Introduction to RecyclerView RecyclerView has been introduced with Android 5, in the support-v7 package. It allows to display a collection of items in an arbitrary disposition (think of a ListView, but much more flexible). As the name of the support package indicates, it’s available from the API level 7 (Android 2.1). Its name comes from the way it works: when an item is hidden, instead of being destroyed and a new one being created for each newly displayed item, hidden ones are recycled: they are reused, with new data bound on them.

Engine what? Nginx (engine-x) is a web server and reverse proxy for web and mail protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP). It has been first released in 2004, and its usage keeps growing ever since (according to Netcraft, it was hosting 14.47% of active sites in August 2014). It’s capable of hosting many kinds of applications: static HTML pages PHP, using PHP-FPM Ruby on Rails and any kind of Rack-based Ruby application, using Phusion Passenger proxying requests to another webserver (e.g. a software launching its own web server, like Kodi)

A lot of websites are generating data which could be really useful outside a web browser. Having the weather shown on your smartphone’s lock-screen, the delay until your next bus… How can we use this from an application? This article will explain what’s behind these hidden data flows, and how to use them. For this purpose, I’ll use Trakt.tv as an example. If you don’t know it: Trakt allows you to manage your movie/TV series library, keep track of watch progress, your ratings, comments… and see those of other people. Some code will show how to send such requests. It will be written in Ruby.

When you have to manipulate audio or video on Android, being used to open-source software, you have a single name which comes directly to you: FFmpeg. However, FFmpeg is a C software, meant to be used as an executable, and not officially supporting Android. There are a lot of partial and/or out-of-date how-to out there on how to get FFmpeg running on Android, like halfninja’s build. However, I needed to use FFmpeg concat demuxer, introduced in FFmpeg 1.1. Most builds target 0.9. There’s a ton of questions on StackOverflow about getting newer FFmpeg releases working on Android. So, here’s a full explanation to get FFmpeg 2.2.3 “Muybridge” working on Android. I’ll describe the steps for Linux, but everything is pretty standard shell and should work on any decent OS.

The Leonardo has a simple keyboard API. I needed a way to emulate a keyboard (from a joystick and arcade buttons - you see where I’m going now). Here’s how I did it.