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New MacBook Air M2
My new Macbook came in today, from my sister in Houston. Thank you!
Coming from Macbook Pro 2015 (won’t run the latest Ventura or Xcode 14.3 anymore), this is a huge leap for me.
I just want to take note of the software and applications I initially installed for future reference.
Applications Installed in order Firefox Dashlane Grammarly Xcode Android Studio Homebrew git Todoist iTerm2 Sublime Text 4 Fantastical
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Early Birthday Gift
My wife gifted me an early present, a Fitbit. Thank you so much! I love you!
I used to have a Huawei smartwatch but lost it and hopefully, I can find them. This is my first Fitbit device. I always enjoy tracking my health data, especially my sleep pattern and steps.
And as someone who’s getting older by the day, tracking my health is something I am planning to take seriously.
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Jetpack Compose Journey Part 1
This will be my first time delving into Jetpack Compose for a rewrite of our existing app. I believe I have no time to study or do a full Google code lab for this one, due to the constraints of the timeline and deadline. So I will have to go head first and rely on my > 11 years of experience.
Setup So with every new Android project, I created one.
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Belated Happy Birthday To My Wife
After a very busy day yesterday, there was not enough time to post a greeting here.
Happy birthday to the best person I have ever known and my lovely wife! I love you so much!
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Google I/O 2023
It’s that time of the year. I’m surprised that Google announced the event this early.
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New Home
My wife and I are proud homeowners today. After 3 years in the making, we finally got the keys to our new house.
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Diablo Immortal on Linux
I was able to run Diablo Immortal on Linux, despite only being available on iOS, Android, and Windows. I know for a fact that I needed Wine to be able to run a Windows environment or application in Linux. But, I just found out you need to install Lutris too.
For future reference, the steps are below. I am on Fedora.
Install Wine 1 sudo dnf install wine Install Lutris 1 sudo dnf install lutris If Lutris won’t start, try installing it via Flatpak.
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My first contribution to Google/Android
I just had my first GitHub contribution to Android/Google merged into their codebase. I have never thought of taking my free time to contribute to open source in my over > 11 YOE.
1 lawgimenez/agp-v7.4.1 It’s not much of a contribution though, it’s just an update to the latest Android Gradle plugin. But nevertheless, I contributed and I’m proud of myself.
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Bought ThinkPad T480
Yesterday I bought a ThinkPad T480 for 17,000 PHP or ~315 USD. It has 512 SSD storage and 16GB RAM which is a very good specification-to-price ratio.
The screen resolution is underwhelming though with only 1366x768, compared to my Macbook Pro with Retina.
But the machine is decent enough to work on Android Studio and some light programming.
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Leftover Android Studios
Thanks to this Reddit post, I just found out that you could remove unused Android Studio cache or leftover versions.
I saved around ~4GB of storage.
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Books I've Read this 2022
I haven’t read that many books this year. For 2023, I hope I would be able to improve my reading habit.
The following below are the books I’ve read (finished).
Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World Beastie Boys Book The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time UNIX: A History and a Memoir Three Assassins by Kōtarō Isaka Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion
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My Personal Feedbin Reader - v0.2.1
The name of my personal Feedbin reader is called FeedMe. The more I worked on it the more it feels like this is not an RSS reader app, but a food or recipe app.
v0.2.1 Release I finally fixed the format alignment in the feed view.
And, the mark as read button is now located at the bottom. For easier reach with anyone who has small hands.
There is still more work to do and I am currently enjoying iterating on the fixes, improvements and features.
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My personal Feedbin Reader - v0.2
In three days, I developed my own Feedbin Reader since the official one is not written in native. In other words, it feels so slow.
First commit was on December 7, 2022.
The app is written in SwiftUI and I am just blown away by how fast you could create an iOS app. Compared with Storyboarding or UIKit.
I open sourced for my future reference.
There’s still so much to work on it, so many bugs and critical ones but for now, it is functional for my everyday use.
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Philippines Top 10 In Pivoting to Clean Energy
According to MIT, the Philippines is one of the countries pivoting towards clean energy. Perhaps we are the only one throughout Southeast Asia? Good to know our leaders here, and past, are not climate change deniers.
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Updating old Android codebase
An old client of mine contacted me to fix some bugs and the tricky part was that I have to update an Android codebase that hasn’t been updated in 3 years.
I have updated com.android.tools.build:gradle from v3.6.4 to v4.2.2.
And from v4.2.2 to v7.3.1.
This is how old the codebase is.
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GCF on Hacker News
In high school, in me and my brother’s room, I had a vandal of a phrase on my wall saying
On the streets saving the scene from the forces of evil
It came from Good Clean Fun’s hardcore album of the same name. It was one of my favorite albums growing up.
About 2 weeks ago, I came upon a username issa on Hacker News and was talking about some hardcore riffs.
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Android Studio Render Problem
If you encounter a Render Problem issue on your Android Studio, like the one below.
The solution I came up with is to use the Material Styles as your app theme.
1 2 <style name="AppTheme" parent="@style/Theme.Material3.Light"> </style>
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Reddit Gift
Reddit made an error with their Premium and in turn, they gifted me with 21,000 coins. I would never expect them to even respond or solve this issue.
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Android Job Post Nostalgia
Just found this photo of a newspaper ad for an Android Developer job post. This was my first break in the mobile development industry.
This was published back in October 2011. I emailed them my application and was interviewed the next month. And was hired, if I remember correctly, the same month in November that year.
Amazing, I still have that email sent saved.
This is the source code of the app I developed for the demo for the technical interview.
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Xcode 14.1 Beta 3 New Splash?
I just saw this new Xcode splash screen for the first time. This popped up on Xcode 14.1 Beta 3. I’m surprised this wasn’t included in Xcode 14.0?
Had to confirm it on Reddit.