How to Hide/Exclude Certain Files from Sidebar in Visual Studio Code?

Currently I'm learning Angular2 and building a test project using Visual Studio Code.  VSCode is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

So what happens while working on Angular2 Project is that we write TypeScript codes. The tsc: typescript compiler generates respective JavaScript Code for our typescript codes. For this single process there are 3 files created which are listed below:

For a typescript file: event-details.component.ts, typescript compiler creates event-details.component.js.map and event-details.component.js. This is two additional files for a single components. Imagine an application with 20 components and 10 services, your side bar will be full of files. Because of similar names you cannot locate your required files easily. 

So in Visual Studio Code, here is how you Hide/Exclude certain files from your sidebar:

1. Goto File
2. Click Preferences
3. Click Settings
   You will see the user Settings and Workspace Settings in your Visual Studio Code Text Editor.
4. In your text editor add following code:
   "files.exclude": { "**/**.js.**" : true, "**/**.js": true, "**/**-lock.**": true } 

Above code listed every file with extension .js , js.** (example: *.js.map), *-lock.*(example:config-lock.json) will be hidden from sidepanel.

This small tips will help us refine our sidepanel and also vase much time in finding the right file we want

Related Article: 

1. Why Visual Studio Code?
2. Microsoft and Open Source Technologies
3. How to run any chrome app as Desktop App in Windows10

 Free. Open source. Runs everywhere.

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Python, PHP) and runtime. Visual Studio Code is one of the greatest committed open source project on Github by Microsoft. 

Owner: Microsoft

Github: vscode

Why Visual Studio Code?

VS CODE provides development environment for most of the programming languages which follow Open Specification (technical standard) known as Common Language Insfastructure(CLI) 

VSCode is lightweight. Comparing it with the Visual Studio it has many pros which promises developers to dive into it.

Visual Studio	2015(V14.0)	CODE
Software Size	1.9GB	54MB

Visual studio Code consists of three components:

1. Side Panel
   Here we can see the tree structure of your project. We see a search icon where we can perform advance search in files as well as folders. Visual Studio has integrated Git where we see the change in file immediately. We can perform every git operation that can be done from other git application. We can browse extensions and download from side panel too.
2. Text Editor
   This is where you do all the coding stuffs. The color customization and Theme Selection from VSCode is pretty straight forward. You can split the screen and see multiple text editors.
3. Terminal
   Here we build and run the project. Once we run the program from terminal it fetches and downloads all the necessary referenced library online while building the project.

You can perform all other activities that you do from Visual Studio 2013, 15, 17 and other IDEs.

This can be a major alternative of Visual Studio IDEs where you need to buy the licence key and also need ore space and memory to execute it. VS CODE mimics the Command Line Interface implementation of developing and deploying a project. So this could be a good tool for software development.  

Because it's free   . Free as in you can view and customize the source code. Do you believe that Microsoft launched a software for free? Means it's worth it.

I use visual studio code for web app development in ASP.NET MVC Framework, Angular2. 

Explore more about Visual Studio Code.

Related Articles:

1. Why Visual Studio Code?
2. Microsoft and Open Source Technologies
3. How to run any chrome app as Desktop App in Windows10

How to Run Any Chrome App as a Desktop Apps in Windows 10

Previously on my Windows8.1 Machine, I installed Google Keep from Chrome Application Store. Chrome automatically set the app as my Desktop Application. After I installed Windows 10, it didn't happened automatically. I didn't  see Google Keep installed on my machine. So I did a small tweak from which I will now onward use my Chrome browser to run an instance of my desired chrome app from Desktop only. I wont need to open Chrome and type the url time and again.

Following are the steps to Create Shortcuts of the Chrome Apps, which lets us browse standalone apps as our new desktop Apps.

• Right Click your Desktop
• Add New Shortcut
  Add this path to the interface shown below:
  "C:\Program Files(x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --app="https://keep.google.com"
  

  What this does is, it uses the Chrome Application installed on your local machine and provides an instance to launch Google Keep.
• Next name the application as Google Keep or simply Keep as your wish.
• Save it.
• You will now see a new shortcut icon of chrome on your desktop like shown below:
  

  

This icon is little confusing. It would be better if you could get the Google Keep Icon for Keep. Otherwise you will be confused when you will try to open chromium browser next time. So this is quite simple. All you need to do is:

• Right Click your Shortcut that you recently made.
• Click to the properties.
• There you can see Change Icon
• Download the Google Keep Icon and locate that icon.
• Save it

And here we are with separate icon for separate app. This small tweak is valid for every chrome apps.All you need to do is change the url of the app in this particular section: "C:\Program Files(x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --app=keep.google.com. Instead of keep.google.com you can replace it with pictures.google.com or contacts.google.com as you wish.

Here you can see I created five new Desktop Apps i.e. linked Chrome Apps as shortcuts which are now browsable as desktop apps on my Windows 10 Machine.

Regarding Memory usage:  I find out that all apps ran independently are threaded inside chrome app in Task Manager and consume memories which is managed by Chrome itself.

Related Articles:

• How to Activate or Deactivate Cortana in Windows 10
• How to Disable Login Screen Background Image
• How to Remove Plugins From Your Browser
• How to get .np Domain for Free
• Why Visual Studio Code?
• Microsoft and Open Source Technologies
• How to run any chrome app as Desktop App in Windows10

Mr. Pradeep Khanal (IPP CAN-USA) Awarded with ICT Excellence Award

ICT Excellence Award was awarded to Mr. Pradeep Khanal. 

On the occasion of Honoring Program for Great Personality, Mr. Pradeep Khanal (Immediate Past President of CAN-USA) has been cordially honoured by Information Security Response Team Nepal (Infosec-Nepal).

The ceremony was structured with Interaction. The event was held Saturday, 10th June, 2017  at Softech Foundation premises. ICT Frame, one of the online tech portal of Nepal, has covered the event and also covered the press release. For more information Click here.

Is Artificial Intelligence Free?

I saw someone asked a question  How-can-AI-be-free? on Quora. Having keen interest in this field I tried to think of all possible reasons inside my mind. The question was not precise whether s/he wanted to know about whether the tools that we use for an AI project is free, or he was talking about languages, platforms and frameworks. But the answer was quite straightforward, AI is not quoted as a patent of any tech giant, neither it is a private hardware which only an individual can have access to. Artificial Intelligence is a subject/ field of study and knowledge is always free, all it requires is your mind to capture as much as you can. So I answered my logic or simply what I think about it. But together with this question another question which is my Blog Title to "Is AI Free" also seems to be valid. And here is what I answered:

 

Artificial Intelligence, this exciting research field in Computer Science itself is in it’s initial phase. And hundreds of tech giants, institutions, universities researchers are doing independent researches. And within last 8–10 years such research bodies have published Tools, Languages, Datasets, Frameworks and Libraries as well as community support platforms. It’s the knowledge about AI and necessary skills for performing the executions required prior to the concern about whether or not AI is free.

Just assume you’ve knowledge about AI and enough skills to program your robot/IoT whatsoever you want to, there won’t be any hindrance for you to implement your algorithms for a AI Project.

• There are huge datasets available from ImageNet to process, there are abundant online courses for free on Coursera.
• There are libraries in python liky SciPy , NumPy and Pybrain for the statistical analysis of data you use in your Machine Learning Projects.
• There are now foundations like Open AI and AI4ALL which aims to make this huge knowledge base of Artificial Intelligence to the open community.

And the lists about where you can get the resources for AI for free is abundantly available online. All you need to do is explore :)

7 Most Useful Quick Mac OS X Yosemite Tips

Mac OS X Yosemite is one of the best OS X Apple has ever introduced. With tons of improvements over OS X Mavericks and some UI changes has added extra flavour to user experience.

Here are 7 most useful quick tips for you to get most out of your Mac running OS X Yosemite.

TIP 1: QUICKLY TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS

Suppose you’re working on some stuffs and you really need focus and do not want to get disturbed by notifications that show up in the top-right corner of your Mac OS X, then here’s a small workaround.

You can either disable notifications from a specific app or you can also go for “do not disturb” mode which will temporarily disable notifications to show up for rest of the day.

Turn Off Notifications From Specific App in Mac OS X

• Visit System Preferences
• Click on Notification
• On the left, select the application from which you do not want to receive any notifications
• Now click on None as the alert style for that specific app

Quickly Turn Off Notifications in Mac OS X

Using Do Not Disturb to disable notification for rest of the day.

• From Menu bar, click on Notification Center icon
• Scroll down a bit
• Turn on Do Not Disturb

You can also use a shortcut to directly turn on Do Not Disturb mode in Mac OS X. Just hold alt key and click the Notification Center icon. The icon turns dim when notifications alert are disabled.

TIP 2: QUICKLY RELAUNCH FINDER

For starters, Finder in Mac OS X is just like My Computer in Windows. Finder makes it easy to access folders like Applications, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music  Pictures, etc.

But within a period of time, Finder sometimes might become unresponsive due to various reasons. In that case you might need to know the ways to quickly relaunch the frozen finder.

There are two ways you can relaunch the Finder in your Mac.

Using Dock

• Hold down option key and right click on the Finder icon in the Dock
• Now select Relaunch

Using Shortcut Key

• Hold down option+command+esc keys together to open Force Quit Applications window
• Select Finder from the list of Applications
• Click Force Quit

Now you can easily relaunch the freezed Finder in your Mac.

TIP 3: CHANGE YOUR LOGIN ACCOUNT PROFILE PICTURE

The very first thing you do after owning a Mac is personalizing it, making the system more like yourself and set the system preferences according to your needs. And when it comes to personalizing needs, setting a login account profile picture is one of them.

Changing Your login account profile picture in Mac OS X

• From Menu Bar, Visit Apple Logo > System Preferences
• Click Users & Groups icon
• While you’re under Password tab, hover your mouse pointer over the present login account profile picture to get an edit option and click on it
• Now choose your image which you want to set as profile picture from the list of available places (Defaults, Recents, iCloud Photos, Faces, camera, Linked)

If you want to use a custom/downloaded photo as your profile picture, you’d have to drag the particular photo over the current profile picture. Scale the photo (zoom in/out) as per your need and finally click Done.

TIP 4: GENERATE STRONG & MEMORABLE PASSWORDS

Getting yourself a strong yet memorable password is a difficult task. No one really wants to compromise their accounts (eg, social networks, e-banking, etc) because of weak passwords. Passwords must never contain any information related to you and your lifestyle. Hackers might use the information related to you for brute-force attacks, and your accounts might get into wrong hands.

If you’re a Mac user, then there’s a way to generate a super strong as well as memorable passwords using Keychain Access, an application which handles all the password and certificate security in.

Make Mac OS X Generate Strong & Memorable Passwords

• Open Keychain Access Application (Finder > Applications > Utilities)
• From Menu Bar, Click on File and select New Password Item
• In next window, click on the key icon present beside Password field
• A small window pops up, and there’s the auto generated password in the Suggestion field
• To generate next password just select Memorable from the drop down menu

The length of auto generated password can be adjusted by sliding the Length slider menu.

TIP 5: CHECK VERSION OF APPS

It might be for checking the availability of newer versions or downgrading to older versions; whatever may be the reasons sometimes you might need to be aware of the version of app you’re currently running in your Mac. And there are two quick ways to know which version of application/software you’re using.

Knowing Which Version of App You’re Using in Mac

• Open Finder
• Go to Applications folder
• Single click the App whose version you want to know
• Press command + I
• Under General, you’ll get the Version of that specific app

And the next way is to open the application, and from the menu bar visit application’s menu > About.

TIP 6: INCREASE/DECREASE APP WINDOW RESIZE AREA

Mac users can resize the App/Software window by moving the cursor to the edges of an active window and finally click & drag; outside and inside so as to increase or decrease the window size respectively.

For some users moving the cursor to the exact edge can be difficult. But there’s a small workaround that increases the window resizing area, which makes it easy to resize app/software window quickly in Mac OS X.

Increasing/Decreasing App Window Resize Area in Mac

• Open Terminal (press command + SPACE, and type terminal)
• Enter the following command which changes the edge resize size to the value you set.

defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 15

Change the value 15 to some other number as per your need.

• Restart Your Mac

In case you want to revert back to default setting, enter the following command into the Terminal and restart your Mac.

defaults delete -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize

TIP 7: CHANGE FINDER SIDEBAR ICON SIZE

Finder sidebar helps Mac user to quickly access their Favourites Locations (iCloud Drive, Airdrop, Applications, Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, etc), Devices (flash drives), Tags, Network, etc. By-default Mac system shows medium sized icons in the sidebar. Some users might want to decrease or increase the icon size.

Changing Finder Sidebar Icon Size in Mac

• Visit System Preferences (Either for the dock, or Apple Logo > System Preferences…)
• Open General
• Next to Sidebar icon size heading, use the drop down menu to select the icon size (Small, Medium, Large)

Changes takes place immediately. Now open Finder window, you’ll notice that the icon size have changed according to the size you’ve selected.

CONCLUSION

I hope you found these Mac OS X Yosemite Tips helpful. These tips also work for OS X El Capitan, I have personally tested it on this new OS X too.

Stay subscribed to our blog for further updates.

How to View Complete Details About a WiFi Network in Mac OS

Whenever you’re connected to a Wireless network (WiFi) on your Mac OS X, you don’t get to see the complete details about that specific WiFi network. You can manage various WiFi settings by visiting Network preferences > WiFi > Advanced. While you can view very few details like your local IP address provided by the router, subnet mask, router’s IP address, setup DNS and proxies; from the Advanced settings window.

But there is a quick way, to view complete details about a WiFi network which includes BSSID, channel & country code of the router, signal strength, disturbance (noise), and the transfer rate of the network.

VIEW COMPLETE DETAILS ABOUT A WIFI NETWORK IN MAC

Make sure you’re connected to the WiFi network whose details you wish to view.

Now hold down option key and click on the WiFi icon on the menu bar. This time you’ll not only see the options to search and switch between the networks, you’ll also see a list of various technical details about the WiFi you’re connected to.

From the top are the interface name and the mac address of the WiFi adapter of your Mac system. The next extra option you get this time is Open Wireless Diagnostics. Without having to visit the advanced setting window you can directly diagnose WiFi problems, using this option.

BSSID is the mac address of the wireless access point (WAP).

RSSI is the strength of the signal of the Wireless network you’re connected to. RSSI stands for Received Signal Strength Indication, whose value ranges from -100 to 0. For a signal to have good strength, its value must be near to 0. That means, RSSI indication of -20dBm is better than -70dBm.

Tx Rate is the maximum speed of the network which is possible for data transfer inside that specific network.

PHY Mode shows which wireless technology standard does the network follow for the connection. Mostly, nowadays’s routers make use of 802.11n technology, but it might vary depending upon the router you’re using.

How to Free up Google Photos Storage From Google Drive

Over a period of time your phone definitely takes tons of photos and if you’re using Google Photos to backup your photos then I’m sure the storage might have been used to some GBs. Google Drive allows you to store max 15 GB of data (Drive, Gmail & Google Photos). For high-quality photos, Google gives you unlimited storage. But if the images are stored in original size, the upload quota is limited.

So if your photos have been accumulated in your drive account in original size and the storage is about to bid you bye bye, well here’s a way-out to free up Google Photos storage from Google Drive.

FREEING UP GOOGLE PHOTOS STORAGE

You can download all of your Google Photos to your local machine using Google Takeout.

Visit Google Takeout page and select the app Google Photos and click the “next” button to grab all the photos from your Google Account.

After you’ve downloaded all your photos (make sure you have all of them), delete the online copy of photos from Google Photos app.

Now within Google Photos app, visit settings > backup and select the quality of photos to “high quality”. Selecting high quality gives you unlimited storage quota for backing up your photos in Google Photos.

Facebook Spaces is live now

    

When Mark Zuckerberg  CEO of Facebook, first demo'd Facebook VR at  Oculus’ third annual virtual reality developer conference  on October 12- 2016. Where he  discussed the next phase of VR, including an exciting live demo of Facebook’s latest social VR experience . Facebook said they expected it to go live within a year. It's taken them just 6 months and here is :

Virtual Reality (VR) is buzzing word of todays'  Tech Era and to make VR more lively,Facebook launched Facebook Spaces BETA version. It's live now at https://www.facebook.com/spaces and can be used straight away via Oculus Rift. 

The  beta version of it will allows you to :

1.  Personalize your avatar with your Facebook photo
2.  Enter your Facebook photos or videos virtually with friends 
3.  Teleport yourself anywhere with your friends
4.  Take selfies in 3D with your friends and share them
5.  Draw in 3D with your friends, chat and collaborate
6.  Receive messenger calls even if your friends aren't in VR
7.  Delve  yourself into 360
8.  Capture the moment by creating the fun memories in VR and take selfie even in  costly areas : Mars.

and Explore more then you have ever imagined.

Additional Details: 

Language : English 

Space  Required : 1.35GB

Developer : Facebook VR

Publisher : Facebook

Supported controllers : Oculus and Touch 

Supported Players Modes : Sitting and Standing 

Supported Tracking Modes : Front-facing 

 As It's in Beta so  it may not be in store yet. But  you can add it here: 

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1036793313023466

How to Activate or Deactivate Cortana in Windows 10

Finally, Microsoft’s digital assistant “Cortana” has been embedded into the company’s desktop operating system – Windows 10. Using digital voice assistant, one can easily get small things (set alarm, remainder, search, etc) done and its a wise thing to activate it for increasing productivity level. Windows user can easily upgrade to the new version of Windows for free.

If you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 from previous versions, then “Cortana” might not be activated by default. So here’s an easy way to activate/deactivate her.

ACTIVATING/DEACTIVATING CORTANA IN WINDOWS 10

• Click Start button
• Select Cortana
• Within the settings, click the notebook icon (third icon down – on the left)
• Click the toggle button to turn on/off Cortana

TURNING OFF “HEY CORTANA” VOICE COMMAND

Cortana pops up herself when you use this command, that means she’s active all the time which is battery consuming too! So some people might prefer deactivating this voice command.

Go to Start > Cortana, and select the notebook icon. Click the toggle menu to turn off the voice command.

How to Visit Your WordPress Login Page

WordPress beginners might find it difficult to find and visit their WordPress login page. WordPress login page is the admin section of WordPress site which lets authentic users to login into their site’s dashboard, so they can manage their WordPress site from the back-end. Once you’re logged in to your WordPress dashboard you can publish posts & pages, change appearance, add or delete themes & plugins, add or remove users, and manipulate various site elements.

Once you’re familiar with WordPress, everything becomes quite easy. You can have a better site running under 5-10 minutes. But to edit your WordPress site app per your needs, you’ll first need to login to admin dashboard vi WordPress login page.

FINDING YOUR WORDPRESS LOGIN URL

You can simply access the login page of your WordPress site by entering /login/ or /admin/ slug after your WordPress site’s URL.

http://www.example.com/login/
http://www.example.com/admin/

These URL automatically redirect to the main login page of your WordPress site. If they do not properly redirect, you can make use of following URLs.

http://www.example.com/login.php/
http://www.example.com/admin.php/

The above example URLs are for the WordPress site running on the root domain. If you’re running your WordPress site on a subdomain, then you can access your site’s login page by adding /login/ or /admin/ slug to the subdomain URL. But if that does not redirect properly to the login page, use following URL structure.

http://subdomain.example.com/login.php/
http://subdomain.example.com/admin.php/

Once you’re familiar with these URL, you can easily access WordPress login page of your site or blog.