peter's techie side

I’ve started this blog just to provide a place where I can post useful techy information I find, so that others may also perhaps find it useful. Mostly related to Mac computers, Audio software, Android, and Open Source.

[peterstech]

Quite a good article, with (gasp) actual science inside.

[peterstech]

How to keep your email private with PGP encryption on your Mac

In case you want to *not* have all your email read (targeted towards Mac users, but the same program is available for PC & Linux).

GPGTools works with Mail.app and Thunderbird, and Keybase helps you publish your public key and verify other people's.

[peterstech]

awesome free software

You know who is awesome? People who write really great software for free. And there are a lot of those people. Why should you care about this, since you can undoubtedly download a cracked version of whatever you want? Because free (especially open source) software is a) often really good, b) very unlikely to be infected with viruses and crap, and c) free to update, meaning you can get security patches as long as the developers keep working.

A story: I recently was helping a friend whose computer was plagued by viruses and popups. You know how she got them? She had downloaded cracked (and infected) versions of pretty much every program you can think of — Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Cubase, Ableton Live, Finale, Sibelius, Adobe Premiere… She thought having all of this software would make her computer more useful, yet she couldn’t even use the web browser because of all the popup windows and other random crap going on.

So to spare you the same agonizing fate, I’m going to tell you about software you don’t have to pirate — because it’s free — which means you don’t end up at the mercy of, well, the pirates, who, let’s face it, often have ulterior motives, like taking over your computer to participate in their scams.

free alternatives to commercial software:

Microsoft Office / Word / Excel / Powerpoint — get LibreOffice

Sibelius / Finale — get MuseScore (works similarly, but ever-so-slightly basic) and/or Lilypond (more of a language, but very powerful) with Frescobaldi editor

Skype — get RedPhone + TextSecure (for Android) or Signal (for iOS) for all your secure communication needs

Photoshop — get GIMP

Indesign / Quark Xpress — get Scribus

Adobe Illustrator — use the Draw component of LibreOffice, or get Inkscape

ProTools / Cubase / other Digital Audio Workstation — there are a few options:

Ardour is free for Mac/Linux, but a little hard to set up, and it doesn’t exist for Windows;

Reaper is cheap ($60) and free to try out indefinitely, and quite comparable to Pro Tools/Cubase in power;

Harrison Mixbus is often cheap ($39 at the moment) and sounds really excellent. It is based on Ardour, but is a commercial by a world-class analog audio gear manufacturer.

if you’re on Mac, Garageband which came with your computer is definitely worth a look.

Two channel audio editor (also has basic multitrack capability) — Audacity

Antivirus software — ClamWin (Windows) or ClamXAV (Mac) — because if you’ve been downloading cracked stuff, you probably have caught something…

There are also excellent online tools that run in your web browser — Google Docs (replaces MS Word/Excel) & Photoshop Online are both quite powerful, and especially great if you’re collaborating with other people.

And don’t forget to try the stuff that actually came with your computer. Especially on a Mac, iMovie (video), Garageband (audio), Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), Keynote (presentation), iPhoto (photo library), etc are all surprisingly powerful and useful.

The nuclear option — linux

If you want to go all free, simultaneously bypassing almost any risk of malware, and using your (perhaps old) machine more efficiently, ditch Windows and try Linux as your operating system. If you’re running WIndows XP or Vista, you should seriously consider this option, as Microsoft is no longer releasing security updates, so your computer will become more & more vulnerable.

I recommend the Linux Mint distribution (if you want more power to tweak things) — “Cinnamon 64-bit” edition for decently powerful computers (i.e. not a netbook, & made in the last 3 years), “Mate 64-bit” edition for medium-strength machines (4-6 years old), and “Xfce 32-bit” edition for older / less powerful machines (6+ years old). The Linux Mint 13 Xfce edition should actually run decently on any system that came with Windows XP, say a 14-year-old Pentium 4 machine with, 512mb ram and a 10gb drive. A bonus is that Linux makes installing & maintaining all this free software ridiculously easy, and all security & OS upgrades are free!

[peterstech]

A fix for unexpected battery drain on Android

After generally getting about 16-20 hours on my Android (Galaxy S3, running a CyanogenMod fork called ArchiDroid), I suddenly was getting about 6-7 hours of use (not constant or anything, just normal). I couldn't abide this, so I did some research and found this...

I bought & installed

BetterBatteryStats

, and noticed a lot of partial wakelocks from Google Play Services, specifically NlpCollectorWakeLock & NlpWakeLock. The former had done about 3000 wakelocks in a few hours. This is bad.

CheckinService

NetworkLocationLocator

What's a wakelock? A wakelock is a request from an application to keep the phone from falling into sleep mode, ostensibly because the app has something it needs to do. If the phone can't sleep, it uses battery much quicker.

What's wrong with Google Play Services, that it needs so many wakelocks? Actually, nothing, Google Play Services fields requests from other apps, including location requests. It seems the problem is actually with Google Now (part of the "Google" app), which constantly wants to know where you are so it can remind you when to leave for your next appointment, etc.

Ok, that's what's happening to me too, so how do I fix this? Well, if you've checked (with BetterBatteryStats, or Wakelock Detector, or something like that) & found that you, too, have thousands of requests for NlpCollectorWakeLock, maybe I can help. But there are prerequisites:

Your phone must be rooted. Search the internet for how to do this, it's beyond the scope of this article.

You need the Xposed Framework, get it here & then restart your phone.

Get Wakelock Terminator (the free version is fine) and install that.

Open Xposed, and enable Wakelock Terminator.

Restart your phone (again).

Open Wakelock Terminator, find Google Play Services, and tap it.

Select "Prevent Wake Lock," and tap "Filter Wake Lock."

In there, type (exactly): NlpCollectorWakeLock NlpWakeLock  and click OK.

That should do it. I've also found that some people recommend filtering also

CheckinService NetworkLocationLocator

but I haven't done so, as they didn't show up in my logs as problems. Good luck!

[peterstech]

Mystery solved: Mac unable to connect to wi-fi networks while traveling internationally

For years, as I travel internationally, I've been stymied by the seemingly inexplicable inability of my Macbook Air to connect to wi-fi networks. When I ask for help, as soon as people hear I have a Mac, they say, "oh Macs don't work." Well, of course that seemed like a ridiculous proposition, since Macs tend to work very easily for most things. Today, I figured it out.

In System Preferences -> Language & Region, if your Region is not set to the place where you are, you may not have all wi-fi channels available. I bought my computer in the US, and so it was configured for the US. US wifi networks have channels 1-11 available. But here in Turkey, there are channels 1-13. Setting the Region to Turkey has allowed me to connect previously unavailable networks.

Hope this helps.

FYI, I found this information from this StackExchange thread: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/74570/macbook-air-wifi-nic-supported-channels/74575#74575

[peterstech]

Introduction

Hi-- I've started this blog just to provide a place where I can post useful techy information I find, so that others may also perhaps find it useful.