Experience - Inspire

Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Saturday, August 01, 2020

SCRCPY - No Frills Tool for Android Screen Mirroring

If you are Android user and wanted to Mirror your mobile or tablet screen on your laptop for presentations or want to control your phone from your computer without having to switch between the devices every now and then SCRCPY is the tool for you. It is OpenSource, free and easy to setup. Works out of the box once you enable Developer Options and Switch on USB Debugging on your Android Device.

Once it is setup, you can control your device from your computer using Keyboard and Mouse, make use of the larger screen real estate of your computer instead of your tiny mobile device screen. You can check your SMS, notifications, open your favorite apps, play games etc all from your computer. Best part - it works on Windows, Linux and MacOS

Now lets get to work.

First download SCRCPY that is suitable to your OS from the Github page link below

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

It would download a Zip file that you can unzip to a location of your choice.

Enable USB Debugging on your Device

1. Make sure your device is running on Android 5.0 or higher. You can get this information from About section in settings of your device

2. Enable Developer Options on your Device. To do this tap 7 to 8 times on the Build Number in the About section in the Settings screen

3. You will see that message will be displayed saying Developer Options have been enabled on your device

4. Now Return to the main Settings page and select Developer Options and scroll down to find USB Debugging and enable it.

Now Connect your device to your computer using a USB cable and in couple of seconds you would see a prompt on your phone to accept the fingerprint of the Computer, select allow this computer and click 'OK'

Got to SCRCPY folder and launch scrcpy-noconsole with Admin Privilege, on Windows you can right click and select run as administrator, on Linux and Mac OS you can launch it as super user from terminal. If everything worked as expected it would show up your mobile screen on your computer

1. Use your Mouse right click to wake your device.
2. Use left click to interact with your device.
3. Use Ctrl+R on keyboard to Rotate the screen
4. You can also Use Ctrl+P to Wake your device.

By default the mirroring function would keep the actual screen device active. Use Ctrl+O to Poweroff

the device screen, however, SCRCPY window would be still available for use

You can now launch your favorite apps on your phone without even touching your phone all from your computer with all the convenience of Keyboard and Mouse.

To take it to next level you can actually configure SCRCPY to work on Wifi so that you can get rid of the USB cable between your device and computer. For this follow below steps.

Make sure your Android Device and Computer are connected to the same WiFi network.

Find out the IP address of your Android Device from WiFi advanced settings

Connect your Android Device to your computer using the USB cable.

Open Command prompt in admin mode, navigate to SCRCPY folder and run below two command

adb tcpip 5555

adb connect DEVICE_IP:5555 (Replace DEVICE_IP with IP address your Android Device)

Disconnect cable from the device and launch scrcpy-noconsole

Now you can mirror your phone to your computer without any cable. Isn't it cool.

You can play games, watch OTT content from Apps that cannot be accessed on your computer, dial your contacts or receive calls, send and read SMS all without touching your mobile device or while it is charging in other room.

Reference:

https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb#wireless
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuTdxa-w1js

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Info on Undersea cables that power Internet

Here is an animated map from Business Insider that shows all the Undersea Cables that power the global internet

It is more than 150 years since first undersea cable was laid

Map shows all the 300 cables stretching 8.8 Kilometres or 550,000 miles, equivalent distance of circling Earth 22 times that transmit 99% of total internet traffic on the Globe

Longest cable being 38,624 Kilometres or 24,000 miles from Germany to Korea with 39 landing points

Watch how these cables are laid in below video

Below video shows how are these cables are repaired

Thursday, April 21, 2016

What is USB Type C

Here is a nice video that explains what is USB Type C that is being increasingly seen in most of the new devices these days

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Raspberry PI and CherryMusic - Web Music Server

CherryMusic is a open source music streaming server that can play your personal music collection on almost any device with a web browser. It is written in python and is very light weight.

CherryMusic can be installed on Raspberry PI to create a personal web based music station that can be used on any device of our choice and be central repository of all the music you like.

So, below is the list of what we need to build our own personal music streaming server

1. Raspberry PI

2. PiBang Linux Server (Any Linux distro will do, I prefer Pi Bang based on Raspbian)

3. CherryMusic – Download it from here

Burn PiBang Server to SD card and boot your RPi.

Update Linux on RPI and install prerequisites for CherryMusic Server

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get install -y imagemagick vorbis-tools lame flac python-mutagen

Use wget and download the latest CherryMusic Master branch from GitHub and unzip the master.zip

Make a folder on your RPi and upload your music collection. I have it on /music folder

mkdir /music

now cd to unzipped CherryMusic folder and run below command to setup CherryMusic

python cherrymusic --setup --port 8080

It will ask to download cherrypy, key in y and press enter to continue with installation

Now point your browser to http://rpi-ipaddress and you will be presented with the below setup screen.

Key in /music/ (or any other folder that has your music collection) in the Media base directory, leave the rest as defaults and click on Save Configuration and start CherryMusic

Wait for the Setup to complete, it would take few seconds

Once the setup is complete you will be greeted with the below login screen.

I have admin as default username and password. Login and enjoy your music on all your devices. You can even port forward or NAT your RPi and listen to your collection anywhere as long as you are connected to internet.

I was able to play music simultaneously on 4 different devices on my home wifi with no issue

1. Windows 8.1

2. Blackberry

3. Android

4. Acer Iconia Tablet

Reference-

1. http://www.fomori.org/cherrymusic/Setup%20Guide.html

2. https://github.com/devsnd/cherrymusic/tree/master

3. http://raspberrypihelp.net/tutorials/44-raspberry-pi-cherrymusic-music-streaming

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Ubuntu for Phone – Future OS to rule them all

Mark Richard Shuttleworth, entrepreneur, founder of Canonical Ubuntu, the famous Open Source Linux Distribution and second self funded space tourist and first from Africa has recently announced Ubuntu for Phone, with a vision of building ONE OS to run on all devices ranging from Smartphone, PCs, Televisions, Tablets to super computers and cloud.

As per the announcement by Mark, phones based on Ubuntu for Phone should be available in the market somewhere during last quarter of 2013 or first quarter of 2014

Slipstream XenServer Supplemental Packs

Citrix recently released new version of XenServer a Hypervisor based on Xen, originally a research project at the University of Cambridge. With the new XenServer 6.1 we get live Storage XenMotion (Not Available in Free Edition) to migrate VMs between Hosts and Pools without shared Storage. With this release we also get new version of System Centre Integration Suite and Performance Monitoring supplemental pack.

It is necessary that we update these supplemental packs when ever we update XenServer. In general we provide Install Media of the supplemental packs when asked for while installing XenServer or by using xe-install-supplemental-pack command.

The easy way is to slipstream the supplemental packs to the XenServer Install media and perform the update or installation. Below are simple steps to slipstream XenServer install media with supplemental packs.

1. Copy or extract all files from XenServer install media to a folder. Mine is XenServer6.1

2. Create one folder for each supplemental pack inside above folder. In my case I am using Integration suite and Performance monitoring supplemental packs and created two folders named packages.integration-suite and packages.perf-monitoring following Citrix’s naming convention for XenServer folders as shown in below screenshot.

3. Copy or extract all the files of supplemental packs to respective folders created above.

How do we heal medicine ? Well Use Checklists

Here is a very interesting TED talk by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Surgeon and Journalist, saying

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try”

He says Medicine has become very complex today and we need pit crews with checklists as in other fields of technology to make it better.

Have patience and listen to this 19 Mins talk :)

Thank you for your time.

Useful Links:
More about Atul Gawande here at TED Profile
Atul Gawande’s Website - http://gawande.com/
At TED here

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

RHEL/CentOS on Hyper-V 2k8 R2 with LIC v3.2

Microsoft Officially supports RedHat, CentOS and SUSE Linux Distributions as VMs running on Hyper-V. Linux Integration Components (LIC) or Linux Integration Services are the software components released by Microsoft that need to be installed on Linux VMs to take full advantage of Hyper-V features.

Linux Integration Components are a set of drivers that enable synthetic device support in supported Linux virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V

These components when installed on Linux mainly provide below features

1. Drivers : Synthetic network controller (NIC), IDE and SCSI storage controllers support
2. Time sync : Clock inside the virtual machine will be in synch with the clock on the Host
3. Integrated Shutdown : Shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or SCVMM
4. Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support : Support up to 4 virtual processors Per VM
5. Heartbeat : Allows Host to detect if the virtual machine is running and responsive
6. Integrated Mouse Support : Seamless mouse integration when used with the Linux GUI

If Linux IC are not installed one might be presented with one or all of the below errors

Note: This post assumes that one has install CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 6.2 on HyperV and has mounted Linux IC v3.2.iso onto DVD Drive of VM. If not please follow link below this post for Picture guide of CentOS server minimal installation

The documentation available along with LIC v3.2 looks good, but, unfortunately when trying to install you will get an error similar to the below one

ls: cannot access kmod-hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory
ls: cannot access hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory RPM’s are missing

There is a simple work around to this by changing the working directory to the mount point of Linux IC drive and invoking ./install.sh script.

Below are the commands to run to install Linux IC and reboot, once prompted, as shown in the above screenshot

mount /dev/cdrom /media

cd /media

./install.sh

reboot

When VM is rebooted you will notice that there is no network connectivity to your VM. Follow steps below for configuring network connectivity

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Press i Key on keyboard and type the below lines

DEVICE="eth0"
ONBOOT="yes"
HWADDR=
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME="System eth0"

HWADDR is the MAC address of the NIC that can be found from settings menu of VM in Hyper-V (Below screenshot for your reference) and DHCP is the mode of getting IP Address

Now use below Key Combination to save the file and close

Esc

Shift + :

wq

Enter

Use the below commands to edit, Save and close one more file

vi /etc/sysconfig/network

Enter below text, save and close

NETWORKING=yes

Now Run ifup eth0 and you should be connected to network or else take a reboot.

With this our CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 6.2 can take full advantage of Hyper-V synthetic drivers and is ready for production :)

Useful Links:-

Click here for RedHat Official Site

Click here for CentOS Official Site

Click here for Scientific Linux Official Site

Here is the official download page of Linux Integration Components v3.2 for Hyper-V

Pictorial Walkthrough of installing CentOS 6.2 minimal on Hyper-V with LICv3.2

Thursday, March 22, 2012

I am sure you will watch this more than once

Simply Great, this is all what I can say about these people. My take - Think different, Dedicate Time, Plan, Practice, Work as a Team, Try your Best, Try new things when you become good at some one thing, at the same time explore ways of doing the same thing differently and you will always be the ONE out of crowd and be admired by a lot

Have Patience till 30th Second

:) Well that is what I always say :D

Source Here - Japan Tron Dance From Youtube

Friday, March 09, 2012

Interesting Info about Google’s Driverless Car

Here we have interesting info on Google’s Driverless Cars (Presently Experimental) which when available for public, can increase productivity of owners and safety during travel.

The Google’s Driverless Car is a project by Google to develop technology for driverless cars. Currently the project is being led by Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Below video is a talk of his at TED

Infographic below recently released by Aptus Insurance has few interesting effects of this car on people lives and economy (Click Image to enlarge)

Source

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Windows 8 Consumer Preview released

Much awaited Windows 8 (Beta) Consumer Preview has been released yesterday (29th March 2012) at Barcelona, Spain, MWC (Mobile World Congress) event. Below video of 8 Min 13 Seconds length gives a quick glance of what is new in this release.

Useful links

Click here for Windows 8 Keynote video and demo videos on Microsoft Newsroom page.

Note : Keynote video in the above link is of 90 Mins length

Windows 8 Home page here

A PDF product guide on Windows 8 from Microsoft is available here for download (~7MB)

Click here for Windows Experience Blog

Download latest Windows 8 ISO from here (~3.33 GB in Size for 64-bit) – Product key available on the download page below for ready reference needed during installation.

Windows 8 Beta Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

Follow this link here to create a bootable USB to install Windows 8

Note:-This is a beta release and not ready for production use. Many apps would work but few which are important and critical may fail. For me Cisco Anyconnect VPN failed to work :(

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Create Bootable USB to install Windows 7 or 8

There are many tools available on internet that help create a bootable USB/Flash drive to install Windows 7. But if you are running Windows 7 we can use built-in tools like diskpart to create a bootable USB drive without any third party tools.

All you need for this is a Windows 7 or 2008 R2 machine, a USB Flash drive with minimum of 4 GB capacity (Note that all data on this drive will be erased), Windows DVD and privilege to run command prompt in elevated mode.

Note:This post assumes you have only one physical hard disk on your machine and no other USB disks attached

First attach a USB flash drive to your system and if auto run kicks in close all related windows.

Fire up an elevated command prompt, invoke diskpart by typing diskpart at the command prompt and key in below commands one by one

list disk

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

list partition

select partition 1

active

format quick

assign letter=m

exit

This finishes the USB disk preparation. Now key in the below command to copy the installation files of Windows 7/8/2008/2008R2/Server 8 to the above USB disk. Replace X: in below command with path to Windows installation files on hard drive or DVD drive on your machine

xcopy X:\*.* /s/e/f M:\

When the last command finishes, a bootable USB disk with Windows installation files is ready

Enable PING Response on Win 7 with Firewall ON

If you are a person managing or using systems running Windows Operating Systems, you would know that starting from Windows XP, Microsoft has provided built in firewall and is by default enabled blocking ICMP response to PING. Though blocking PING response is considered a security best practice when connected to network, it is a general practice by many SysAdmins to disable Windows Firewall whenever a system is built, leaving it vulnerable with all ports open.

Today we will see how to enable ICMP response on Windows machines without disabling firewall.

From Command Line

On Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 run the following command to enable ICMP response without disabling the firewall

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv4-In)" new enable=yes

If you ever want to disable ICMP response run below command

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv4-In)" new enable=no

Refer screenshot below for output from both the commands

Launch VirtualBox VMs from Windows 7 Jumplist

VirtualBox is one of the most popular Type 2 hypervisors and natively does not support Windows 7 Jumplist. If you install and run many virtual machines on VirtualBox on your Windows 7 machine you will like VBoxLaunch which is a tiny script around 900 KB in size written by Nic Bedford to add Jumplist functionality (actually a workaround) to VirtualBox.

We just have to download the free script and unzip VBoxLaunch.exe to VirtualBox install directory usually C:\Programs Files\Oracle\VirtualBox

You may be asked to provide administrator permission to copy the exe to the folder

Click on continue to finish the copy

Now right click on the VBoxLaunch.exe and select Pin to Taskbar and Start Menu

Now Right Clicking the VBoxLaunch icon in the Taskbar will pull up the jumplist of all your VMs inside VirtualBox.

If you have pinned VBoxLaunch to Start Menu you can access VMs and launch from there.

This works on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows 7. VBoxLauncher is a very handy and must have tool for those running VirtualBox on Windows 7

Note

Download VBoxLaunch from here

Know more about VBoxLaunch here

Click here to know more about Hypervisors

Click here to know more about VirtualBox

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Undersea (Submarine) Cable Map

All of us know that undersea cables connecting different countries across the globe form the backbone that carry more than 90% of our voice and data traffic (Internet). Ever wondered how many such cables have been laid, which countries are connected and who owns those cables.

TeleGeopgraphy a research and consulting firm since 1989 based on their Global Bandwidth Research has released an interactive world map with nearly 200 active and planned submarine cables and their landing stations.

Clicking on any cable on the map provides data like its name, length, owners, website if any, year (RFS – Ready For Service) and landing points. Selecting a landing point gives a list of all cables landing at that station.

Click here for the interactive map

List of undersea cables that land in India

1. The Bharat Lanka Cable System

2. Europe India Gateway (EIG)

3. FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA)

4. FLAG FALCON

5. i2i Cable Network (i2icn)

6. IMEWE

7. SAFE

8. SEACOM/Tata TGN-Eurasia

9. Gulf Bridge International Cable System (GBICS)

10. SeaMeWe-3

11. SeaMeWe-4

12. Tata TGN-Tata Indicom

13. WARF Submarine Cable

Reference:

1. http://www.submarinecablemap.com

2. Telegeography’s Global Bandwidth Research Service

Saturday, July 02, 2011

NoReplyAll Addin for Outlook

If you are an Outlook user and looking for a feature to disable reply all option the NoReplyAll plugin from Microsoft Research is for the rescue. It is a small plugin, when installed add two new buttons No Reply All and No Forward to the new message UI as shown below

The buttons are self explanatory and use them whenever required for your email.

Download NoReplyAll Outlook Add-In From here which is just 300 KB in size. It is a zip file and when extracted will have 4 files including setup.exe and 1 folder in it.

Double click setup.exe to start the installation

It would ask for confirmation to install the tool and once confirmed it would continue with the installation

When the installation is complete just click close to on the popup.

Now NoReplyAll Addin for your Outlook is ready for use.

Note: This plugin works only with mailing systems that use Microsoft Exchange Server as the backend and will not work for users using web based email like gmail.

In short it is a very handy tool for a Outlook 2007 and 2010 User.

Click here for more info here on the Microsoft Research site.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

How Fiber Optic Cables Work

In this 5 min 30 Sec video Mr. Bill Hammack (Engineerguy) from Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois – Urbana shows how a fiber optic cable works using a bucket of Propylene glycol and a laser pointer.

Source: http://www.engineerguy.com/videos.htm

Click here for more about Fibre Optic Cable

Click here to know more about Propylene glycol

More on Pulse Code Modulation here

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Silent install Startup Script for Sophos Antivirus

Sophos Antivirus is one of the best enterprise grade antivirus for Windows, MAC and Linux operating environments that has features like application control, device control, NAC etc and has been one of my favourite Antivirus programs. AV agents can only be installed on the client machines from the management console of Sophos or manually using a Sophos ID and password. By default there is no automated way to install the agent when a machine is added in an Active Directory Environment.

Below code helps to create a batch file for example InstallSophos.bat using a text editor and can be added to a Startup script GPO to install Sophos Antivirus on newly added machines in a domain.

This batch file first checks if Sophos is already installed on a machine for both 32 bit and 64

bit Windows operating systems and installs the AV Agent in the background if not found.

Add Sophos server FQDN or IP address, User ID and respective password inplace of SophosServerNameHere, Domain\UserNameHere and PasswordHere in the below script.

We can even remove all the lines which start with REM as they are just comments which would make this a 5 line script :)

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Reset Lost Windows Password

At some point in time everyone who work with Windows would need to reset or clear password of built-in administrator as it was not accessed for long time or it was removed from Domain and no one remembers the password. Many would reinstall Windows in this situation not knowing how to crack the password. In this post we will see how to clear forgotten local administrator password on Windows using free Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is 4 MB CD based on Linux which contains things needed to reset the passwords on most Windows systems for free. The CD can also be installed on a USB drive and floppy disk as well by following the instructions on the site.

Download the latest version of Offline NT Password & Registry Editor from here. Burn a CD or create a USB or Floppy which ever is suitable for you and configure your system to boot from that device.

When the systems boots from Offline NT Password & Registry Editor the screen would look like the one below with a boot prompt.

Slick Internet Explorer 9 Is Fast

IE9 Beta has been released to public and finally it is what everyone wanted it to be, slick, clean and fast, though you can find similarities with other browsers out there. Download it from the official site www.beautyoftheweb.com

Few New Features of IE 9 include
Complete Hardware acceleration – Uses GPU for Rendering
CSS3 support
HTML 5
Improved TAB management, Tab tearing without reload
Pin Tabs to Taskbar similar to applications
Relocation notification bar

Checkout some of these features in action here

I have pinned twitter.com to my task bar and I can access tasks of twitter like tweet etc from jump list even when the twitter page is not open.

Similar is with facebook.com

Click here to Download IE 9 Beta Setup. Note that this installer will need live internet connection for installation and need to restart once the installed.