replaced it with my own scripts. I had an interesting discussion on Twitter which made me decide to show you how I run my digital life without the help of Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Whatsapp or iCloud, and still be able to have all the functionality these services offer.

The search was hard and sometimes I need to reconsider some of the choices, but the last few years the selection of products was very stable and the setup has worked flawlessly. Searching for a secure replacement for Whatsapp or Google? It’s in here.

Software

From the Finder to the Shell (and back)

2013-12-20 rolfje No Comments

A quick tip for OSX users out there who frequently need to open a Terminal window for the current location in the finder, or the other way around:

Go2Shell and Back

Install the free application from the App Store: Go2Shell. It will give you an icon on the toolbar of your Finder, and pressing it will open a Terminal window and automatically change it’s directory to match the Finder’s location.

The other way around is easier; you can already do that on any Mac. Simply type “open .” (that’s the word “open”, followed by a space and a period). This command will open a Finder window for the directory location your Terminal window is in.

Bonus tip: Also check the “open -t [filename]” command, it will open your system’s default text editor with the given file.

Apple, Software

Anonimatron: Quick Start

2013-11-032026-05-07 rolfje 18 Comments

After reading my last blogpost on Anonimatron, you must have asked yourself “Great, but how do I actually use Anonimatron to de-personalize my database”? I tried my best to make basic Anonimatron configuration as self-explanatory as possible, just start it without any command line arguments and it will tell you.

Less adventurous or in a big hurry? This blogpost will show how simple it is to install and configure Anonimatron on an example MySQL database.

Read More “Anonimatron: Quick Start” »

Software

Anonimatron: Overview

2013-10-31 rolfje No Comments

In every software project, there comes a time where a bug pops up, nobody knows how to reproduce it, and somebody says “I know, let’s test this against a copy of the production database”. Even with the best intentions, once production data leaves the production machine with all its safeguards it becomes really hard to do access control on that data.

Most of the time, it’s not even needed to have that data. Developers just need a data set which resembles the production scenario close enough. Some brave souls have mixed succes with data generators, but those generators usually are tedious to maintain and die a slow death under the pressure of the daily grind.

In some ambitious projects automated integration testcases are built on top of the data which was inserted by the data generators. As the generators die, so die the tests. If you recognize this pattern, Anonimatron might be the answer for you.

Read More “Anonimatron: Overview” »

Software

Script: Text-to-NATO-spelling

2013-05-27 rolfje No Comments

In my morse training adventure on lcwo.net, I hit a slight bump in the road. At Koch lesson 33 (of 40 lessons total), I can’t seem to copy with 90% accuracy, which is the criterea for moving to the next lesson. See my downward trend here. It is partly because of gradually speeding up the Farnsworth timing from 10wpm to 12wpm so I can be on 20wpm at lesson 40. It is also because of shorter, less focussed daily training sessions, I must confess.

I experimented a bit, and it seems I can recognize characters easily at 37wpm, but I can’t form the words and recognize letters at the same time. More accurately: I can’t seem to be able to remember 3 to 5 characters, form a word and listen to new characters at the same time.

Fun

Open letter to Keith Lang about Skitch

2013-01-03 rolfje No Comments

Dear Keith,

I read your letter about Skitch and would like to respond to all that has happened from my end-user perspective.

I am a long-time Evernote user and fan. Evernote changed note taking by being truly searchable. I can confidently drop all the websites, receipts, todos and ideas in there, and clear my mind of the “I must remember that” burden. The OCR of Evernote works beautifully on photos of whiteboards, making even my whiteboard notes searchable.

In 2010, I discovered Skitch. The simplicity and razor sharp focus on anotating a screencapture and share the anotated image by dragging it anywhere was sheer brilliance. My daily work includes making annotated screenhots and mailing them to team members to discuss improvements. Skitch changed this ugly capture-save-edit-save-attach-send cycle to pure poetry in motion. Dragging images into Evernote even made my screenshots searchable. It instantly became second nature and my go-to image tool.

Apple

Gmail: Save an email to disk

2011-10-18 rolfje 15 Comments

Want to save a single email from gmail to disk, in a readable format for Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail? Here’s how:

Open your browser and log into your gmail account.
Open the email you want to save.
On the top-right, there is a little triangle next to the “Reply” button. Click that, and select “Show Original”.
The original, raw email opens in a new window or tab.
Right-click on this new window, and select “Save as…”.
When saving the file, make sure the extension of the filename is “eml“. So for example “MyEmail.eml”.

All done. Now you dan open the file in Thunderbird, Outlook or whatever email viewer you have out there and see the original mail, in all it’s marked-up glory.

Software

Fixing Photo Creation Dates

2011-08-15 rolfje 2 Comments

You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching date/times. Now what?

It turns out that there is actually a pretty simple trick to solve this, and you don’t even haven to install exiftool or do funny command line voodo. If you have iPhoto and a mouse, here’s what you do:

Apple

Changing the Order of your UnitTests

2011-04-01 rolfje No Comments

A few months ago we had a problem where Eclipse could not automatically run all jUnit unit tests in a package if that package references a class called “enum”, which is a reserved word in Java 1.6. I’ll spare you the details, but we were forced to create a TestSuite. Normally we avoid this construction because it’s easy to create a new unit test and forget to add it to the correct TestSuit. So as a workaround we wrote some code which could build and return a TestSuite dynamically. Right-click in eclipse, select “Run as Unittest”, sit back and enjoy.

Lately this piece of code came in handy while testing another application, which required the removal of data from a database. Yes I know, Unittests should maybe not depend on databases because it leans towards integration testing, but here we are, and I need to solve it. I used the old TestSuite code and changed it so that the TestCase I needed to run first was singled out, while still maintaining the functionality of auto-detecting testcases in the source folder.

Software

Anonimatron featured on Softpedia

2010-09-26 rolfje 1 Comment

As you may know I started working on a little tool to anonymize databases. Nothing fancy, just a Java tool that uses jdbc to replace live data with fake generated data which still looks representative enough to do testing and make believable screenshots. Oh and did I mention that it is 100% free of charge? You can get the latest version from SourceForge.net.

I recently received an email from Softpedia that Anonimatron has been added to their catalog. Their email states:

“anonimatron” has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components. We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future.

Anonimatron is written in Java and will ron on Linux, OSX and Windows machines. The current version is 1.3, and it should be considered “beta” at this point.

Let me know what you think!

Software