Showing posts with label Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tools. 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

 

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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.

 

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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.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

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.

 

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

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

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Download Torrents without a client

Torrent2Exe is a simple web application which lets you download a torrent without the need of client on your Windows PC. An executable is generated from a link to the torrent or a torrent file on the disk which automatically downloads your torrent. This helps you to send the exe to your friends who do not have to bother to install a bittorrent client or search for the torrent. Torrent2Exe also provides with links which helps you to publish them on the web so that users can download the torrents without clients.

Now lets try to download a torrent using Torrent2Exe. I choose to download CentOS (Community ENTerprise OS) 64 Bit DVD using torrent. I browsed to one of the download mirrors and copied the link address to the torrent.

torrent2exe-1.b

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Use GImageX to work with .Wim OS Images

People who create and deploy Windows Vista and Windows 7 images know that .wim is now new native image format used by Microsoft for all its OSs. Microsoft has provided a command line tool called ImageX as part of WAIK short for Windows Automated Installation Kit to work with .wim images. ImageX being a command line tool, sometimes we tend to make mistakes while typing the commands and feel if it had a GUI to work with. Jon Bennett a MCS consultant has felt the same and built an app called GImageX – a GUI for ImageX using C++ and Microsoft’s WIMGAPI API (the wimgapi.dll file from the imagex directory of WAIK)

You can capture, apply, change, mount, delete, export and get info from .wim images using GImageX as you can with ImageX CLI. Below are the screenshots of ImageX CLI and GImageX

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