Bill Farmer

Upgrading a Moto G

I got myself a refurbished Moto G phone a while ago. It came with Android Kitkat 4.4.4, complete with Moto bloat. I had already put Cyanogenmod on my tablet, so I installed Cyanogenmod 11, android 4.4.4 on it, in accordance with the instructions on the wiki, no problem. That got rid of the bloat and allows fine control of app snooping via Privacy Guard in the settings.

When I first installed Cyanogenmod, I had to use an unofficial build, as an official build for Kitkat 4.4.4 wasn’t available. Now there are six official builds available, including two for Marshmallow. I tried to upgrade to Lollipop using the built in upgrade system, but failed I think it complained about the bootloader.

Upgrading to Windows 10

I didn’t like the Windows 10 preview, I thought it was a pain in the backside, so I have delayed upgrading from Windows 7 until the last minute when I got the countdown notification. I have been running a slightly dodgy copy of Windows 7 for a long time, so I was somewhat surprised when, out of the goodness of their hearts, Microsoft said I could have an activated copy of Windows 10 for free.

Resurrecting a netbook as a web server

When I got fed up with Windows XP on my netbook, I tried windows 7 on it, but it was barely usable. So I tried Windows 7 Starter which was better. I upgraded it to Home Premium, which was OK at first, but slowed down as it got clagged up with updates.

That was it until recently, when I read an article about putting Windows 10 on one. I didn’t try that, but I did try Linux Mint on it. That works quite nicely. Then my other half decided to research her family tree and wanted some software to put her data on. We looked at what was available and decided that Webtrees was the most usable. That requires a web server and up stepped my netbook.

Build Mac OSX apps using command line tools

You will need to install the Xcode command line tools, you don’t need the Xcode app. The easiest way to do this is to attempt to build an app like emacs by typing ./configure on the command line. A dialog box will pop up asking if you want to download and install the tools.

Xcode now uses the LLVM CLang compiler and documentation is exceedingly hard to find. You can type gcc -help or clang -help on the command line to get some info. I found two web pages with more useful info: http://clang.llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/clang.html and https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix/compiling/compiling.html.

Read iBook books on an Android tablet

You will need to install Calibre to make the books usable, and the books must be DRM free.

There are two ways to do this:

• If you have a Mac or Hackintosh you can find your books in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books, in what appears to be epub files but are really folders with numeric names. Copy the ones you want to somewhere accessible, like ~/Books, and zip the contents of each folder, not the folder itself. Rename the zip files as epub files.