Not so well documented, but there is a way to display hexadecimal numbers in Excel. Use the following formula to convert a number into hexadecimal format:
="0x"&DEZINHEX(A1)
Limit upload / download speed of Dropbox and Seafile
Cloud storage app like Dropbox and Seafile can eat a lot of your bandwidth, which is especially painful when you are on a slow WiFi connection.
Luckily, these apps come with a possibility to limit their bandwidth use.
For Dropbox,
- click on the Dropbox icon in the system tray
- click the cogwheel in the right corner
- select “Preferences”
- go to the bandwidth tab and enter the limits
For Seafile,
- right-click on the Seafile icon in the system tray
- Select “Preferences”
- enter the limits on the general tab
Schedule meetings automatically into Google Calendar with Doodle or Calendly
doodle.com is a well known page for scheduling meetings or making decisions. Its calendar integration is probably less known. Doodle can export a calendar with the dates you have chosen in order to remind you to keep them blocked. When a date is fixed for a query, doodle releases the other dates. You can also add your calendar to doodle to see your availabilities right in the doodle calendar and to use such features as autofill.
If you look for something else, calendly.com is another free service that provides an interface for others to schedule a meeting with you. Dates with concurring events in your Google calendar are automatically blanked out.
Use TortoiseSVN without Passwort
Tortoise SVN has an option for saving authentication, but it does not work for SVN. In order to save the authentication, go to Tortoise settings, for example by right clicking in the Windows Explorer and then selecting Tortoise > Settings. In the settings window, select Network. Then add the path to Tortoise Plink (it is in the “bin” folder of the Tortoise installation) and add an option for a username and password using options -l and -pw.
For example:
“C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoisePlink.exe” -l foo -pw bar
Recover webpages from your browser cache
Think of the following situation: The database of your Wiki just crashed, you have a backup from a couple of days ago, but what about the pages that have been edited since then?
There is hope, most likely your browser has cached some of the files when you viewed them the last time.
Very important!
Don’t try to access the page because this will overwrite the cached contents.
To recover the cached pages follow these steps:
Firefox:
- Go into offline mode by clicking the hamburger icon, developer tools and work offline
- Open the page about:cache
- Click on “List Cache Entries”
- Search for the page you want to recover
- Click on the link, this leads you to a page with the hexdump of the compressed file entitled “Cache entry information”
- Click on the link to the page here, the page opens with the cached contents, including images
- Save your page
Repeat this from step 2 for every page you are interested in. Go back to online mode (hamburger icon, developer tools and uncheck work offline) when done.
Chrome:
- Open chrome://cache
- Search for the page you want to recover
- Click on the link, this leads you to a page with the hexdump of the compressed file
- Select all on this page (Ctrl + A) and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl + C)
- Go to this page http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2012/01/viewing-chrome-cache-easy-way.html
- Paste the contents into the textbox on the page
- Click “Go”
- Click on the link under “Results” to download the cached file. Some browsers block the download of html files because of security concerns, in this case go to downloads and explicitely allow the download of this file
Repeat this for every page you are interested in.
You are welcome.
Avoid distracting advertisements
Avoid distracting advertisements on your browser and Skype with the following three tips (they can be applied independently):
- Install an Ad-blocker for your web browser. Adblock Plus works very well. Some pages block their content if you have an adblocker installed. Therefore, Adblock Plus can be quickly deactivated/activated with a middle mouseclick on the symbol.
- Deactivate Criteo: Criteo is using tracking cookies to present personalized advertisement. This page explains how to block Criteo cookies
- Block advertisement in Skype by adding Skype to the restricted internet sites: WinKey+R > inetcpl.cpl > Security > Restricted Sites > Sites and then add https://apps.skype.com to the list
You are welcome!
Automatically repair 3D files
The Model Repair Service from Netfab automatically repairs STL, OBJ, or 3MF files for 3D printing. To use the service you need a Microsoft Live account. The service is free for non-commercial use.
Combining multiple RSS feeds
The easiest way to combine multiple RSS feeds into one is using RSS Mix. All one has to do is enter the URL addresses of the feeds (There’s no limit to the maximum number of feeds to be combined) to be combined and then pressing the “Create!” button. RSS mix then provides you an URL to the aggregated feed.
Turn off ligatures in LateX
Latex ligatures make a fine typesetting, but sometimes you might want to turn them off — for example if people should be aber to copy the text from the pdf document or if you need to export the pdf to a doc.
You can turn off ligatures with the following commands in the preamble of the Latex document:
\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures{encoding = *, family = * }
filegive: send and receive files across computers
filegive easily sends or receives files point-to-point, with authentication and ciphering, and the other side only needs a Web browser. No third party server is involved in the transfer. It can use common NAT traversal protocols like uPnP and NAT-PMP, manually forwarded ports, or a public ssh server.
filegive is a commandline tool available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS.