Add An Existing Local Git To Github.com

Git is a great way to manage different versions of your code during development. I use it on my local machine when developing on my own but occasionally need to start working with others. This is a step-by-step description of how to upload a local git repository to github.com for sharing and collaborating.

Useful Git Commands

I've made several posts about git as I was learning to use it. This is a list of all the useful commands I found in the form of a cheat sheet.

Intro to Git Version Control

This is a simple story to illustrate how to do basic revision control with Git. I've had a couple of nightmares with Git repositories - it has been a bit of a git getting my head around how it works.

If you don't know what Git is, it's a distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system.  It's widely used to share open source code and is great for managing your code base with speed and, if you pay at github.com private.

Uninstalling Linux Packages

Advanced Package Tool (Apt) is one of the programmes that make Linux such an awesome operating system.  It allows you to install any of 1000s of libraries, commands, tools and applications and Sourceforge have a good introduction for this.  However there is little info about how to uninstall anything and clean up properly. Vast amounts of hard-drive space can be taken up by files left over after an uninstall.  This post gives you the information to thoroughly uninstall programmes and any extra dependencies that came with them. Keep your Linux machine as clean as Mr. Clean!

Raspberry Pi Motion Detection Security Camera

We have weekly deliveries of meat or vegetables to our home that are left outside our house if we are not there to receive them.  Although they are only there for a few hours and hidden behind some planters someone noticed them and started stealing them. I decided to catch them by using a Raspberry Pi to make a really cheap security camera.

Raspberry Pi Download Git

This is a quick post on how to download a git repository to a *nix machine - in this case a Raspberry Pi. I did it to get some cool code that my colleague had interneted/clouded to download to my Raspberry Pi.

Get Python IDLE to work on your Mac

An out of the box Mac comes with Python and a development environment called IDLE. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well e.g. raw_input() command causes it to hang and there are some other serious problems. Here's an alternative and a quick solution...

Mac Image Batch Processing with terminal

Have you got a pile of images you want to rotate or resize? You can do this really quickly on your Mac using built-in command line aka The Terminal in seconds.

Get started with Git: Cloning

Git is a software version control system.  It is good because you can use it in a distributed way keeping local and remote repositories kept in sync, with multiple developers strong project history and conflict resolution.

This post describes how to 'git going' with an existing project assuming you have already Set Up Git.  We create a local version of a project on github, make a small change and bounce that back to the github master.

Unhide Android Developer Options

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with Android 4.2.2/Jellybean. I routinely use my phone for development purposes requiring access to Android Developer settings. Out of the box these options are hidden and you need to know how to reveal the options.

Go to Settings, More..., About Device. Tap on Build number 7 times.  You will get a little toast popup window letting you know developer options are enabled.  They can be accessed from the More... menu.

Secrets of bit.ly

I always thought the all those bit.ly shortened URLs were used to reduce the number of characters for tweets.  It turns out that using bit.ly does a lot more for you.

Accessing JSON Stored in NSDictionary

I'm still learning to be a developer... and probably always will be.  It helps me to write blogs about code that I manage to get working. I've written an app that uses OAuth to access a JSON input from the web and parse it. This post describes some of the new stuff I learnt on the way, specifically about parsing JSON and accessing NSDictionary.