Marvin Trilles

Have you tried transferring files from your phone or tablet to your PC but just could not get hold of that micro USB cable? If you are the type of person that needs file transfer every now and then but always forget the cables, as long as you have WiFi access, this application can make your life better. The WiFi File Transfer apps allows shares your phone or tablets drive over the air allowing you to transfer data to and from the device through a simple web interface.

Microsoft error messages are sometimes cryptic and in some cases, misleading. This morning I was working on a client server setup at work when I encountered one. So I have two fresh image drive, one for the client and the other for the server. For redundancy, each have their own MS SQL Server installed. The client uses its local database in case of disconnect. After a little configuration, all is almost ready to go. However, final test would reveal its not ready at all.

We like receiving emails, but opening your inbox and finding a hundred of unread emails just listed in front of your eyes can be a sore sight . The emails we receive can be organized based on the sender , the topic, the domain name where the email was sent and other flexible rules and criteria. I love playing with rules and filters in Microsoft outlook, unfortunately, i  don't use it for personal emails. Personal emails can be cumbersome to manage since all types of junk can just come right at you. Good thing GMAIL from Google supports the ease of management through filters and labels.  Labels are like tags or folders, they are used to group emails based on common categories. Filters  are rules that makes label management automatic . How cool it is to have an inbox that automatically arrange your email as it comes, either by placing it to a special folder or just sending it directly to the trash. This blog entry will give you the basic idea on how to do jus...

Finally, Google has released a note-taking application which syncs through the cloud. This means your note is available across your Google powered devices as well as across the web through their web applications. This morning, Google Keep was released in the Android Play Store and made available to the web through this link .  A few years ago, Google Notebook was introduced, unfortunately like many of the Google apps that was discontinued, it had to go. I was waiting for a relaunch, then Evernote came and blew me away. Now that it has emerge as Google Keep, lets see if it can satisfy our simple requirements. This is a new app and we should expect improvements and features in a few more weeks. Until then, we can only decide if we go with Google Keep or keep Evernote :-)

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day. It is a cultural and religious holiday celebrated every 17th of March. The celebration was named after Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Having said that, it is therefore a tradition associated with everything Irish : green and  shamrock.  Why on March 17th ? Most of the reading would point us into one logical reason, it is the day that St. Patrick died.  Why  Irish ? The tradition started in Ireland. The Irish people credit him to bringing Christianity in the country. What about the shamrock ? Shamrock is the national flower of Ireland. The story states that St. Patrick used the flower to explain the concept of Holy Trinity to the pagans. Why green and gold? History says that in Ireland the Catholics are represented by green and Protestants are of orange, being a Catholic Saint green was used. The day is celebrated with a lot of green - green hats, green beers and green leprechauns.

I must admit, I am a fanatic. My virtual day start with Google and ends with Google. So when I came accross some fun facts about it, I have to share it. So feast on the list taken from different sources (other sources may be unreliable) , I just got those that made me smile.       The name "Google" was an accident. A spelling mistake by the original founders who thought they were going for "Googol". Fellow graduate student Sean Anderson suggested Google creator Larry Page and Sergey Brin name their site "Googolplex". Page suggested they shorten it to " Googol " , which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Anderson mstyped "Googol" as "Google", which was an available name.   The first Google storeage was made from LEGO. See article here .

Google  has started cleaning up their Play Store for ad-blocking applications.  This is an expected behavior from a company that earns from advertisements and commercials. Those affected by the "great purge" was properly informed through a letter similar to the one below.

If you are like me using more than one device for work and leisure, then synching  between devices for file updates is a pain. What is more frustrating is discovering you have been modifying an older version of your file on another workstation! Even the best merging tool wont help you much if the changes have been big. I bet two in three readers would say, hey why not use the cloud ? I have to say cloud is amazing, it enables my android devices to sync seamlessly and I consider Evernote as one of a must have.    

   Remember the days when we used to pimp our windows desktop with fancy wallpapers and gadgets? I wished I could do more of that before with my old Nokia symbian phone and  it cant be done on my  iPod Touch .  Android came and gave users the customize the phone the way they want it , in any way they can.  Regardless of  versions and fragmentations, every android user is different and each have their own way of reflecting it on their phone. Lets start with the screen most bound to be customized, the home screen. The home screen is the main "desktop" in an adnroid phone, luckily, for us users, we have all the tools to make it our own.

Image Source; www.techcrunch.com Should software developers or anyone working on similar fields pay for the "Apps" they use? Legally speaking, if the software is for a price, anyone who intends to use it must buy the software. Of course we all know this is never a common reality. I will not go into discussing  corporate  non sense and go into details of complicated licensing schemes being offered by , often times, greedy software companies. Let's focus into what they call,  the "Apps". These  simple yet entertaining and(sometimes)  useful software has kicked off to become a worldwide commodity, thanks to the ever expanding smart phone industry. Unlike big productivity suites offered by large money-sucking companies, most of these "apps" are startups trying to make a name in the industry. Of course we know some who went on and hit big time with a highly addictive app. Others were eventually bought by bigger companies. That's the idea of...

A few years ago , I wrote about the concept of singleton and eventually mentioned the term "Resign Patterns" in the process.  In the realm of software engineering, design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in  software design. Similarly, resignation has been a general solution to a commonly occurring problem within a workplace.  Having only passed two resignation letters since I started working, clearly shows that I was never a fan of this solution. However, it does not mean that I am not fascinated by it and that my mind is not cheerfully entertaining and  playing with the idea of bidding goodbye to my bosses at some point.