Making Latex work with Anki

Been using Anki for years without realizing it could leverage Latex equations, so I installed MikTex (if you know better and smaller Latex distributions for Windows please let me know) and was unfortunately greeted by the following error “dvipng: GUI framework cannot be initialized.”.

The solution is simple but was not well explained anywhere.

1. Go to your miktex bin folder (in my case C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin)
2. Right click mo_admin.exe and run as admin
3. In the General tab, switch “Install missing packages on-the-fly:” to “No”
4. Click OK

Et voila! Nice Latex equations in Anki

Connecting your Nexus 7 FHD (2013) on a HDMI display

To connect your Nexus 7 FHD to your TV or monitor using an HDMI cable, you need a Slimport cable that you connect in the micro USB port of your Nexus 7 FHD on one end, and to your HDMI cable on the other hand. Do NOT buy a cheaper MHL cable which will not work; I had a couple of those at home for other devices and none of them worked with the Nexus 7 FHD.

Some people report prices above $50 in some cases for a Slimport / Micro USB cable, so decided to look into it and found much more affordable alternatives like this Slimport MyDP Micro USB to HDMI HDTV for under $13 including free shipping and taxes.

I have received and tested this cable with my Nexus 7 FHD, so I recommend it. Beware it takes a while for the Nexus 7 to start outputting video when you first connect the cable (took me over one minute the first time).

If you find a working and even cheaper alternative, please let me know.

Running OSX through VirtualBox within Windows 7 environment running Bootcamp

I have a great MacBook Pro with awesome retina display, but I mostly run Windows 7 on it through bootcamp. Given that I often have to make iOS related tests, and that switching back and forth between OSX and Windows 7 was quite painful, I decided to try to run OSX as a virtual OS within Windows instead of Windows as a virtual OS within OSX.

If you want to do the same here are the simple things you need to do

1. Open regedit to export a backup of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\AppleHFS and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\AppleMNT
2. Keep regedit opened and delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\AppleHFS and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\AppleMNT
3. Reboot and make sure the OSX drive is not visible anymore as D: drive
4. Run in command line “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe” internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename c:\RawAppleDisk.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0
5. Open VirtualBox, create a new type “Mac OS X” with version “Mac OS X (64-bit)” virtual machine.
6. When asked to create a drive, select “Use an existing virtual hard drive file” and click the orange folder button, select the RawAppleDisk.vmdk that you created in step #4, it should be at the root of C: but you can move it anywhere you like before adding it to the virtual machine.

Et voila! Now your virtual machine should boot and run OS X as a virtual OS within Windows 7 running native on genuine Apple hardware :)

You can learn more about VirtualBox guest limitations for OSX here. And how to change the guest screen resolution here.

My blog is back. Sort of.

Thanks to my previous host, I completely lost the previous blog database. And I was hesitating to start a new one, despite the success of the previous blog.

At the same time, the world is still the same and I keep encountering small problems improperly or not documented every day. I often wish someone would have written a similar blog to save me a bit of time, and just said “here is how I solved it” on blogs, instead of just “problem solved”.

My goal is therefore to document some of the solutions I daily find here. Hopefully it will make it easier for others to solve identical problems, and to reduce the overall information noise.