[Android Studio] Error : Failed to find: com.android.support

It's nice that Google is trying to make a full-fledged Android Authoring Software, complete with what is expected from an authoring tool.  But as of now, the tool itself is in Beta which has a few hiccups hidden somewhere, and one of this is not being able to compile an Android Project. o_o

Like, really?

So if you, like me, had encountered this problem saying:

Error : Failed to find: com.android.support

Relax and open SDK Manager then install the Android Support Repository and/or Android Support Library.  Better yet, install those two. :)

Upon restart of Android Studio, that problem should go away.

Happy hacking!

~creek23

[FFMPEG] Adjust video volume

Before anything else, here's a quick disclaimer:  I do not promote the use of torrent for downloading movies you do not currently own.  Yes, I do download movies but only if I have a DVD/Bluray copy of it.  The only reason I download it so I would have a soft copy -- yes, I suck at ripping DVD/Blurays.

Okay.  Now, onto the issue at hand.

It seems that this torrent group called YIFY is famous among torrent freaks because of quality Bluray rips packed in very small HD files.  Sadly, YIFY configured their rips to lessen the quality of audio.  Which is not a problem for people watching the video on their computers since VLC Media Player can double the movie's volume and everybody's happy.

Well, not quite.

People who have LED TVs happen to enjoy the quality of the movie they downloaded by watching it on their 40~50in TVs.  And it so happen that their TVs doesn't have the feature VLC Media Player has (doubling the volume) -- so they are stuck with the audio quality that YIFY offers with their small-size HD movies.

So how do you fix it?

Have I mentioned my disclaimer, yet?

Anyway, let's use FFMPEG! Just type this into your Command Prompt:

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -c:v copy -af "volume=10dB" "thanksToCreekCodes.mp4"

Above ffmpeg command should make sure that you should now have a louder audio while having the same video quality.

I'm pretty sure you understood my disclaimer right?  Well, happy viewing!

~creek23

Compiling Geany on Windows

Can't remember exactly how many times I've tried compiling Geany or even thought of trying to compile it on Windows.  But I remember that my last try was last 2011 -- about February or March.

It's been a while that I've been trying to find a stable and reliable free and open source (not to mention cross-platform) Source Code Editing software so I could strip it down to provide an IDE specifically functioning for my open source game creation project called KAGE.  Finally, -- finally! -- I successfully compiled it yesterday!

I know that Geany's project page has a how-to page for compiling it on Windows but I still had bumps along the way.  This tutorial is simply to compliment what seems to be missing in the official tutorial.

So, just a recap. You need to have this things done already:

• GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) , as your compiler, made available through MinGW project -- I used version 4.6.2
• MSYS, as your Shell Interface for Windows, also made available through MinGW
• GTK+, as the GUI library, available on GTK.org 
• And of course, the Geany source code

Not sure if we also need the GtkMM for Scintilla, but I did have that installed on my machine before I tried compiling Geany for the last time.

Before we proceed, let's make sure that you had the contents of GCC and GTK+ under C:\libs directory.  And that C:\libs\bin is added on your %PATH%, as well as C:\libs\msys\1.0\bin.

Now, for the `complimentary' part of my tutorial.

First, download the Manifest file from Geany's Git repo, which was not included in the downloadable zipped source code.

Rename win32-config.h to config.h then change the content of makefile.win32 from

all: config.h
 $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/ctags -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/mio -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/src -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C scintilla -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C plugins -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C src -f makefile.win32
config.h: win32-config.h
 $(CP) $< $@

to this

all: $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/ctags -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/mio -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C tagmanager/src -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C scintilla -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C plugins -f makefile.win32
 $(MAKE) -C src -f makefile.win32

The reason behind is that, there seems to be wrong with the makefile that the command COPY thinks config.h is supposed to be a directory.

Now, open a command line then run cd to the directory where you extracted Geany's source code.

Finally, type-in: make -f makefile.win32

Wait for it to compile and you'll then end up a very fresh build of Geany on Windows.

~creek23