GPSLogger is a free battery-efficient application for android phones. It uses the global positioning satellite (GPS) functionality built into just about every phone to log location coordinates. This can be useful for users needing a free and easy-to-use way to capture location data without buying a special device. Developers can pair GPSLogger with geocoding services like Geoapify to get experience working with location data.

GPSLogger features

GPSLogger is a great option because it is well-documented and has many features allowing it to do as much or as little required. It supports various file formats for GPS data such as GPX, KML, GeoJSON, CSV and more. It allows automatic uploading to cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox. Other options like email, FTP and even custom cloud setups are supported.

Where GPSLogger really shines though is its ability to fine-tune other settings like logging intervals, distance filters and accuracy. It may take some trial and error after initially installing GPSLogger to get it to function in a way that meets your needs. However, when set up and running properly the output file(s) are reliable and customizable.

GPSLogger for Android

Some uses of GPSLogger include fleet management, photo geotagging, and tracking your children or the elderly to keep them safe. It can also be used when logging trips/travels, programming projects needing GPS data and so much more. GPSLogger for Android is a great free option.

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Steam is a pioneer in the field of video game digital distribution. The service was launched in 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games. In 2005 it expanded to distributing and offering third-party game publishers’ titles. Steam has a powerful application user interface or API that developers can access. Let’s dip our toes into some of the basic functionality of using the Steam API with Python to access your own account’s data.

Steam API Key and your Steam ID

Visit the Steam Web API Documentation to read about the Steam API and how to access your API Key. You can find your Steam ID from the profile tab of the Steam application by going to your profile URL. Your Steam ID is a unique 17-digit number that represents your account. Users can use their Steam ID to link other people to their profile or use third-party apps. It is different from your username.

This tutorial assumes you already know the basics of the Python programming language, already applied for a free developer account to get access to the Steam API and know the Steam ID for your account. In a new python file, let’s start by importing the requests and random libraries as well as declaring 2 variables with your Steam API Key and Steam User ID.

import requests
import random

steamApiKey = "YOUR-STEAM-API-KEY"
steamID = "YOUR-STEAM-USER-ID"

Next, let’s format the link we will use to make our Get request to the Steam API and save the response to a variable. Convert the response to a JSON and print the information about games owned by the Steam ID sent to the screen in JSON. Use a JSON view/formatter like this one to better understand the data.

#Steam API link formatting for "GetOwnedGames"
slink1 = "https://api.steampowered.com/IPlayerService/GetOwnedGames/v0001/?key="
slink2 = "&steamid=" + steamID + "&include_appinfo=1&format=json"
slink = slink1 + steamApiKey + slink2

#Sent API Get request and save respond to a variable
r = requests.get(slink)

#convert to JSON and save to another variable
steam = r.json()

#JSON output with information about each game owned
print(steam)

You can use the code below to get an integer value of the number of games registered to your account on Steam. Congratulations you have successfully used the Steam API with Python to access your own account’s data for the games owned.

#Getting integer value of total games owned
totalGames = str(steam["response"]["game_count"])

#Output total games owned
print(totalGames)

Experiment with the Steam API and Python

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the Steam API. Feel free to read more about the API and its access points. There are many things you could do for example only getting games with a certain number of hours played. An example of such functionality can be seen in the full code below. The code from this tutorial is available on Github. Follow @Geezam on Twitter and subscribe to our Youtube channel for more tech tutorials, howtos and walkthroughs.

import requests
import random

steamApiKey = "YOUR-STEAM-API-KEY"
steamID = "YOUR-STEAM-USER-ID"

#Steam API link formatting for "GetOwnedGames"
slink1 = "https://api.steampowered.com/IPlayerService/GetOwnedGames/v0001/?key="
slink2 = "&steamid=" + steamID + "&include_appinfo=1&format=json"
slink = slink1 + steamApiKey + slink2

#Sent API Get request and save respond to a variable
r = requests.get(slink)

#convert to JSON and save to another variable
steam = r.json()

#JSON output with information about each game owned
print(steam)
#https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Web_API#GetOwnedGames_.28v0001.29

#Getting integer value of total games owned
totalGames = str(steam["response"]["game_count"])

#Output total games owned
print(totalGames)


#Some logic for getting a random game from account with over 10 hours playtime
steamGame = ""
steamGames = []

for num,item in enumerate (steam["response"]["games"]):
    num+=1
    if item["playtime_forever"] > 600:
        steamGame = item["name"]
        steamGames.append(steamGame)
    
steamRec = "".join((random.sample(steamGames, k=1)))

print(steamRec)

More APIs to explore with Python

Looking for more APIs to experiment with using Python. Check out our tutorials on using the Twitter API with Python and Tweepy to get public data on any account and Reverse Geocoding with Python and Geoapify.

The post Using the Steam API with Python to access your data appeared first on Geezam.com.

In this internet age, many users have dozens of passwords and other sensitive information such as credit card information and other personal data. Bitwarden is an open-source service that is used to manage passwords, sensitive information and website credentials in a secure encrypted vault.

Bitwarden is free

Bitwarden is free but also has paid options for users and businesses looking to manage passwords and get more use out of the service. All the basic features needed by the typical user are free. Bitwarden has a wide variety of client applications allowing users to use the service in a variety of ways.

Manage Passwords anywhere

There is a web interface for accessing anywhere with a web browser and an internet connection. There are desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux. Mobile applications for iOS and Android. Browser extensions for the most popular browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Brave and more. There is even the ability to access Bitwarden using the command-line interface (CLI) for more tech-savvy users.

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There are hundreds if not thousands of free WordPress plugins available. A plugin adds new functions or expands the functionality of an existing feature of a host program. We have compiled a list of 7 Free WordPress plugins every blogger should use or at least take a look at. Some have premium or pro versions but the basic functionality described is free at the time of this post.

Contact Form 7

After your homepage, your contact page is the most important page on your blog. Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage simple or complex contact forms using simple markup. It has excellent protection against unwanted messages with built-in support for CAPTCHA and Akismet spam. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with over 5 million active installations.

Inline Related Posts

When you start to have more than just a few dozen posts on your blog the older content will often not get the attention it deserves. Inline Related Posts is a plugin that puts related posts (by tag, category or both) INSIDE your posts so visitors can easily get exposed to additional content on your blog. This will keep them browsing your blog for longer and reward creating evergreen content with good titles.

Pretty Links

What if you could shorten or create custom links using your own domain name? Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that allows just that. Perfect for keeping your internal and external links uniform. We use Pretty Links here on Geezam in many ways, including sharing our social media and newsletter links. For example, instead of sharing a long link for our newsletter, you can sign up at a more clean/professional link at https://geezam.com/newsletter

Simple History

This plugin creates a simple log of things happening on the backend of your blog. Events such as failed/successful logins, plugin updates, published posts, edited posts, new media uploads and more are shown in a dedicated log window. Simple History is handy when running a multi-author blog or to keep an eye on what is happening on your blog at a glance.

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit is a plugin that provides important information related to your WordPress blog and its presence on many of Google’s services – primarily using Google Analytics. Get a really powerful Dashboard that displays information related to traffic, search engine performance, site load speed and even advertising revenue from Adsense.

Code Profiler

Plugins are one of the reasons WordPress is such a powerful blogging tool and CMS. However using too many plugins especially, outdated or resource-heavy ones can really slow down or break your website/blog completely. Code Profiler scans your blog and displays information on just how much individual plugins you have installed affect your blog’s performance.

WP Maintenance Mode and Coming Soon

Working on your blog and want to keep visitors from seeing broken pages or unfinished tinkering before a launch/relaunch? Put on a special “Maintenance Mode” and tinker with that theme or test those plugins in peace or time your launch. WP Maintenance Mode is really powerful and most importantly customizable with support for various templates and any colour scheme.

Recommend a Free WordPress Plugin

Are there any other free WordPress plugins that you would recommend? Tell us on Twitter @Geezam. Also, check out 10 Online Tools every Blogger should be aware of and use. Happy blogging!

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Reverse Geocoding is the process of converting map coordinates (latitude, longitude) to a physical location or address that is easily understood by humans. There any various situations where a program/app/service would need to pin a location to a specific location such as tracking, populating a map, calculating distances between locations and much much more. Let’s see how we can do reverse Geocoding with python and the Geoapify API.

Geoapify is a company that provides various “location intelligence technologies”. Let’s take a look at their reverse geocoding application programming interface and see how we can access their API using python to find the location of any set of coordinates we feed it.

Reverse Geocoding with Geoapify

First, sign up or log in to your Geoapify account and create a new project, name it and select the “Reverse geocoding API”. At the bottom of your project under the API keys tab after selecting reverse geocode API you should see example code for a bunch of programming languages such as Javascript, Go, Java and more. Select the tab for Python and you should see something similar to this with your own API keys.

import requests
from requests.structures import CaseInsensitiveDict

url = "https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=51.21709661403662&lon=6.7782883744862374&apiKey=YOUR-API-KEY-HERE"

headers = CaseInsensitiveDict()
headers["Accept"] = "application/json"

resp = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

print(resp.status_code)

Copy, paste and run the code in your favourite python programming editor and you should get a status code of “200” meaning all is well. Now let’s add to this code to play with it a little. The URL variable that the program will be sent to geoapify has three main parts.

• an API key
• the latitude value
• the longitude value

Reverse Geocoding with python from a CSV file

In the modified code below we grab 5 latitude and longitude values from an exam CSV file (caribbean_airports.csv) and save them to a dictionary within a list using a For loop. Next, we do some string concatenation to create the URL to send to Geoapify with the 3 main parts needed. Next, we access the API, ask for the response in a JSON and print the parts of the JSON file we want to display on the screen.

import requests, csv
from requests.structures import CaseInsensitiveDict

#API key of your project
geoapify = "PUT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE"

#initialise records list and lat, lon float variables
records = []
lat = 0.0
lon = 0.0

#url parts to be put together specifying JSON format
#Geoapify allows 'json', 'xml', or 'geojson' (default)
link1 = "https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?"
link2 = "format=json&apiKey="

#EXAMPLE CSV file with records of 5 airports across the Caribbean
#save each airport coordinate into a dictionary array within the records list
with open("caribbean_airports.csv") as csv_file:
    csv_reader = csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=',')
    line_count = 0
    for row in csv_reader:
        record = {
        "lat": 0.0,
        "lon": 0.0}
        if line_count == 0:
            line_count += 1
        else:
            record["lat"] = float(row[0])
            record["lon"] = float(row[1])
            records.append(record)
            line_count += 1
        
#loop through and view each record
for cord in records:
    print(cord)
""" OUTPUT    
{'lat': 17.93644564240522, 'lon': -76.77887154784555}
{'lat': 18.576469251350392, 'lon': -72.29583239907271}
{'lat': 13.079748830120481, 'lon': -59.487715973535956}
{'lat': 12.007459857934851, 'lon': -61.78592481196946}
{'lat': 10.597751926559294, 'lon': -61.33846862517268}
"""

#create a url string that has all the parts geoapify needs
#array has five record [0] to [4]. Let's use the 1st one
lat = "lat=" + str(records[0]["lat"]) + "&"
lon = "lon=" + str(records[0]["lon"]) + "&"
url = link1 + lat + lon + link2 + geoapify

#access geoapify API with credentials
headers = CaseInsensitiveDict()
headers["Accept"] = "application/json"
resp = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

#Choose data to be displayed from JSON output received
print(resp.json()["results"][0]["name"])
print(resp.json()["results"][0]["city"])
print(resp.json()["results"][0]["country"])

""" OUTPUT
Norman Manley International Airport
Kingston
Jamaica
"""

#remove the hash sign below to see full JSON output
#print(resp.json())

The code from this tutorial is available on Github. Follow @Geezam on Twitter and subscribe to our Youtube channel for more tech tutorials, howtos and walkthroughs.

The post Reverse Geocoding with Python and Geoapify appeared first on Geezam.com.

The Nintendo Switch is a great gaming console. Its main selling point is its mobility but there are many situations where you would want to play your games on a bigger screen without docking the console such as:

• When sharing one screen for multiplayer games
• During a long commute in a car, on a plane, bus or ferry
• When away from power outlets such as camping, at the beach etc.

What you will need

• a portable monitor with at least 2 USB C ports capable of video and power supply.
• USB C to USB C cable capable of delivering power and video signal to monitor
• USB C to USB A cable for connecting to the power bank
• A Nintendo Switch
• A USB power bank

Connecting all the parts

1. In the Nintendo Switch system settings make sure the TV resolution is set to automatic
2. Use the USB C to USB C cable to connect the mobile monitor to the Nintendo Switch
3. Use the USB C to USB A cable to connect the portable monitor to the power bank
4. make sure the joycons/controllers are removed from the Nintendo Switch
5. Turn on the Nintendo Switch and monitor.

Nintendo Switch connected to a mobile monitor

You should be good to go! Enjoy keeping your kid(s) entertained on that long-haul plane ride, impress your friends at the next cookout or just play your games on a bigger screen than the one built into the switch while not needing to be tethered to the dock. Just keep your power bank charged!

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Everyone has at least one email address, sometimes many. With 1.5 billion active users Gmail is the biggest electronic mail provider and has come a long way. There are many tips and tricks to make the most of your Gmail account but one of the most useful ones is knowing how to use aliases in Gmail to manage your emails better.

How to create a Gmail alias

We sign up for things almost daily with our email addresses: Newsletters, promotions, jobs, discounts, special offers, restricted content and so on. When signing up for something that needs an email address add a “+” sign after your email with some extra descriptive text. For example, you can use:

– ”yourmail+coupons@gmail.com” when signing up for a coupons site
– ”yourmail+jobtitle@gmail.com” when applying for a job
– ”yourmail+food@gmail.com” when signing up for a recipe newsletter

How to use aliases in Gmail

The options are endless with many benefits. You can then use filters in Gmail to sort/filter your messages to these aliases, highlight important emails better and also know who compromised your email if you suddenly start to get spam messages to a particular address.

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Twitter is a popular social media website with millions of users. It also has a powerful application user interface or API that developers can access. In this tutorial, let’s explore how to access the Twitter API using the Python programming language and Tweepy to get followers, following and tweet count for any account.

Python, Tweepy and the Twitter API

Tweepy is an open-sourced, easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API. It has excellent documentation and is very beginner friendly. The Twitter API allows you to do various things depending on your permissions.

This tutorial assumes you already know the basics of Python, already applied for a free developer account to get access to the Twitter API and installed the Tweepy library with pip. In a new python file, let’s start by importing Tweepy.

import tweepy

For accessing any public data on Twitter, we will only need a Bearer Token which you will get after signing up for a developer account on Twitter and registering an app.

client = tweepy.Client("insert bearer token here")

After that, we will declare a variable to store the username of any Twitter user profile we want to access the public data of.

user = "Geezam"

Next let’s feed the user profile name via Tweepy to Twitter, tell it that we want the public data fields of that profile and save that data array to a variable.

data = client.get_user(username=user,user_fields=["public_metrics"])

With the data saved, we can then pick out the three specific data types we want and save them into their own variables and print them to the screen to check.

followers = data[0].public_metrics['followers_count']
following = data[0].public_metrics['following_count']
tweets = data[0].public_metrics['tweet_count']

print(user)
print(followers)
print(following)
print(tweets)

Good job! You have now successfully used the Twitter API with Python and Tweepy to get public data on Twitter. Remember you can modify the user variable to any public account on Twitter and get their info. Let’s put the code altogether and format a nice message. You can do so much more with the Twitter API such as sending tweets and more with your account. Please comment below if that is a tutorial you would be interested in.

The code from this tutorial is available on Github. Follow @Geezam on Twitter and subscribe to our Youtube channel for more tech tutorials, howtos and walkthroughs.

import tweepy

client = tweepy.Client("insert bearer token here")

user = "Geezam"

data = client.get_user(username=user,user_fields=["public_metrics"])

followers = data[0].public_metrics['followers_count']
following = data[0].public_metrics['following_count']
tweets = data[0].public_metrics['tweet_count']

print(user)
print(followers)
print(following)
print(tweets)

message = "Twitter user @" + str(user) + " has " \
+ str(followers) + " Followers, follows " \
+ str(following) + " accounts and has sent " \
+ str(tweets) + " Tweets."

print (message)

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“Schneider Electric is able to be the ideal solution for this infrastructure deployment with our Modular (or Prefabricated) Datacenter solutions, designed to meet the growth of data, connected devices, increased traffic to the data center and the integration of new technologies that allow real-time and efficient processing, based on modules”

Sales manager for EcoStruxure Modular Data Centers and Prefabricated Data Centers at Schneider Electric, says Martin M. Jiménez, commenting on prefabricated and modular data centers.

A study conducted in the Caribbean region by IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, and sponsored by Schneider Electric, points to prefabricated and modular data centers as the answer to the great challenges that IT strategists face in the accelerating innovation and demand for data and services in ever-expanding ecosystems.

Published on June 28, 2022, this a recent study carried out in the region, proves how the digital disruption due to the adoption of the cloud, big data, analytics, the Internet of Things, mobility and social networks demands a rethinking of the way in which companies should design and build the data centers that support these technologies. From this study, the following insights were revealed for the Caribbean region:

1. Enterprise IT investment (excluding devices) reached a total of US $709 million in 2021 and this investment is expected to grow 9% in 2022.
2. The volume of data in Latin America is estimated to triple, from 3.1 zettabytes to 9.5 zettabytes between the years 2020 to 2025. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 24.7% in that period, above the global average (22.9 %), a trend that will also be reflected in the Caribbean.

This will necessitate the requirement of an agile, scalable and flexible infrastructure, even in limited spaces, according to the need for data processing and storage of a business. This places prefabricated and modular data centers in a privileged place thanks to their multiple advantages: capacity to reduce planning, construction and implementation times and to scale according to the needs of the organization while keeping an eye on sustainability in terms of costs, power, cooling and resources for infrastructure management and control.

IaaS – Clouds, Networks and Data Centers growing strong in 2025

In its report, the leading IT consulting and market research firm highlights that in the Caribbean region, business IT investment (excluding devices) reached a total of US$709 million in 2021 and this investment is expected to grow 9% in 2022.

This growth will accelerate in the future hand in hand with the digital transformation process of the organizations located there, so that investment in business IT will have an average annual growth of 12.5% between 2021 and 2025.

Regarding hardware, the growth of IaaS stands out, which in 2021 already represented 31% of IT investment. Between 2021 and 2025, that same investment in the Caribbean will grow at a CAGR of 45%.

By 2025, IaaS will account for 41% of hardware investment. Not only this, IDC also estimates that by the end of this year, 75% of enterprises globally will implement a unified management system for their clouds, networks, and data centers to deflect business resiliency threats away from infrastructure costs and operational complexity.

This shows us that the architecture of the digital infrastructure must be transformed from silos to flexible resources that allow the implementation of ubiquity, autonomy of operations and a workload-centric approach.

In a digital infrastructure ecosystem that is emerging and increasingly built on the foundation of the cloud using cloud-native technologies, seeking to ensure faster delivery of innovative infrastructure hardware and software, there is a need for resource abstraction and process technologies to support the ongoing development and refinement of digital services and digital experiences that are both sustainable and resilient.

EDGE Computing – Latin America Data usage to triple by 2025

This can be reflected in the adoption of Edge Computing, which can serve as a complement to the cloud in order to bring computing closer to the place where things happen and data is produced. This helps to reduce latency in a more cost-effective way as explained in Schneider Electric launches EDGE Computing in Jamaica to make IOT a Reality.

In Latin America, even though this technology is still in the deployment stage, it is estimated that 70% of the investment in Edge Computing is allocated to hardware and connectivity.

In the Caribbean, this investment will have more emphasis on hardware, since, in this region in particular, the disparity in terms of connectivity, energy and its geographical peculiarities imply more challenges for the presence of data centers, making Edge Computing charge more sense, especially for  Healthcare IT Solutions as predicted in Schneider Electric Healthcare IT Solutions – EDGE, AI , IoT with UPS backup for Servers.

IT infrastructure strategists must consider this trend in more dispersed data and devices, especially when it is estimated that, from 2020 to 2025, the volume of data in Latin America will triple, from 3.1 zettabytes to 9.5 zettabytes, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 24.7% in that period, above the global average (22.9%), a trend that will also be reflected in the Caribbean.

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. on June 23, 2022 debuted Make STRANGER Nights Epic, a short film that leverages the advanced Nightography camera features of the Galaxy S22 Ultra to pay homage to the popular Netflix series Stranger Things.

The video is part of Samsung’s ongoing partnership with Netflix and is available to view now on Samsung’s social channels, arriving just as season four of Stranger Things dropped on the streaming platform.

In the short film, the Stranger Things-inspired theme serves as a fitting backdrop to showcase the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s powerful Nightography capabilities. In season four of Stranger Things, nighttime opens up a portal to an extraordinary world – and the S22 Ultra is used to recreate that distinct style and tell a cinematic story demonstrating how Galaxy technology has the power to capture what would otherwise go unseen in the dark. 

Netflix Stranger Things 4 – Volume 2 – Making Nighttime Epic 

In Make STRANGER Nights Epic, a young girl puts her Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in her back pocket while riding her bike to a Stranger Things 4 watch party at her friend’s house. During her journey, her video inadvertently turns on, capturing footage of what’s lurking behind her in The Upside Down. All of the vertical phone footage scenes were filmed with the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. 

The short film also makes the most of the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s powerful Nightography camera features, which include a 108MP main camera and a massive 2.4μm pixel sensor powered by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that allow it to capture more light and data for brighter, crisper video footage, day and night. 

Bridgerton – Creating a Galaxy of Extraordinary Content 

Samsung and Netflix have a longstanding partnership and have collaborated on bespoke campaigns featuring several of the streaming platform’s most popular series. In January, they launched an integrated campaign to help kick off the second season of Emily in Paris, including letting fans “flip the script” and become the lead character in their own animated poster via Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G.

Samsung and Netflix also teamed up to create a Bridgerton short film for the unveiling of the Galaxy S22 series at Unpacked in February. In the three-minute skit, innovators try to gain the attention of Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte. Inventor Lord Tristar succeeds when he showcases his visionary creation – massive Neoclassical paintings of the Galaxy S22 and S22+, ready in 209 years.

Samsung and Netflix – High-quality content for the people  

Following the May release of Stranger Things 4 volume one, Samsung’s debut of Make STRANGER Nights Epic comes a day after Netflix released the official trailer for volume two, which will drop on July 1. 

To watch the Samsung and Netflix short film, Make STRANGER Nights Epic, visit Samsung’s YouTube channel. 

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