Link Diary December 2023

• Reset MAID on Android
• Steam Favourites gone?
• When you need to know emo-triggers in movies beforehand
• Switch axes of a LibreOffice table
• Advent of Code & Python
  • Search & Replace in String with groups
  • Replace without regex
  • Convert all strings in a list to int
  • Switch-case syntax
  • Loop through a list by two's
  • Loop backwards through a list
  • ceil & floor
  • Replace only the first occurance
  • abs, min and max
  • Find value in a dictionary
  • Sort a dictionary by keys
  • Sort a list backwards
  • Initialize a set
  • Increase recursion depth limit
  • Get the smallest item of a list
  • Get the position of an element in a list
  • Find intersection point of 2 vectors
  • Finding the shortest path using Dijkstra
• Advent of Code & Bash
  • Get the first line of a file
  • Get the length of a variable
  • Loop through all characters of a string
  • Only get the matching part of a grep
  • Search & Replace with groups using sed
  • Add 1 to an int
• Video Picks
  • Loosing weight quick
  • Recipe for an indian sweet
  • Bullet Journal base concept
  • Interview with the inventor of the Bullet Journal
  • A song about caring
  • Bassist hears Maxwell Murder
  • Life and struggle of Tim Armstrong
  • Viral chinese math problem solved
  • Practical coding with ChatGPT
  • Demographics and the end of the world
  • Addictive learning
  • Folding a bookmark
  • Housetour at Asmongold's

Once you reset your "Mobile Advertisement ID" (MAID), advertisers have to start fresh to profile you. Can help to get out of ad filter bubbles one has been put in by "the algorithms".

That's how it worked for me on my Android So geht's bei mir. Ich habe ein Android 11, Xiaomi Mi 10.

1. Open Android settings
2. Click "Google"
3. Click "Ads"
4. Click "Reset adverting ID".

If you want to know how google profiled you, this can be interesting:

1. Open the "Google" App.
2. Click your Profile image.
3. Click "Settings"
4. Click "Privacy & Security"
5. Click "Ads personalization"

I stumbled upon it watching the 37C3 talk "Die Akte Xandr: Ein tiefer Blick in den Abgrund der Datenindustrie" (german), but the links there seemed outdated.

Help! My "Favourites" Category is gone! And no setting to be found to bring them back, OMG … well…

In my case, it seems an update has removed all my favourites.
Having no favourites, also does not show the category anymore.
Adding a Game to Favourites again does the job.

Some people cannot handle dogs dying in movies apparantly. Anyway, this website warns you and features all sorts of other triggers.

https://www.doesthedogdie.com/

You need the table in LibreOffice Calc.

1. Mark the table and copy it.
2. Paste it using Strg-Shift+V
3. In the dialog click "Transpose all"

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/Transpose_Table

Things I searched for to solve parts of the challenges.

re.sub(r"<regex-with-groups>", r"<mytext>\1\2, str))

txt.replace("bananas", "apples")

list = [int(x) for x in listOfString)]

or faster

list = map(int, listOfString)

match checkValue: 
  case "foo":
    print("That's foo!")
  case "bar" | "baz":
    print("So bar/z!")
  case checkValue if len(checkValue) > 3:
    print("Bigger!")
  case _:
    print("The fallback")

https://hellocoding.de/blog/coding-language/python/pattern-matching

for i in range(0,10,2):
  pass

range() ends one early which is usually desireable in forward-loops.

for i in range(len(list)-1,-1,-1):
  print(list[i])

import math
math.floor(x)
math.ceil(x)

txt.replace("bananas", "apples", 1)

abs(x)
min(x,y)
max(x,y)

if "value" in dictionary.values():
  pass

sorted_dict = dict(sorted(my_dict.items()))

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/python-sort-dictionary-by-key/

list.sort( reverse=True )

mySet = set(())

import sys
sys.setrecursionlimit(4096) 

smallest = min( myList )

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/list_min.htm

pos = -1
try:
  pos = list.index(search)
except:
  pass

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Find_the_intersection_of_two_lines#Python

• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/dijkstras-shortest-path-algorithm-visual-introduction/
• https://github.com/msambol/dsa/blob/master/shortest_path/dijkstras.py

One challenge looked like it could be solved on bash, this is what I researched while doing it.

input=`head -1 $input`;

length=${#input}

for ((i = 0; i < $length;i++)); do
	char=${input:i:1}
done

grep -o "this.*that" myfile.txt

sed "s/\(...\)/\1/";

turns=0
# some loop...
turns=$(($turns+1));