Tech Tips & Tricks

Dropbox Bytecode Decryption Tool

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Dropbox is actually just a python application, so it is shipping the bytecode of its modules which one could theoretically use in other applications. Also building a more lightweight dropbox-client, that does not come with its own interpreter, might be a goal. Apparently though, dropbox does not want this and makes it slightly harder to get to the bytecode. So here is a project I’ve been working on quite some time ago, which converts the encrypted python modules of dropbox to real python-2. Read More...

lxml-based BeautifulSoup loader

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With ElementSoup there is already a tool, that allows you to create an etree Document using the more fault-tolerant BeautifulSoup-parser. However, looking for the oposite direction (i.e. creating a BeautifulSoup document using the lxml-parser was not yet possible). In my experience, I discover BeautifulSoup’s API much more intuitive and useful, especially for quick scraping and data manipulation tasks. So the only reason to use lxml in the first place, is that its parser is much quicker and consumes less memory. Read More...

fixing adb "insufficient permission" errors

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The forums tell you to run the adb-server as root. But you shouldn’t really do this. Instead create a udev-rule like the following one and put it in /etc/udev/rules.d/26-android.rules: SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c87", MODE="0660", GROUP="adm" The vendor and product id here are for a HTC Desire, however yours may differ. You can use sudo lsusb -v| grep -B 13 -i android to get these ids. Also feel free to change mode and group settings of the device to your likings. Read More...