Tools

As a programmer with definite lack of visual skills, MagicaVoxel is a gift from God to create usable 3D models. Unfortunately, there is no installation option for Linux on the official website. With the help of Wine it is possible to use MagicaVoxel under Linux. And it really works great! Installation Prerequisites As I said you need to run Wine. As stated on their landing page, Wine is a compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to run under POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, macOS and BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic, such as a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into real time POSIX calls, eliminating the performance and memory degradation associated with other methods. Wine allows you to integrate Windows applications neatly into your desktop environment. ...

Xamarin utilizes the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) for debugging on physical devices, which are usually connected over usb. While this feature definitely is useful, it would sometimes be more practical if you could do this over WIFI instead. Luckily, that is possible! You can simple switch between using USB and TCP/IP for debugging. To get started, you need to connect your device via USB to the computer you’re debugging from. I’m using Windows, so the commands I’ll execute the following commands from the commandline (which runs as an administrator), but since they are adb commands, they should be the same on Linux or macOS. ...

In my introductory post on git, I told you that git uses three areas to track changes. Well, maybe I lied to you in this case. There are actually four areas available and I will cover this fourth area in todays post. The fourth area is called Stash. Basically, it works like a clipboard to which you can save current changes. Concepts of the Stash … Imagine the following scenario: You are working on a change. In the middle of your work you remember that you also wanted to do something else. This other change is important and should be handled immediately. However, it cannot be implemented with the uncomitted changes you are currently working on. In short, you need the status of the last commit, but you don’t want to discard your current changes and you also can’t commit them yet. ...

In one of my earliest posts, I wrote an introduction to version control, more specifically: git. The topic I will cover today extends this article by a topic which is actually not that complicated. However, people seem to find it hard to deal with it and use it as a highway to StackOverflow. I talk about git reset. This command can be used to reset changes in your working area or to remove staged files from the index. I think that one of the problems here is the context-dependent functionality of the command. Another problem is the commands potentially disruptive character, since it can lead to data loss. ...

Today, I’ll talk about how you can set up PGP for Thunderbird. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) allows you to encrypt and digitally sign your emails. I wanted to publish this post for quite some time now and thanks to some help from the 34C3, I finally managed to do it. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) Before we can start installing all the requirements and setting up PGP, I’d like to give you a short introduction to PGP. Basically, PGP is a tool to encrypt and digitally sign emails by applying public key cryptography. This means that you link your email account to a key pair, which can be used to encrypt and decrypt mails. Each of these key pairs consists of a public and a private key. Using those keys, you can encrypt and digitally sign your emails. Any person that knows your public key will now be able to use it to encrypt emails. On the other hand, you can use your private key to prove that you are the author of the email. Your private key will be used to decrypt mails encrypted with your public key and vice versa. ...