Bill Farmer

Read Paywalled Newspaper Articles

Most mainstream newspapers show a teaser front page on their web site, but hide most of their content behind a paywall. As with most things you can think of, there is a browser extension for this – Bypass Paywalls.

However this does not work for all newspapers, the extension appears to have dropped support for The Times, for example. It is still possible to read some articles by making use of a search engine to find another source for the text of the item. To do this:

Android Flutter

Google have made a big thing of their flutter development platform, so I thought I ought to give it a try. It’s easy to install, just download the sdk, unzip it in a suitable place and add the bin folder to your path.

Update

I decided to have another look as it appears to be liked by developers on Reddit. The old version wouldn’t update, so I downloaded the latest (Flutter 3.16.5) and replaced it. This time it found everything it wanted. This time I build a simplistic app that just displays an image.

Android Kotlin

All my android apps have up until now been written in Java, avoiding the use of the support libraries or androidx. The Google developers docs and guides advocate the use of Kotlin rather than Java and the use of androidx almost to the exclusion of the standard android API.

I have a very simple app, Oglaf, NS(Generally)FW, which is just a wrapper around the web site, with some navigation. So I decided to convert it to Kotlin, just to see how difficult it was and to see what effect, if any, it had on the app.

Android Word Count

I was asked to add a word and character count to my Editor app. So I looked it up and found a Gist that uses BreakIterator. This relies on an embedded function that determines what is considered a word.

So I tested it and found that it gave different results to the linux utility wc. However, the app already makes great use of regular expressions, which include an expression for a word character \w.

Download playlist video

This has been superceded by youtube-dl, which seems to work on most video sites.

Since I wrote Download streamed video video web sites have upped their game to stop downloading. One of the techniques used is to use a M3U playlist and a complicated set of parameters. Other techniques are to use JavaScript to create a blob and play that, and to use a JavaScript browser app which goes into debug mode if you use the developer tools.