Mac OS X 10.10.4, which is released on June 30, 2015 and the upcoming 10.11 “El Capitan”‎ will allow the user to enable TRIM on third party SSDs. They include a command trimforce to make this happen. If you don’t want to upgrade and still want to stick with 10.10.3. There is still a way to do it. I found a guide that showed me how to enable TRIM to on 10.10.3 to support TRIM without disabling kext signing or patching the system file IOAHCIFamily.kext by just adding one Apple signed system file AppleDataSetManagement.kext from El Capitan.
I started to use DigitalOcean cloud web hosting two months ago after I signed up for $10 credits. I was happy with it for a while. However, when I tried to find out how to request additional public IPs for SSL purpose for my other websites on the same instance, I realized that there is no way to do it. Many other web hosting companies allow you to add extra IP addresses to an instance as long as you pay for them or have a valid reason for doing that such as extra ones for SSL. I was assuming that DigitalOcean is the same but it is not. Upon knowing that, I started to look for alternatives that allow extra IPs, and I found Vultr. It not only allows extra IPs per instance, but also offers specs more suitable for me than DigitalOcean for the same $5 per month.
When I tried to use Bing’s Site Move Tool to notify Bing about my blog moving to a new domain, I kept on getting mysterious “The sample URLs we tried do not appear to redirect correctly. Please make sure that they redirect permanently to the new destination using 301 redirects” error. My 301 redirect was set up correctly and it worked with Google Webmaster Tools’ change of address. I emailed Bing’s support team with screenshots and they forwarded my request to their Product Group but no response since then. One day I started to monitor my server’s access log and I noticed those lines on my access log when I try to set up the site move:
Mac OS X’s PDF encryption still uses 128-bit RC4 which is compatible with Adobe 5.0 and later. 128-bit RC4 is a weak encryption algorithm and people generally don’t recommend it. I use Adobe Acrobat X to encrypt my PDF files instead and choose the strongest AES256 algorithm compatible with Adobe Reader X or later. Note that there is AES256 encryption in Acrobat 9, but it has security flaw which makes it easier to brute force passwords than Acrobat 8.
I found a youtube tutorial for running Android apps in Chrome in Windows with ARC Welder. It will also work for Chrome for Mac and Linux.
You need the APK of the app that you would like to launch in order for it to work because right now android apps available on the Chrome Web Store from the browser are only searchable and installed on a ChromeBook.
Simple APK files will work, but those built with NDK for other architectures like ARM will not. Those that uses Google Play Services will likely not work either. I tried an app that uses Google Play Services. It asks me to install Google Play Services but when I click on “Get Google Play Services” nothing happens.
So far I have tested Evernote, Twitter and Pandora and they work pretty smooth. Pandora actually plays music really well without any issues.
Sometimes after you connects a usb external hard drive to Mac, you notice that the hard drive keeps on spinning yet nothing shows up. It could be because of the hard drive was not ejected properly last time it was plugged in and the system is running fsck(File System Check) on the background. This can take a while especially when the hard drive has lots of data. Unfortunately, there is no indications of this happening except in Activity Monitor showing a running fsck process. This can make people believe that something broke. This has happened to me and my friends before and we all thought that we had broken hard drives. It wasn’t until I plugged my hard disk to a Windows computer and found out the disk was all right. I then started to troubleshoot the issue and found out a running fsck process in Activity Monitor when the disk is uncleanly ejected. After a while when that process finished running, the disk finally showed up in Finder.
Apple should improve the UX of this by making some sort of progress indicator for the File System Check running on the background so that people won’t get confused and thinks that they have a broken hard drive.
Right now you can use Google Hangout to make free outgoing phone calls to U.S. and Canada and also receive incoming calls if you have Google Voice number. It is very useful to make and receive phone calls over wifi when you don’t have signals or you only have a mobile device without phone call capabilities, or you just wanted to save on minutes. I have tested it on my iPhone’s Google Hangout and Android Tablet and it works.
More details about receiving phone calls are here for iOS and here for Android.
After I tried to use GoDaddy to forward my old domain to my new domain using 301 redirect and test if t works, I found out that if you connect to the old domain for the first time after a while, it returns 302 found first with the same url! When you try it for the second time, it returns 301 redirect correctly. After noticing that, I just switched back to using my own server for redirection.
Here are the sample outputs of another domain that I have set to use 301 redirect in GoDaddy:
Here is a simple Apache/PHP heroku app using mod_rewrite to do 301 redirect an old domain to a new one:
You can edit the .htaccess file inside of the web/ folder to specify the old domain and the new domain to redirect to.
Today I tried to open a password protected pdf file with AES256 encryption on my Dropbox website and now it can be opened directly from the browser without downloading it first by entering the password on the web interface’s dialog.