Superdecade Games: android

My most pointless IFTTT applets

IFTTT is a service for linking various services together. Literally, if this happens, then that will happen. If you are reading this article from a link on Twitter, G+, Tumbler, Pinterest or elsewhere, it is likely that an IFTTT applet put it there. I've been using IFTTT for years and I have several hundred applets automating my digital life.

This post is about some of the most pointless applets, some of which I still use.

Used in conjunction with with the 'mute your phone at bedtime' applet. I quickly stopped using this one because it would always set the volume to 'very high'. I certainly miss the 'quiet times' feature of my Lumia 950.

This one is cool, but pointless. You get to store all of your tweets in a text file for, you know, reasons.

Daily pictures from NASA on your homescreen. I stopped using this one because I much prefer a simple solid colour background to my phone whereas the NASA pictures can make your phone look cluttered. Again, I miss my Lumia 950 for its live tiles and transparent icrons. The Microsoft launcher is a good replacement for Android, and you also get the Bing daily pictures on your homescreen if that's a thing you like.

Ok, so when an email arrived in my inbox, the LaMetric stopwatch would start time. Presumably I did this so I could time how long it took me to delete, I mean respond to import work messages. I soon found this an annoying distraction and turned it off. I can see how this might be a useful feature someday, again, you know, because of reasons.

Pocket is great. Here I can save the links people tweet directly into Pocket. I'm still using this one, the only problem is I don't actually think I every follow up on many of the links. My pocket is hundreds of articles deep and growing. A cull is needed soon.

This one is totally not a pointless applet at all. If an email arrives then the attachments are safely stored away. I don't need to trawl through days and days of junk in my inbox, the files are waiting for me on all my devices whenever I need them (along with a large proportion of junk).

It sounded good at first. Every new item on your Alexa shopping list automatically gets a new page in OneNote. What's the problem? I delete things from my shopping list when I have bought them, but not from OneNote. My OneNote now has eighteen pages called 'onions'.

This one is switched on, but I don't actually use the Alexa 'To-Do'. I use Wunderlist instead.

So, there's eight pointless applets but there are so many potential good ones waiting to be made. That's all from me, I've got a gutter to clear. If you want to stay and read more vaguely amusing tech stuff, then you might like to read about some clock programs, or fun stuff Cortana can do.

Sharing a usb drive to chromebook, raspberry pi, Android and Windows 10

I noticed that my new home router comes with a USB port. I figured that it was possible to connect an external hard-drive and use my router as a home file server. This means that I will be able to share files between my Chromebook, Raspberry Pi, Android tablet and Windows machines.

Here are the steps I used by device.

First steps
Plug in your usb drive and check the admin settings on your home hub. I get there through the default address of my router which is 192.168.1.254 and yours is likely to be similar. It is a good opportunity to change the admin password at this stage.

In Windows 10
Access to the shared network drive is as easy as opening the file explorer and typing the address into the address bar eg //192.168.1.254

Your files are now ready to be accessed on all your devices.

On a Chromebook.
It would be useful to access my PC files on my Chromebook as well. I used File System for Windows.

Your shared files are now available in the ChromeOS File app.

On Raspberry Pi under Raspbian

1. You need to mount the network drive into the Raspbian file system. To do this you need to have cifs-utils installed. My Raspberry Pi 2 came with this pre-installed. You can check whether it exists or not by running the following command: dpkg -s cifs-utils

2. Should you need it, you can install cifs using the command sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

3. Next create a directory on your pi for where you want to mount the network drive: sudo mkdir -p /media/network/public

4. You need to edit the etc/fstab file in order to mount the network drive. You may need to give yourself permission to do this, so navigate to your /etc folder and type chown pi: fstab (where pi is your username).

5. Now open the etc/fstab file in your text editor and add the following single line:

//192.168.1.254/usb1 /media/network/public cifs defaults,rw,username=pi,password=yourpassword,domain=domain 0 0

Note that the first part is //IP ADDRESS OF ROUTER/directory name of network folder

If your network folder has any spaces in the name, eg "My Documents", then replace the spaces with \040, eg My\040Documents.

The second part is the path to the folder you created in part 3.

You will need to put in your own username and password .

6. Now mount the drive using sudo mount -a

Android

There is no single file explorer app for Android, but many of them allow you to access network drives. I use ES file explorer which has a nice 'search' feature which will find your network drive in a few seconds. You can also pin your network drive to your desktop for easy access.