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Use the default Android sharing mechanism with the Brave browser

8 May 2021 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

(NB September 2021: This does not seem to work anymore… I’m investigating.)

I have been using the Brave browser on my phone for some time now and it works great.

When I find an interesting website or article, I often share it to social media and, for some reason, the Brave developers slightly changed the way sharing is done in the latest version of the browser. To restore the previous way of doing sharing i.e. using the default Android sharing mechanism, there is one setting to disable: Chrome Sharing Hub.

The idea is simply to go to brave://flags, look for Chrome Sharing Hub (which means that Brave probably is built on Chromium), disable the setting and relaunch Brave.

Enjoy.

Installing a previous version of a program in Homebrew

21 March 2021 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

I’m an avid user of Homebrew on macOS.

Doing an updates rightly updates all software installed through Homebrew to their latest version as expected. But, sometimes, you might want to install the previous version of a program. Here is the correct way to do it courtesy of variar on Stack Overflow:

TAP=...    # <org>/<repo>, for example "my-org/homebrew-old"
MODULE=... # name of module you want to install, e.g. "hugo"
VERS=...   # version of $MODULE you want to install, e.g., "0.80.0"
brew tap-new $TAP
brew extract --version $VERS $MODULE $TAP
brew install $TAP/$MODULE@$VERS

An example without using the shell variables is as follows:

brew tap-new avinash/homebrew-old
brew extract --version 2.51.3 unison avinash/homebrew-old
brew install avinash/homebrew-old/unison@2.51.3

The first command creates a new tap called avinash/homebrew-old and this needs to be done only once.

This will install a previous version of unison, version 2.51.3. Incidentally, to obtain the list of versions of a specific Homebrew program (called a formula), you can use this excellent search feature of Github.

How to create a permalink for a Microsoft Office 365 Outlook email

12 February 2021 By Avinash Meetoo 3 Comments

At work, I have to use Microsoft Office 365. Sure, I’m more used to Google or open-source software solutions but, well, the Microsoft offering is not bad at all.

One small issue I have is that, in the web version of Microsoft Office 365 Outlook Mail, the URL which is in the address bar when reading an email is not a permalink. In other words, copying that URL in, say, a task manager is useless because, clicking on it, will not bring you back to the email. Rather, it goes to the Inbox, which is useless.

I got the solution from Nick on Superuser, part of the Stack Exchange franchise. The three steps are as follows:

In Outlook Mail, in the list of all emails, right-click on a specific email and, in advanced actions, choose “Create Task”. A new task is created in To Do.
In To Do (which can be accessed by clicking on the checkmark icon at the bottom left of Outlook Mail), click on the newly created task and a right side information panel opens up.
The permalink is the “Open in Outlook” link. Right click on it and copy the link.

VoilÃ .

This is much more complicated that in Gmail (where the URL is always a permalink) but it’s better than nothing… For me, this is important as it allows me to use GQueues with Outlook Mail.

One caveat: moving the email to another folder (e.g. archiving it) invalidates the permalink. What I do is to archive first, search for the email then create the task. It is tedious but it works.