How to change the color scheme of Windows Command Prompt / cmd.exe

Published 2019-01-23, 16:37

Last week we announced the exciting news that Windows Console has a new default color scheme, and also promised you that we would release a tool to make it easier to change the console to your desired scheme. The Windows Console team is proud to present the ‚Colortool‚ which you can use to apply the new default color scheme, and several alternate pre-defined color schemes or even schemes of your own!

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/08/11/introducing-the-windows-console-colortool/

Download from https://github.com/Microsoft/console/releases, unzip to folder that is in your PATH environment variable, use via colortool solarized_dark for example.

TIL: How to Fix a Slow-Opening Windows Downloads Folder

Published 2019-01-22, 15:10

Opening my Downloads folder from Firefox or Chrome always was slow. Reaaaaaally slow. So finally I googled „opening downloads folder from firefox is slow“ and found this short article, the explains a simple and perfectly fine solution:

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/slow-windows-downloads-folder

Yay!

Android Emulator: PANIC: Broken AVD system path. Check your ANDROID_SDK_ROOT value

Published 2018-11-16, 17:38

Debugging and fixing a broken Android SDK setup is always „fun“ – especially on a CI environment where you don’t control the actual installation.

It gets worse when all the StackOverflow answers and other Google results for the error you are getting are basically „I executed some slightly related, but otherwise random commands, and after that it worked“.

In my specific case I was getting this error message when trying to start an Android Emulator:

PANIC: Broken AVD system path. Check your ANDROID_SDK_ROOT value

It was really hard to find out what „AVD system path“ actually meant and how my ANRDOID_SDK_ROOT could be connected to that.

So to maybe make this search a bit easier for future people having this problem, I write a solution down here:

Continue reading Android Emulator: PANIC: Broken AVD system path. Check your ANDROID_SDK_ROOT value…

Azure Devops Pipelines: Software available on Microsoft hosted agents

Published 2018-11-14, 15:27

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?view=vsts&tabs=yaml#software contains links to READMEs on GitHub that list the available software

Azure Devops Pipelines: Install and start an Android Emulator

Published 2018-11-14, 15:17

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "y" | $ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin/sdkmanager --install 'system-images;android-27;google_apis;x86'

$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/adb devices

echo "no" | $ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin/avdmanager create avd -n test_android_emulator -k 'system-images;android-27;google_apis;x86' --force

nohup $ANDROID_HOME/emulator/emulator -avd test_android_emulator -no-snapshot > /dev/null 2>&1 & $ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/adb wait-for-device shell 'while [[ -z $(getprop sys.boot_completed | tr -d '\r') ]]; do sleep 1; done; input keyevent 82'

echo "Emulator started"

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/340547/azure-devops-unable-to-run-the-android-emulator-on.html

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs/issues/1677#issuecomment-433858827

How to comment in cmd.exe / Windows command line

Published 2018-11-14, 15:02

REM this is a comment

or

:: another comment

(Second one only works sometimes, see comment)

Results of an Amazon.de „Datenauskunft“ / „Data Subject Access Request“

Published 2018-09-18, 17:14

On 2018-07-20 I requested a „Datenauskunft“/“Data Subject Access Request“ from Amazon.de where I had an account since 2001. I wanted to document both the process and the results, as I couldn’t find anything online back when I requested this myself

To request a Datenauskunft from Amazon yourself you have to go to amazon.de/kontakt, then select „Digitale Inhalte und Services“, choose „Datenauskunft beantragen“ („Request your data“) in the first dropdown, „Datenauskunft für eine spätere Zusendung beantragen“ („Request data file be sent at a later date“) in the second and „Daten aus allen Kategorien anfordern“ („Request All Your Data“) in the third and last one.

Clicking „E-Mail“ will populate the contact form with some default text that you can just submit after adding your full name to the body text.

Shortly after I submitted the form, I got an email that I had reply to to confirm that I, the owner of my account email address, had indeed requested this data.

(I had to jump through a few hoops here as I use catch all email adresses @janpiotrowski.de for login, but replied from my usual email address which of course their system didn’t like. But as this is for verification of my request, I was happy to comply.)

I got a first response with data ~20 days later on 2018-08-09, which included a download link to a file name `Piotrowski.zip` (which was 138 KB of size).

The email also included the following admission:

Da wir für Ihre Anfrage Daten aus mehreren Bereichen zusammenstellen, gibt es einige zusätzliche Daten, die wir derzeit noch sammeln. Sobald Sie auch diese Daten herunterladen können, werden wir Sie entsprechend informieren.

The data file’s content:

1. DSAR_-_Jan_Piotrowski_-_Kontakthistorie.docx
2. DSAR_Anfrage_-_Jan_Piotrowski_-_Kontoinformationen.docx
3. Mein_Profil.xlsx

The `.docx` Word files contained 1) a history of (some recent) written communication with Amazon (including my data request of course), 2) all my current and past shipping addresses, payment methods, failed payments (just one…), watch list(s) content, vouchers used (lots), warranty claims (none), wish list(s) content, subscriptions (prime trial) and some information about Amazon Drive (never used) – really everything I could probably have gotten from the Amazon website myself after logging into my account there.

The `Mein_Profil.xlsx` just contained a link to www.amazon.de/profile.

Roughly one month later on 2018-09-17 I received another email from Amazon, telling me that now all data had been collected and could be provided to me.

Again it contained a download link to a file, this time called Jan Piotrowski.zip, now grown to 1043 KB (10.9 MB unzipped!).

This is its folder and file structure:

|   
+---- Ihr Kundenkonto -
|       DSAR - Piotrowski, Jan - Kontakthistorie.docx
|       DSAR_Anfrage - Piotrowski, Jan  - Kontoinformationen.docx
|       
+---Alexa
|   \---Alexa_0032...ea17a
|       +---Communication - Messages
|       |   \---Conversations
|       |           Conversations.html
|       |           
|       +---Communication - Preferences
|       |       alexa_comms_preferences.html
|       |       
|       +---Lists
|       |       Lists.csv
|       |       
|       +---Preferences
|       |       Preferences.json
|       |       
|       \---Routines
|               Routines.json
|               
+---Appstore
|       PurchaseDownloadInstall_Appstore.csv
|       
+---CloudDrive
|       Piotrowski_Jan_Account_Info.csv
|       Piotrowski_Jan_Client_Events.csv
|       Piotrowski_Jan_Device_Info.csv
|       Piotrowski_Jan_Node_Metadata.csv
|       
+---Community Profile
|       Mein Profil.xlsx
|       
+---Fire TV
|   |   3poptout_000.csv
|   |   appusage_000.csv
|   |   deviceusage_000.csv
|   |   marketingoptout_000.csv
|   |   registration.csv
|   |   
|   \---FireTV_Piotrowski_Jan
|       \---FireTV_Piotrowski_Jan
|               2018-01-23.json
|               2018-01-26.json
|               ...
|               FireTv-Glossary.csv
|               
+---Kindle
|   +---Geräte
|   |       appusage_000.csv
|   |       deviceusage_000.csv
|   |       marketingoptout_000.csv
|   |       registration.csv
|   |       
|   \---Inhalte
|       |   householdsharing.csv
|       |   KindleReadingActions.csv
|       |   ReadingSessions.csv
|       |   whispersync.csv
|       |   
|       \---digitalcontentownership
|               DigitalMusicTrack_B00...AG.json
|               DigitalMusicTrack_B00...DS.json
|               ...
|               KindleEBookSample_B00...W0.json
|               KindleEBookSample_B00...WA.json
|               ...
|               KindleEBook_B00...L0.json
|               KindleEBook_B00...W0.json
|               ...
|               KindlePDoc_2UEXX...TSOH.json
|               KindlePDoc_3753F...0766F1E.json
|               ...
|               MobileApp_B00...BO.json
|               MobileApp_B00...1W.json
|               ...
|               
+---Prime Music
|       DSAR_Jan_Piotrowski_Meine_Musikbibliothek.csv
|       
\---Prime Video
        Genderlanguage.csv
        Locationdata.csv
        Viewcounts.csv
        Viewinghistory.csv

As you can see this new package includes the same files as the first package in `/- Ihr Kundenkonto -` and `/Community Profile`, but also adds several other folders with my real usage data from Amazon:

The easiest way to look at the data was to just upload the whole folder to Google Drive. The previews of the `.csv` files is decent enough to get a quick overview.

Opening some of the files with Google Spreadsheet then enabled me to better format the available data and add columns to e.g. parse strange date format columns, sort by date columns and so on.

After a first look through the data files, they seem to be a pretty solid representation of what I expected to get from Amazon.

Some „logs“ are a bit short, only showing data from the last few months which is surprising, after I looked into those more I will possibly check with Amazon if there isn’t more that they just didn’t include by default.

I’m pretty happy with the time it took Amazon to compile this as well. Instant response and download or even self-serve would have been great, but I understand how much work it might be to compile all this data if there are not automated processes in place (yet). I expect this to get faster and better in the future.

Berlin focused Facebook Flohmarkt groups

Published 2018-09-14, 12:40

Any important ones missing?

How to Install Ruby with rbenv on Ubuntu 16.04

Published 2017-12-13, 14:48

Each time I have to install Ruby + rbenv + bundler manually on a Ubuntu machine I somehow mess it up and have to google for a tutorial, then try some until I find a working one.

This one here did work perfectly yesterday, when it was time to do it once again: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-with-rbenv-on-ubuntu-16-04

How to create a macOS High Sierra VM with VMware

Published 2017-12-01, 22:07

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