android hide media files

so you have an android phone and you have some pics or video's you don't want anyone to see. i first tried locking my phone, but it's too tiresome to keep entering codes or shapes or whatever to unlock it. i want quick accessability. then i got a free app. locker, face lock, and used it to lock the gallery app, where all the photo's and downloads are stored. but, it also locked my system manager app, which i use all the time to kill app's to save power and cpu. plus, pics were still accessible through camera app.

i then used the files app to create a directory to store all my secret files. but, they were still showing up in gallery app, because android has a media scanner, which scans all folders to get music, pic and video files. there are 2 ways to stop the media scanner from scanning a folder:

1. make it a hidden folder, i.e. change ranjit to .ranjit (to view hidden files: files -> settings -> show hidden files)
2. create file named .nomedia and put in directory you don't want scanned.

Hidden folder created. How to hide files in adroid.

thanks to: http://alexborisov.org/hide-media-files-from-android-media-scanners/

upgrading chromium on debian 6.0.5

so i installed linux debian 6.0.5 and tried to get chrome from the repo's, but it's not included and i cannot download it from the chrome download webpage, since the company blocks the download page. However, the repo's did have chromium, which is the open source version of chrome. i installed this, but the version i got was chromium 6.0 (see pic below).

so i googled and found a ppa for chromium stable builds (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/stable). ofcourse for ubuntu >:

adding ppa to debian synaptic sources list - i had a little trouble figuring this out, the solution is embarassingly simple and since googling didn't help, here is what to do. synaptic sources does not recognize "ppa:chromium/stable" format, it wants "deb xxxx" format. click the "technical details for this ppa" link and it shows various deb formats for various ubuntu releases :)

i tried precise (12.0.4), but various dependencies could not be met. i tried maverick (10.10), but various dependencies could not be met. Lucid (10.04) was the only source repository which worked. The deb for chromium stable for lucid is "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/stable/ubuntu lucid main"

It upgraded me to chromium 18.0.x.x :) (see below)

vmware tools install on linux guest

I installed a VMware virtual machine (free virtual player) on my windows XP machine. i then installed debian 6.0.5 gnome front end on it. For enhanced functionality like, shared folders between host/guest, copy and paste, drag and drop, etc., you need to install vmware tools. At the top under virtual machine, is the option for that.

When I ran the tools shell script in my linux guest, it could not find gcc or kernel headers, etc. The specific error was something like, "vmware tools cannot find gcc on the system". I was puzzled because when i typed "gcc" on a command prompt, it found the command. I felt it was not properly installed. A little later i found you need to do the following two steps to install proper gcc based build capacity on a linux machine.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` (` is the one next to the 1 key on your keyboard)

The first command installs gcc and all the compiler utilities. The second command installs the header files for your currently running kernel. Notice that the ` is the one next to the 1 key on your keyboard.
thanks to: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-vmware-tools-on-ubuntu-edgy-eft/

Now shared folders work, drag and drop, cut and paste, AWESOME!

Also, it might have fixed a problem I had with the mouse getting locked when I was hi-lighting text or moving stuff around. It would lock from 5 - 30 secs. Hopefully, that is fixed too.

enabling flash with chromium browser on linux debian 6.0.5

I installed linux debian 6.0.5 on a vmware instance.  I then installed Chromium browser from the repo.  Also installed flashplugin-nonfree package, which is supposed to install flash.  Flash was not working.  Company blocks flash dowload page, so went home and downloaded generic linux flash install package, named install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz

Unzip the tar and extract libflashplayer.so to any directory.  Then copy the file to the chromium browser's plugins directory - /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

I did this as root, so I chmod 777 the file.  Restart browser, flash works :)