Month: September 2018

No Notifications on Android ? Try Changing Your Phone’s Wifi DNS

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Android Notification Photo by Jamie Street on UnsplashAndroid Notification Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

It seems ever since my Android phone updated to Oreo I have been missing many notifications. I would be on my home network and when I left home, my wifi would switch to data and my phone would start going off with delayed notifications I should have received when I was on my home’s wifi. I finally found what seems to be the fix. After fiddling with the Wifi Settings I discovered that by changing the DNS to Google’s own (8.8.8.8. and 8.8.4.4) the notifications would work on WIFI.

  1. Long Press on your Wifi Wireless SSID Name
  2. A menu should pop up, select “Modify Network”
  3. It will show you several options – SCROLL down on the dialog (mine only appeared to show Password and Proxy Settings, I had to scroll to see the DHCP settings)
  4. Under IP Settings, select the down arrow and change from “DHCP” to “Static”
  5. Change “IP Address” to a free available ip address on your network. If you don’t know what to do here then google it or check your router settings. It will be something like 192.168.0.120. The first 3 groups of numbers should match the ip address of your router, the 4th group is a number that hasn’t been assigned by your router yet to a device on your network.
  6. Change “DNS 1” to 8.8.8.8 and “DNS 2” to 8.8.4.4
  7. Click “Save”. That’s it. You may have to disable and re-enable the wifi on your phone but you should now be getting notifications.
  8. I later found an explanation and guide on Quora that also explains the steps. See this list of steps which has screen shots.

Easy Two Dollar Magnetic Wall Mount for Google Home Mini and/or Tablet

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Here’s a stable, cheap magnetic wall mount for a small tablet or a Google Home Mini. The big advantage to a magnetic mount is you can easily detach and reattach without any tools. In addition, for tablets, you can use them vertically or horizontally. The mounts have a surpisingly strong magnetic bond and are incredibly stable – I have been using these for a year with an Amazon Fire HD 7″ tablet and a Home Mini. For the wall plate of the Home Mini I used the bottom cut out from a tin can. For the Tablet I used a 1 gang metal plate bought from Home Depot. The metal plate is more attractive and has a stronger hold than the tin can but either will do these devices.

What you need:

  • Large circular Washer from Home Depot or other hardware supplier (not sure of exact part number but looks something like this, mine is 2″ in diameter and has “ASC” Stamped on it) (about 20 cents)
  • 1 Gang Metal Wall Plate or Bottom of a Tin Can (at most $1.60)
  • Large 1 3/4 inch Magnet (about 80 cents)
  • Sheet Rock Screw and Anchor
  • Super Glue

Installation

  1. Optionally paint the wall plates. Let dry well.

    2.  

  2. Attach the metal plate to the wall using the sheet rock anchors. The tin can just needs one screw, the wall mount has two. For a tablet, make sure you install the plate in such a way as to allow the tablet to be mounted or have enough space to orient it horizontally or vertically, the circulate magnet will let you do either.
     

    Tin Can

    Metal Plate

  3. Place the magnet on the plate (you can try superglueing it but I found that the magnetism holds it just as well and the super glue may come off as you can see happened on the tin can mount above).

    4.  

  4. Superglue the Washer to the back of the device.

    5.  

    Google Home Mini

    Tablet

  5. Done.

 
To keep the wires neat as possible and out of the way, I drilled holes above or below the device to run the cables behind the sheet rock to the wall outlet below. For the wall outlet I installed a USB outlet and a small saw brush plate above it (about $6).

One Line Linux Command to Kill Parent Process and Spawned Children in A Group

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Computer Screen Photo by Markus Spiske on UnsplashIn Linux, if you’d like to kill a command and all processes spawned by that command do this (in our example the command “parent” is example.py):

This will kill the “example.py” process and anything that it spawned.

How it works:

To kill all processes of a group the command is

To get the group id you do the ps command using the arguments as shown, grep it for your command, but formatting example.py with quotes and using the bracket for the first letter (this filters out the grep command itself) then filter it through awk to get the second field which is the group id. The tail -1 gets rid of duplicate group ids. Yout put all of that in a variable using the $() syntax and voila – you get the group id. So you substitute that $(mess) for that -groupid in the kill command above.