Alternative to Limitations

Earlier this year (2013) I bought a mini pc that will be dedicated for serving plex media server. I got the ShuttleXPC SZ77R5 because it was small enough for me and it works with the Intel Core i7-3770K since this need to handle multiple 1080p streams on my home network on different devices at the same time. The thing that I did not plan for is the video card. So I can make it a dedicated gaming pc for the most recent games and run it flawlessly. But these kind of cards are huge and usually won't fit this case without modifications. So after some research I got this card,  Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC with Boost 3GB DDR5 DL-DVI-I/SL-DVI-D/HDMI/DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 11197-03-40G  which barely fits and when you close the case it would probably overheat. Also you will have to remove the hard drive/cd rom rack to fit this card. I moved my hard drive on top of the case, there is a bunch of holes there where you can just attach it in. Then the hard part was cutting the case to

If you already know how to use google app engine you can skip to the github project and the short summary will be enough for you to get started on creating static websites. I created this because google sites will stop supporting google adsense and I have a bunch of static sites for my projects that is using google adsense. https://github.com/faisalraja/app-engine-static If you are new to google app engine and would like a way to create static websites with ability to do stuff like server side includes to avoid duplicating your headers/navigation and everything that you can do with jinja2 templating system and starts your hosting for free with daily quota and competitive pricing, by the time of this writing is (1GB/day free and 12cents/GB after). First you need python 2.7 installed in your system, you can download at: http://python.org/download/ Choose the one for your system, then install google appengine sdk at: https://developers.google.com/appengine/downloads?hl=d

Cookieless domains are one of the must have optimization when you are serving a lot of static files. The reason is that if you have a cookie in the same domain it sends those cookies in the request headers if you are serving your static files on the same domain. Those build up and unnecessary. If you have your cookie in domain level and using appspot domain for your main domain this won't work. This will also version your files so in your app.yaml you can leave (default_expiration: "30d") all the time. Each deploy will prefix your static urls with different version. Here is how I did it: import os from google.appengine.api import app_identity VERSION_ID = os.environ.get('CURRENT_VERSION_ID', '1.1').split('.') VERSION = VERSION_ID[0] APP_VERSION = int(VERSION_ID[1]) APP_ID = app_identity.get_application_id() IS_DEV = os.environ.get('SERVER_SOFTWARE', 'Development/%s' % VERSION_ID).startswith('Dev') IS_BACKEND = backends.

I bought the I-Blason PowerGlider battery pack thinking that it would fit in a moga pro for extended gameplay use, because there was a review somewhere in xda that the mophie doesn't fit in the moga pro. So here is a quick video to demo it altogether. It does fit, but it can slip its heavy and hard to play while laying head up because the moga pro grip don't have a lock it might be the same issue with htc one alone. Although in the video it doesn't drop it does feel that it might, but it still fits which is the most important. Here are more photos: I used the moga tablet stand cause the HTC One + PowerGlider is too heavy to stay upright. For battery life, I've never ran out anymore, although sometimes I remove it and charge it by itself so I can still use the phone and never had to charge it directly. Beware though it only has half the mAh output of the charger, people say its fine but I really don't know how it would affect its battery. C

When I build app engine projects and I want to include python package, what I do is download the source and symlink/include it in the project. I have tried the virtualenv approach but it didn't feel clean and I couldn't find anything that will suit my needs in a simple way. So I created this new tool called gaenv which will automate installation/linking of your installed packages to your gae project, it doesn't really need to be a gae project since what it does is just create a folder of symlinks following your requirements.txt so this can be useful to any container base deployment packages that follows symbolic links. Installation & usage: # Note that if you install on a system with multiple python, # you need to call the correct binary on which it looks up packages $ sudo pip install gaenv $ cd to/your/gae-project # Create your requirements.txt & run this to install it $ pip install -r requirements.txt $ gaenv That's it, this

I have a windows desktop that is always tunneled to some server for reason that is not important. I use kitty.exe an improved putty with auto re-login and more, but only needed that feature that's why I'm using that. But for some reason it stops responding if a lot of traffic has passed to the tunnel and it has now happened too frequent that I just had to auto restart it, there might be softwares that does this already but here is what I did using python. This should be reusable with any process just change the variable names you want to monitor. import os import subprocess import time __author__ = 'faisal' # Change this if you want to monitor a different process process_name = 'kitty.exe' # Separate your parameters start_command = ['C:\Applications\Putty\kitty.exe', '-load', 'MyTunnelSession'] # Sleep time in seconds before checking again sleep_time = 60 while True: # Filter a list of windows process that has stopped respondi

IF YOU JUST WANT TO USE IT PLEASE SKIP TO INSTALL PART If you haven't heard, flickr has made their free storage 1TB for your full size photos. That's a lot of storage for your photos. I have a collection of photos since year 2000, and I have only around 81GB of photos stored to my hard drive and time machine and another backup drive, but those can all fail but I have been lucky not to lose photos from hard drive failures. I was looking for a sync apps to flickr that I can leave alone and I couldn't find one. So here is a quick python script that I created. Here is how it works for backing it up: Let's say you have folder /Volumes/Storage/Pictures/ 2001   / 2001-01-01     / File1.jpg     / File2.jpg 2002 2003 When you run flickrsmartsync it will require you to login give it access then it will sync it automatically, stopping and starting it will just resume it as long as it is in the same structure. So if you sync the same structure under the root folder

This class is based on the db mapper found in remote_api article. But using ndb, the purpose of this is if you want to iterate through a lot of entities but not enough time to do it on request time. So this library helps you create a map of your entities of given kind. You should use this in cases like, deleting users that requested for deletion or updating counters for specific filters. Here is the NDB version of the Mapper. I have added a bit of improvement that I have used for in the past. -Edit- I have removed the memcache ability to stop duplicates. It should just now be handled with the task scope, like taskname or different filters per task (can be done with different initial data and overriding the get_query method and use it as some filter). import logging from google.appengine.ext import deferred, ndb from google.appengine.runtime import DeadlineExceededError class Mapper(object): def __init__(self, use_cache=False): ndb.get_context().set_cache_policy

After checking the archive list of my blog I didn't see me sharing my android apps on here. So here it is, I currently have 4 active apps mostly created for myself that I published on google play. AppLauncher+ This app automatically organize your apps base on google play categories. Reason I built is cause I flash my firmware a lot at one time that reorganizing folders of my apps just takes too much time. I couldn't find one that is simple enough that would just work and I won't ever touch it again. It has now evolve to have features like: Manual Categorization (had to do it cause of too much demand) Floating launcher (for paid, you can open a folder/assign commands on what it does) Create Shortcut & Folder view on those shortcut (also paid only) Free version basically just gets an organized list with ads! :( Live Battery (Status Bar) This is a live wallpaper, you can select a static wallpaper then then it will have your borders as status bar. I did this

Now that google cloud endpoints is around the corner it will and probably should be a standard way of creating web services for any types of clients for mobile, desktop or even your ajax requests. It's still experimental as the time of this writing and I will not really talk about how to use it since their documentation has some good example on it already. I will be sharing on how and what I've used to create my own web services for android clients I have created and for ajax calls. I have created my own jsonrpc client/server class for python. My own full implementation of jsonrpc standards . I have included this on my app-engine-starter code with some sample if you run it and click the JSONRPC Demo dropdown. Feel free to use it. It is still a nice simple library to use creating web services. I will give a quick sample code here on how it's used: import logging from google.appengine.ext import webapp, ndb import jsonrpc class Calculator(): def add(self, a,

Update: Since keys only queries are now free, I would prefer to just cache the queries with only resulting to keys_only=True then retrieving the cached values of it with ndb.get_multi(keys). If you are creating a heavy read app engine app, that has a lot of listing/query entities it's a good idea to cache those queries so you don't get charged for reads. But you want it to also be up to date and not have to worry about invalidations. Here is some of the things I've done for caching queries. This can't be applied to all but should work on most and can be implemented on same manner with more complex queries. The idea is to have an updated field on the fields you are filtering from so you can use that as your cache key. Here is a sample code that that shows how to display user post with cached queries. from google.appengine.ext import ndb class User(ndb.Model): created = ndb.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True, indexed=False) updated = ndb.DateTimeProper