Category: English Post (Page 23 of 97)

My morning news paper

2018-07-26 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

One of my favorite morning rituals is to have a cup of coffee while reading the news, but unlike Johnny Business pants over here, I don’t read the newspaper, I use something more high tech!

What is RSS?

I use a service called RSS, which is in short known as a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.

Why do I use it?

Newspapers are at an all time low, and even if I try to get the paper to read first thing in the morning, it won’t catch up to the latest news as it happens, here is where the internet excels over traditional press.

How to use RSS on your computer / phone?

There are several tools to choose from, after Google retired it’s reader (sending shock-waves throughout the RSS world), there are some very good alternatives you can choose from.

RSSOwl

One of my all time favorites, a cross platform tool that is free and open source, the only downside to it is that development stopped over 5 years ago, I stopped using it after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 because of dependency issues, RIP Owl.

QuiteRSS

A light weight RSS client built around QT, has less features than RSSowl (can’t grab the contents of the feed without opening it in a new window), but still a very decent client to run on Ubuntu Linux.

Lifera

It’s a lightweight RSS reader on Linux, worth a try.

Firefox Extensions

For those who appreciate a minimalist feel, there are Firefox add-ons that can grab feeds and display them on your system, surely has less features than a dedicated client, but it’s always fun to tinker around with them, Feedbro is highly recommended (also available for chrome).

There are bunch of apps in the Google play store, choose whatever you like (I don’t use any).

General notes

Not all sites support RSS, don’t get frustrated, look for others.
Some software works better with some sites than others, sometimes you have to compromise.
Always make a backup of your feed file, the format is OPML.

Final words

There has been a decline in the last few years due to the rise of social media, but it’s still a popular way to stay updated and on top of news, and while it doesn’t have the flare of buying the daily newspaper, it sure has more versatility and effectiveness, and the same good feels of getting to know what’s going on in the world today, while sipping on a cup of coffee.

Do you use a RSS feed reader? What’s on your feed list? Any sites you recommend?

I’m back to using Atom Editor

2018-07-02 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

Not a fan of the green icon.

Life is all about discovery, learning and not being afraid of making mistakes, with that being said, I say that I’m back to using Atom after a rocky relationship, of love and hate!

Why I am bothering to give Atom a second chance, the reasons are detailed below.

1. The only “free” editor of the bunch.

I’ve identified Sublime text as the best text editor for development purpose, let’s not forget that Sublime is not free, I know that they allowed using it for those who are under-privileged, but it’s still a Freemium that costs 70$ (free if you can handle the annoying pop up telling you to register every now and then), after changing the licensing plans in early 2018, I don’t know the current status of Sublime text and don’t care very much to be honest!
Atom editor is free and open source under the MIT license, and despite of Microsoft making a money grab for GitHub, Atom will remain free and open source for everyone to enjoy.

2. It’s down right beautiful!

Of all the text editors available on Linux (I use Linux on my everyday laptop), Atom the best looking of the bunch! Not just the color schemes and themes, everything in Atom is designed to look awesome, from user interface to the website, even the shirts and mugs look great (never got any but my birthday is coming up ;), and the user experience is great, even compared to Microsoft VS code (who is based on coffee script and javascript as well), despite my love for efficiency, I value a beautiful GUI.

Ain’t that a beauty?

3. Very customizable

Atom has a ton of themes and packages available for download, which makes it more expandable and versatile, and with some knowledge you can develop your own themes and packages, all what you need to know is in the Atom flight manual (released in 2015 but still very informative). You can even change the key-map of Atom to whatever editor you migrated from and customize it as you like to decrease the learning curve.

4. Ease of use

User experience should be always considered when evaluating software, and VIM for example despite being the most efficient and the most praised text editor in all of the Linux ecosystem, however it’s not easy to use at all, the learning curve is steep, I read the book titled “A byte of VIM“, but I still don’t see why or how can it be better than Atom or anything, as I don’t do anything “professional” with VIM. As a matter of fact, I’m not too keen on the whole terminal as a one tool for all.

5. Consumes more resource, so what?

Yes, Atom is heavier than Sublime or VIM, but does it really matter at this point? In the year 2018 laptops are getting faster and RAM is getting bigger, a few hundred megabytes almost seem like nothing when considering all the reasons mentioned above, it might not be the most resource efficient, but it’s the most usable editor of the bunch.
A well tweaked laptop (both hardware and software) can handle Atom like a breeze, and it’s getting better as time goes by. Speed won’t be an issue if you use an SSD (although using an SSD in itself can be an issue at times!), you could say it’s the price of enjoying a beautiful interface and ease of use.
Besides, converting to a less consuming Linux distro has spared some memory to spend (I’ll blog about it later and link back).

6. The devil you know!

I’ve been using Atom (On and Off) for the past three years, I’ve read the Atom flight manual and even reviewed it on my blog in a few posts (this is the fifth), so for the most part I’ll stick to Atom being the familiar editor that I’ve known and loved (sort of) for the past three years. I’m not alone, as it’s one of the most popular text editors on Alternativeto.

Have you ever used Atom before? What are your impressions about it? What do you use to edit prose and code, and if you use VIM, please take your rants to /r/VIM, because they would be appreciated better by fellow VIM zealots than me.

And yes, this post was written in Atom 1.28, so that you know!

Should you replace your SSD after the COMRESET failed (errno=-16) error?

2018-06-08 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

It is a scary boot screen to wake up to, but things aren’t that simple really, should you throw the SSD in the trash and buy a new one? Or simply ignore the message like it didn’t happen? Well today we will look into it with more detail.

COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

I’ve been having this error now (on and off) for over a year, the disk works fine but tends to throw an error every now and then, I am running Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and the bug seems to be affecting Linux alone.

When contacting the manufacturer of the drive (silicon power) they suggested to update the firmware via a utility on the website, since it’s Windows only I had to remove Linux, install Windows to update, and then come back to Linux.

Since it started I’m backing up my data daily and creating images with parted magic every week, so far the disk hasn’t died on me (reached around 6400 hours, and the bug appeared in 4000 for the first time).

Do you have to replace the SSD right away?

From my experience, it’s not necessary to replace the drive right away, but backing up is a must!

I’ve installed Gsmartcontrol and set the system to check for errors on startup (was recommended to do so on Askubuntu) and it’s reporting no errors on all tests (short, long and contingency).

I do recommend that you get the drive checked, and if possible send it back if it’s still under RMA.

Update

I swapped out the SDD with the old HDD due to an increase in the COMRESET failed (errno=-16) error, I guess my laptop is showing it’s age, and I am due to replacing it soon anyway.

Are you suffering from this issue too? What did you do to fix it? Please comment below.

Update #2

Even after getting a new HDD, I still get the same error message! While the same SSD on another device doesn’t!!

6 years of blogging

2018-05-29 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

The memory works in mysterious ways sometimes! I could almost swear that my blog anniversary was May 27th, turns out later it’s actually May 24th!!

In all cases, I had this post in my mind for months, but I’ve been really busy in May and didn’t get a chance to sit down and write a post, so here goes.

How it all began

Six years ago while working at a dusty old lab in Tripoli university, I came across an issue that I couldn’t really solve, and since I didn’t find a suitable answer on-line, I went into full panic mode until I found a solution. Now many people would stop there and call it a day, but I decided since I had such a difficult time solving this issue, maybe other people are having the same too, and would appreciate to find a solution online, so I started a blog and posted the issue on it (which was mildly successful at the time).

Screenshot of how my blog looked in 2013

My blog was dedicated to solving everyday technical problems, I called it “Tech Tips Made Easy”, and it was far from perfect, rough around the edges, I made a ton of mistakes writing, but it was on and I had a ton of fun doing it! So I guess that’s what matters!

Evolution of the blog

Over the years my blog took many names, looks and purposes, varying to my current needs and approach at the time, so bits and pieces of that lurked around here and there, dead links and unfinished stories, but eventually I managed to normalize everything and maintain a certain vibe for the whole thing, gradually turning into a how-to blog for Libyan people on various living topics, which proved to be a great way to attract readers.

Taking a couple on-line writing courses was also very helpful, as the quality and length of my posts increased, however the grammatical mistakes decreased (naturally)! I hope to keep improving as time goes by.

I am really glad that my blog is taking shape and becoming more polished as the years go by, almost mirroring my own evolution as a person.

Things I experimented with

Not too long ago I had a custom domain that I bought from LTT, but I soon realized that hosting a free blog on a paid domain wasn’t all that, and that I could do most of what I did before (and some better) on the free domain hosted by blogspot.

That’s how my blog Muaad [dot] com [dot] ly looked in 2015

I also made a Youtube video to celebrate reaching 100,000 viewers and I had a shortly lived podcast series hosted on Soundcloud.

One thing I tried and didn’t payoff yet was Google’s own Adsense program, I made 5$ last year and just 1$ this year, so I think this idea is a fail so far!

I added a Disqus widget for comments for a few months, but that didn’t help attract more comments, quite the opposite!!

Last year’s anniversary post was in Arabic, the only one to be posted in Arabic.

An important thing was fixing how some of the blog posts looked, mainly because I wrote in Libreoffice and imported to the blog right away, it took time but the blog posts are cleaner and much more readable.

I have created a new Facebook profile for the sole purpose of managing a Facebook page for my blog, in hope of attracting more traffic.
I added 5000 people and turned my profile into a page, two years later I can admit that the idea failed horribly…
I should have stayed away from Facebook and kept true to my principles.

Current pace

I don’t post as much as I did before, during my prime in 2015 I wasn’t working and had plenty of free time on my hands, now I have more responsibility and find that coming up with fresh topics that people would be interested in is becoming more difficult, as I said in a previous post, I don’t want to blog about the current situation in the country anymore because it’s very depressing.

Perhaps I need a new creative process? Because my current one isn’t very fast!

Reach and recognition

I’ve managed to reach out to many people here in Libya by addressing what’s going on and ways to deal with some situations, also I had several of my posts translated by Mrs. Angelika Gutsche to German. I get a lot of e-mails through the “contact me” link on top, and one of them was a job offer!

My favorite blog template of all time, marked the 2017 era.

Where do I stand currently?

My blog as of this writing has almost 364,000 views, with 6 subscribers and 417 posts (this one included).

What does the future hold?

To a great deal I achieved my goal of blogging, to me it’s a place to speak my mind and try to help other people while doing it. I don’t think I’ll be as active as before, but I’ll do my best to chime in every now and then with whatever I find suitable.

Thank you for reading this update, I hope we continue this journey together for many many years.

What do you think of this post? Do you have an active blog? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.