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Upgrading Acer Acpire V3 notebook

I’ve got an old Acer Acpire V3-371. The notebook is not bad and the price was good when I bought it but unfortunately it was shipped with 1GB HDD produced by Western Digital. The HDD works on 5400 RPM which is a problem because when you do something with files or system upgrade then the notebook becomes completely unusable. Another problem is the lack of memory. The notebook came with only one 4GB DDR3 memory bank and this combined with the slow HDD drive makes the device very annoying at times.
So last week I bought one additional 4GB DDR3 memory bank and 480GB SSD produced by AData.

Then I installed the new components which was easy and straightforward. Here I will explain how you can do the same.

We’ll start removing the screws from the back panel

Then carefully remove the panel unclipping all the clips. I used a screwdriver for that purpose.

Now you can see the additional and still empty memory slot and the slow WD HDD.

At that point to replace the hard drive with the new SSD drive you will have to remove these three screws. Then it’s easy, just add the SSD, put the screws on places and then add the new memory bank to the slot

Return the back panel on it’s place and your are done.

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How to upload a publicly accessible image

Sharing a photo online sometimes can be a complicated process. Even if you have your own server, uploading an image there, means that you have to connect to that server, authorize and only then proceed with the actual image upload. This is complicated, time consuming and it’s not error prone.

Fortunately there are some options which allows more convenient way to upload and share an image. I believe all of you are familiar with Google Drive and Dropbox. Both services are great and allows us to upload and share a pictures with a friends or with the community but both requires an account. So you will need an account to be able to use these services and here img321.com comes in. It allows to upload and share an image even without registration. img321.com it’s very unfriendly and mobile ready which means that you can use it just as well on your tablet or mobile phone.

The image upload and sharing process is very straightforward:
– Open img321.com
– Click on “Choose Files” and select one or more pictures to upload
– Click on upload button

That’s it! Now you can copy the link to that image and share. Simple and easy. Finally it’s good to mention the ability to share the uploaded image to an online forum using the automatically generated BB code. Just click on the copy button on selected image and paste the content inside your post.

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Using screen to detach long running process from current session

Sometimes we want to execute a program which is more heavy and time consuming or maybe to compile something which is again – time consuming. Starting such a process from our current session is not the best decision because we can’t terminate the session and have to wait the process to finish. Using SSH is even more risky because the SSH session may be interrupted and this will terminate our work. This is more painful if you have been waited for hours to execute a program and your SSH session goes down few minutes before you complete execution.

Here GNU Screen comes to help.

… is useful for dealing with multiple programs from a command line interface, and for separating programs from the session of the Unix shell that started the program, particularly so a remote process continues running even when the user is disconnected.

To install screen use your operating system package manager. In my case the following command do that:

sudo apt-get intall screen

Next step is to start screen. Just run screen from the termina:

screen

Now you’ve started a virtual console. You start your long running process here and instead waiting to complete, just detach the virtual terminal. To do that press CTRL + A and then D. This will detach the process and return you to your main session.
Now let’s list all detached screens:

scree -ls

The output should be similar to the following:

$ screen -ls
There is a screen on:
20855.pts-0.pi2 (02/11/2018 12:20:27 PM) (Detached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-pi.

To open again the detached screen run the following:

screen -r 20855.pts-0.pi2

Finally, but also important to know is how to close already started screen. To do that just type exit or press CTRL + D. This will terminate your current screen. I think that’s the most important you should know about screen. This tool is very handy and useful, so use it.

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Multiple files rename

It is often necessary to rename multiple files, adding an index at the end of the name or completely change the name of the file. This is an easy task with bash, just one single line command:

count=0; for i in *.jpg; do let "count++"; mv "$i" "My Pictures - $count.jpg"; done;