Zoiper for Windows

Zoiper, one of the best VoIP clients on Android, and my current favourite, is available for Windows, too. There is a free, community version and seems to work perfectly.



Download Zoiper 3, a free VoIP softphone :: Zoiper

The Best Free Antivirus for 2014 - PCMag.com

After defragmenter, it is time to refresh an antivirus.



The Best Free Antivirus for 2014 | PCMag.com



This year's choice seems to be BitDefender.

Best Free Disk Defragmenters Tested

It has been a while since I used or tested a disk defragmenter on Windows. However, as the system noticeably slows down, it is time to tune it again. Below is the link to a fresh test of the free defragmenters available.



Best Free Disk Defragmenters Tested | Gaming PC Builder



The current winner is O&O Free edition.

Unlock Android device with RFID

Xposed module for unlocking an Android device using RFID (link).

Another option is NFC Unlocker (link) but this requires modifications to the system as, by default, Android does not allow NFC radio until the device is powered on and unlocked.

Unlock your device with NFC

After initial hacks there is now an xposed module available for unlocking a rooted Android device.

(link)

You can now read 41.9% of all real German articles

Thanks to DuoLingo, with their method and availability of language-learning material, my knowledge of German language progressed so far that I've been pleasantly surprised by the following achievement:

"You can now read 41.9% of all real German articles"

That is quite impressive an impressive achievement since I'm only practicing as a hobby and I don't use the language in conversation much. However, I can notice progress in reading German texts and this progress is only inspiring to continue practicing and working even more.

Moving to Static and Keeping Your Toys - Harp.js

Raymond Camden's posts seem to be a great current source of info about Harp.js recipes. If you didn't know, Harp.js is a fantastic node.js-based pre-processor / web server. I currently use it to turn any directory with Markdown notes into a web site (locally) or compile the same into a static web site ready for deployment to any hosting solution.

An interesting, and for some important, aspect of using Harp.js vs dynamic content providers (solutions a la Asp.Net MVC, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, etc.) is how to keep some of the dynamic features even on a static (.html-based) web site. The article below is a good starting point and I'll be happy to chip in a few more related links.



Moving to Static and Keeping Your Toys | Flippin' Awesome

Additional resources

Search

Harp.js provides a JSON representation of all the files in the directory tree. This is an excellent base for a client-side site search. Some ready-made solutions are here:

• Tipue Search (link). This is exactly what is needed to provide search capabilities to a static site. A realtime search would be even better.
• Tapir (link). This is a hosted solution, however.

Free Zone - Free WiFi Scanner

Free Zone is an Android app with the largest database of free and open WiFi networks that I found. While I've seen other apps/sites, like Wlanmap which focuses mostly on Germany and Austria and have more detailed data, Free Zone covers a much larger geographic area and has a decent number of hotspots to display.

It allows caching of hotspot data, which is useful when you are travelling to a new location.

The content is submitted by the users so there's plenty of sources.



Free Zone - Free WiFi Scanner - Android Apps on Google Play

Harp, the static web server with built-in preprocessing

After reading a bit more into Harp documentation, I've discovered that it is a quite powerful framework. It supports some important features I was looking for:

• templating with EJS and Jade
• Markdown syntax for documents
• compilation into HTML for static sites
• contains a server for displaying the contents
• can be plugged into an existing Express site and be used only as a pre-processor

Harp, the static web server with built-in preprocessing



My demo project: Wiki on Node

The goal in this case is to find a node.js-based wiki engine that can be used to write hierarchical notes, a typical wiki site content, documentation, and so on. The content has to be searchable. The wiki is to be used locally, meaning on a local machine - no hosting and as less as possible dependencies, libraries, etc. The content is to be written using Markdown and as much as possible separated from the layout and styling. The wiki engine has to support serving other files, like PDFs or anything else, really.

After finding out that Harp supports compilation into static site structure, I'm thinking of replacing DocPad as the templating engine.