Saturday, July 18, 2015

Adding filters for contact groups in gmail

May you have face the problem to create a filter for a group of your contacts. Google for some reason doesnt provide such a feature. Here what we can do to override this small problem.

create a mail and add the mail addresses of your group. Then copy the line from the 'to' field and paste it into the textfield of this link. Finally press the 'convert' button and take the output. With that last output we can create a new filter and apply our preferences to the filter. Just paste it to the 'Has the words' field. I think all the others that you have to do is obvious.

Of course you could write the condition by hand but for those that is not familiar with OR and AND operators is a bit more convenient.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Android and full backup notes


these are the steps for a full backup Android phones on Linux.

  1. Download the SDK
  2. install and configure the SDK
  3. Enable debugging mode on the phone and connect it to the computer
  4. Create the backup

  1. Download the SDK
Not much to say here. From the download site under SDK tools only(if you are not interested in downloading the Android Studio as well) select android-sdk_{version}-linux.tgz and unzip with
tar -xvzf android-sdk_<ver>-linux.tgz
You need to have installed java.
  1. install and configure the SDK
 It is recommended to locate it under your home directory. if so, next
cd ~/android-sdk-linux/tools
./android
and install all the updates.

Optional but probably you will need that as well for efficiency. Open .bashrc or  .bash_profile and add:

export PATH=~/android-sdk-linux/tools:~/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools:$PATH
export PATH=~/android-sdk-linux/build-tools:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/android-sdk-linux/tools/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Now you are able to run adb command from everywhere.
  1. Enable debugging mode on the phone and connect it to the computer 
On the phone now,

Settings>developer options>enable usb debugging.
  1. Create the backup
the last step requires from you to create a folder where the backup will be stored and run

adb backup -apk -shared -all -f ~/Backups/fullbackup-20130722.ab

obviously replace "~/Backups/fullbackup-20130722.ab" with you own folder and give any name on your file that you like.

To restore the backup
adb restore ~/Backups/fullbackup-20130722.ab

That is it. If you need read some extra notes look at http://www.all-things-android.com/content/android-device-backups which was also the resource of this article.