How to Remove Siri from the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro

howchoo   (467)

September 15, 2023

4 minutes

What you’ll need

Interests

MacBook Pro x 1

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You probably use your backspace [delete] key quite a bit. If you have a Macbook Pro, you probably also hit the Open Siri button quite a bit, as it is (in)conveniently located adjacent to the backspace key.

This is quite annoying.

This short guide will show you how to remove the Siri button from your Macbook Pro’s touch bar, or Control Strip, disabling the button without disabling Siri.

Note: If you don’t want to completely disable Siri, you can also simply hide Siri’s suggestions on your iPhone.

1 – Open System Preferences

Click on the Apple icon and select System Preferences.

2 – Open Keyboard Settings

Click the Keyboard system preference icon.

3 – Customize the Touch Bar

Click the Customize Control Strip... button.

4 – Remove or replace the Touch Bar Siri button

Move your mouse down, off your screen and INTO the touch bar. This will highlight each menu item. Highlight the Siri button, click, and drag the Siri button upward and out of the Touch Bar. It will now disappear.

You can optionally add a new button to replace the Siri button, but I chose to leave it empty because I inadvertently click in the space all the time.

5 – You’re all done!

You go to hell Siri and you die there. Now that you’ve disabled Siri, perhaps you’d like to disable the MacBook Pro Touch Bar and revert it to its former Control Strip glory!

How to Disable the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

How to Enable the “Popping” Sound When Adjusting the Volume on Your Mac

howchoo   (467)

December 13, 2023

Leveling the Kobra Go 3D Printer

howchoo (467)

September 15, 2023

4 minutes

What you’ll need

Interests

Anycubic Kobra GO x 1

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3D Printing

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Anycubic’s Kobra Go 3D Printer Hands-On Review A detailed review on the Anycubic Kobra Go DIY 3D printer

1 – Turn on the Kobra Go and select the Menu

2 – Scroll down and select leveling

3 – Select the Auto Leveling option from the Kobra Go menu

4 – Allow the automatic leveling program to complete

5 – Complete!

How to Update Blender

howchoo (467)

November 24, 2023

Download Raspbian Jessie

howchoo   (467)

September 15, 2023

3 minutes

What you’ll need

Interests

Raspberry Pi x 1

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Important: Raspbian has been replaced by Raspberry Pi OS!

How to Install Raspberry Pi OS on Your Raspberry Pi
Get the new official Raspberry Pi OS on your Pi.

Whenever a new Raspbian version comes out, the Raspberry Pi Foundation removes the previous version from the Raspbian Downloads page. But sometimes for a project you just need an older version. This short guide provides you with links to download Raspbian Jessie directly from the Raspberry Pi Foundation Image Archive.

1 – Download ZIP file

Download Raspbian Jessie as a ZIP archive directly from RaspberryPi.org:

Latest

• 2017-07-05-raspbian-jessie.zip (latest, full)

Older versions

You can access older versions of Raspbian Jessie in ZIP format from the Raspberry Pi Image Archives and choosing a date from 2015-09-28 to 2017-07-05.

2 – Download TORRENT file

Download Raspbian Jessie as a TORRENT file directly from RaspberryPi.org:

Latest

• 2017-07-05-raspbian-jessie.zip.torrent (latest, full)

Older versions

You can access older versions of Raspbian Jessie in TORRENT format from the Raspberry Pi Image Archives and choosing a date from 2015-09-28 to 2017-07-05.

How to Run a Minecraft Server on the Raspberry Pi

howchoo   (467)

December 7, 2023

How to Check Raspberry Pi SD Card Free Space (Disk Space Usage)

howchoo   (467)

September 15, 2023

2 minutes

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Raspberry Pi

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This short guide will show you how to check how much free space your Raspberry Pi has.

1 – Get to the command line/terminal

Open a new command line/terminal session.

If you’re using Jessie Lite, this is the default state that your Pi boots into.

If you’re using RetroPie, you can get here by pressing F4 on a keyboard or by exiting to the command line through the RetroPie UI.

If you’re using Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), simply open a new Terminal.

2 – Run the following command

Run the following command and press enter:

df

This will display the total disk usage for your SD card in columns. If you’d like to make it more readable, you can add the -h flag, which will add G and M units for gigabytes and megabytes:

df -h

How to Run a Minecraft Server on the Raspberry Pi

howchoo   (467)

December 7, 2023

How to connect Peloton Music to your Spotify account

howchoo (467)

September 15, 2023

3 minutes

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1 – View your music on the Peloton Bike

2 – Enter Spotify credentials on the Peloton Bike

3 – View your Peloton playlist on the Spotify app

How to Clean Vibram Five Finger Toe Shoes Without Ruining Them

howchoo (467)

November 22, 2023

How to Find Your Network Security Key (And Protect It!)

howchoo (467)

September 15, 2023

12 minutes

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Internet

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Security

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Why Your Network Security Key is So Important

The Types of Network Security Keys

• WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
• WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access)
• WPA 2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 2)
• WPA 3 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 3)

1 – How to find your default network security key

2 – Changing your network password

How to Create a Secure Wi-Fi Password

How to Generate a Random, Secure Password

3 – How to find your network security key in Windows 10

1. Open Network Connections.
2. Select the Network and Sharing Center icon.
3. Tap on Wireless network.
4. Select Wireless Properties.
5. Open Security.
6. Click “Show characters to make the network security visible:“.

4 – How to find your network security key using a Mac

1. Search for “Keychain Access” in Spotlight Search.
2. In Keychain Access, enter the name of your Wi-Fi network or scroll down to it.
3. Click on your network.
4. Check Show Password to see your network security key.
5. Enter your Mac password to be able to see it.

NordPass Review: Finally a Free Password Manager We Can Love Label us “impressed” with this relatively new password manager.

How to Change Your Frontier WiFi Password

howchoo (467)

November 25, 2023

How to Turn an Object into Query String Parameters in JavaScript

howchoo   (467)

September 14, 2023

3 minutes

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As a JavaScript developer, you’ll often need to construct URLs and query string parameters. One sensible way to construct query string parameters is to use a one layer object with key value pairs.

In this guide we’ll cover various ways to turn an object like this:

var params = {
    a: 1,
    b: 2,
    c: 3
};

into a query string like this:

"a=1&b=2&c=3"

1 – Using map and join

If you’re using a modern browser (or node) you can use map to create an array of strings like a=1, then use join to join them together with &.

ES6

var queryString = Object.keys(params).map(key => key + '=' + params[key]).join('&');

ES5

var queryString = Object.keys(params).map(function(key) {
    return key + '=' + params[key]
}).join('&');

2 – Using jQuery

If you’re the sort of person who uses jQuery, you’ve got a solution readily available:

var queryString = $.param(params);

3 – Using the querystring module in node

If you’re using node, you can use the querystring module:

const querystring = require('querystring');

let queryString = querystring.stringify(params);

4 – Parameter encoding

If you know you’re keys and values need to be encoded, you should use encodeURIComponent like this:

var queryString = Object.keys(params).map((key) => {
    return encodeURIComponent(key) + '=' + encodeURIComponent(params[key])
}).join('&');

It’s also possible to query by timestamp in MySQL.

Make YouTube Video Embeds Responsive Using Pure HTML and CSS

howchoo   (467)

September 22, 2023

Combine Two Querysets in Django (With Different Models)

howchoo   (467)

September 14, 2023

14 minutes

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Today, I stumbled upon a use case where I needed to have a querysets that had objects from different models. Django has a neat “contenttypes framework” which is a good way to achieve this. So here are my notes on what I learned today, and I hope it will help someone in the future. NOTE: If you can design your models from scratch this is not the best approach to follow. Read my note under step 5.

1 – The Models

Let us consider the following models:

class Bmw(models.Model):
    series = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    created = models.DateTimeField()
    class Meta:
        ordering = ['-created']
    def __str__(self):
         return "{0} - {1}".format(self.series, self.created.date())

class Tesla(models.Model):
    series = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    created = models.DateTimeField()
    class Meta:
        ordering = ['-created']
    def __str__(self):
        return "{0} - {1}".format(self.series, self.created.date())

2 – The Queries

We can get list of Bmw’s and Teslas separately like so:

>>> Bmw.objects.filter()
[, ]
>>> Tesla.objects.filter()
[, ]

But what if we want the two querysets combined, say we want to display all cars in our dealership page by creation date. So we want something like:

[, , , ]

How do we do that? Here are two viable approaches.

3 – Using Chain from itertools

Using itertools chain is one approach.

from itertools import chain
def get_all_cars():
    bmws = Bmw.objects.filter()
    teslas = Tesla.objects.filter()
    cars_list = sorted(
        chain(bmws, teslas),
        key=lambda car: car.created, reverse=True)
    return cars_list

Here we get the queryset for Bmws and queryset of Teslas, and pass them to the chain function which combines these two iterables and makes a new iterator. We then pass this list to the sort function and specify that we want to sort it by the created date. Finally we say that we want the order to be reversed. Here is the result:

[, , , ]

This is a good approach if the queryset is small. However if we are dealing with larger querysets and need to involve pagination, every time we need to query the entire database and sort by the created date. Even if we slice the list, then we have to manually keep track of our slice index and created date for sorting, and the whole approach could get messy.

4 – The contenttypes Framework

Django’s contenttypes framework is really a good option for this use case. From the docs: At the heart of the contenttypes application is the ContentType model, which lives at django.contrib.contenttypes.models.ContentType. Instances of ContentType represent and store information about the models installed in your project, and new instances of ContentType are automatically created whenever new models are installed. I would urge you to read up more on it.

5 – Content Types in our models

From the docs:

Adding a foreign key from one of your own models to ContentType allows your model to effectively tie itself to another model class.

So we add a new model to our models called car which uses the Generic Relations.

class Car(models.Model):
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')
    created = models.DateTimeField()
    class Meta:
        ordering = ['-created']
    def __str__(self):
        return "{0} - {1}".format(self.content_object.series,
                                  self.created.date())

We then update our models and define a post save handler.

def create_car(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    """
    Post save handler to create/update car instances when
    Bmw or Tesla is created/updated
    """
    content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(instance)
    try:
        car= Car.objects.get(content_type=content_type,
                             object_id=instance.id)
    except Car.DoesNotExist:
        car = Car(content_type=content_type, object_id=instance.id)
    car.created = instance.created
    car.series = instance.series
    car.save()

And we add the post save handler to our Tesla model.

class Tesla(models.Model):
    series = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    created = models.DateTimeField()
    class Meta:
        ordering = ['-created']
    def __str__(self):
        return "{0} - {1}".format(self.series, self.created.date())
post_save.connect(create_car, sender=Tesla)

(and similarly added for Bmw model not show for brevity) So now every time an instance of Tesla or Bmw is created or updated, the corresponding Car model instance gets updated.

6 – Query using contenttypes framework

Here is an updated query using the contentypes framework that we just set up. Notice how we have both Bmw and Tesla objects returned as Car instances.

>>> Car.objects.filter()
[, , , ]

Here we have returned car objects, so here is how we get to the actual car type a Car instance holds.

>>> car = Car.objects.first()
>>> car.content_object

>>> car.content_object.series
u'Tesla Series 2'

7 – Closing Notes

Although this approach has an overhead of an extra table, for larger query sets I feel this is a cleaner approach.

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions in the comments below.

Class Vs. Instance Variables in Python 3

howchoo   (467)

November 22, 2023

How to Pretty Print JSON in Chrome Developer Console

howchoo   (467)

September 14, 2023

2 minutes

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This short guide will show you how to pretty print a JSON object in the Chrome Developer Tools console.

1 – Output your object as a string

Wrap your object in JSON.stringify and log it to the console:

const currentlyDrinking = {
    beer: 'Yeungling',
    container: 'bottle',
    empty: true
};

console.log(JSON.stringify(currentlyDrinking));

This will result in the following minified object:

{"beer":"Yeungling","container":"bottle","empty":true}

Not exactly pretty yet, so we’ll need to format it. This is especially important for larger objects.

2 – Format the pretty-printed output

To format our object, we’ll need to specify the number of spaces we’d like:

const currentlyDrinking = {
    beer: 'Yeungling',
    container: 'bottle',
    empty: true
};

console.log(JSON.stringify(currentlyDrinking, undefined, 4)); // use 4-space tabs to format and indent the code

This results in:

{
    "beer": "Yeungling",
    "container": "bottle",
    "empty": true
}

Much better!

3 – More formatting options

For more Chrome Developer console object pretty-printing options, check out the JSON.stringify() MDN docs.

Secure Your Sensitive Data with Kubernetes Secrets

howchoo   (467)

November 26, 2023

How to Change Your ASUS Wi-Fi Password

howchoo (467)

September 14, 2023

3 minutes

What you’ll need

Interests

Series

ASUS router x 1

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Router

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• 
  Reset ASUS Router
• 
  ASUS Router Login
• 
  Change ASUS WiFi Password

1 – Log into the ASUS router

How to Log in to an ASUS Router

2 – Access Wireless settings

• Click Wireless on the left-hand navigation pane
• Look under the General tab
• Scroll until you see a field labeled Pre-shared key

3 – Set a new WiFi password

4 – Save your changes

How to Change Your Frontier WiFi Password

howchoo (467)

November 25, 2023