Showing posts with label Tool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tool. 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


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, 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.

 

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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

 

image

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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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.

 

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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, December 29, 2012

ActivePresenter – Easy to use Screencasting Tool

For long have been using and suggesting CamStudio, an open source and free screen capturing and recording software for Windows machines. A recent project of mine needed more features than what CamStudio could offer and there I was bingle(ing) (using Bing and Google) the web, when I stumbled upon ActivePresenter from Atomi Systems.

 

ActivePresenter is a feature rich screen recording software than help in creating interactive screencasts and SCORM-compliant e-learning content.

 

image

 

Few of the many features of the ActivePresenter are

1. Obviously Capture and Record (Images and Full motion video)

2. Annotation

3. Audio/Video Editing with options like pan/zoom

4. Exporting to high quality video formats including AVI, WebM etc

5. Transition Effects

6. Narration, Spotlight, Blur, cursor path etc.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Missing Windows Server 2012 Management Tools

If you have installed Windows Server 2012 Roles and Features using PowerShell or remote server admin tools or new multi server manager console, you will see that the management tools are missing from the server on which you just have enabled the role or feature. This is because Microsoft has provided more granular control on what is installed on the Windows Server 2012. As an administrator we have choice to include or not to include management tools while installing the Roles and Features we choose.

 

Below is a comic illustrating the same.

 

 

Source:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servermanager/archive/2012/08/13/the-case-of-the-missing-role-and-feature-management-tools.aspx

 

Reference:

More on Installing Roles and Features here

Friday, July 16, 2010

Use Solvr to Solve your Problems

Solvr is a web based tool that helps you solve a problem by structuring your thoughts. You can also solve a problem together with others with the help of unique URL provided by Solvr. Simple but effective tool. Presently the tool is in alpha stage and new features are slowly being added.

Below is an extract from the website
How it works
1. You enter a problem.
2. You enter ideas that could solve the problem.
3. Some ideas lead to new (hopefully smaller) problems.
4. When a problem is solved, the tree gets green.
    A problem is considered solved, when you found an idea that does not lead to a new problem.

Solvr-1

Below are the screenshots of a problem for which I used to test Solvr and solve. You can click here to check out my problem page on Solvr.

Solvr-3

Finally Solved all my problems :)

Solvr-5 

Try it once and I am sure you will use it again. Happy problem solving :)

Click here to save this page as PDF

Friday, June 25, 2010

Manage Multiple RDP connections with RDCMan

Microsoft has recently released a small but useful tool called RDCMan short for Remote Desktop Connection Manager for managing Remote Desktop Connections.

We can create groups of servers in a hierarchical fashion, assign a set of credentials, local resources, display and security settings, gateways at one level and let the groups or servers inherit from parents. It also has a live thumbnail preview of all connected servers. We can connect to all servers in a group with just one click.

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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Mount a .VHD file in Windows 7 and 2008 R2

In one of my earlier blog post here I went through an easy way to convert a physical machine to VHD without downtime that can be attached to a Virtual Machine running on Virtual PC or Hyper-V. Today we will see how we can mount or attach the same VHD on a system running Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 without any virtualization software.

First open Disk Management by right clicking on computer and selecting manage or type diskmgmt.msc in run window or command prompt or powershell.

Disk2vhd-5 - Copy