Introduction Recently, I decided to create a tiny Android library called RxBattery, which is monitoring battery state of the device with RxJava and RxKotlin. I created a few Java and Android libraries already and this time I decided to use Kotlin programming language instead of Java to learn something new and write something more complicated than “Hello World” app. Here are my observations. Build System I used Gradle to build the project. It’s popular for JVM and Android apps nowadays and works fine with Kotlin. I just needed to add Kotlin Gradle Plugin and Kotlin STD Lib to the /library/build.gradle file to the classpath dependencies in buildscript section. I also needed to define sourceSets to allow IntelliJ and Android Studio recognize directories with sources. ...

I installed Android SDK and Android Studio on my new ThinkPad T470s with Ubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS. As usual, I wanted to create a new Android phone emulator called AVD (Android Virtual Device). I was able to create a new device, but unfortunately I encoutered problems. After opening AVD window, I saw the error message… /dev/kvm is not found KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). In order to enable KVM, I needed to restart the computer and enter the BIOS by pressing F1 key before the system boot. Next, I entered Security tab and enabled Intel Virtualization Technology and Intel VT-d Feature. Now, I could press F10 to save, exit nad restart the computer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. I saw another error message… ...

Dropbox abandons Linux users Recently, I’ve started receiving a notification from Dropbox desktop app on Linux that they’ll stop syncing my files in November. I couldn’t understand why. I’m using this service for some time and I find it really useful. Moreover, I want to backup several important files on the web server in case of my disk crashes or I’ll need to access them from another computer or mobile device. I googled this issue and found pretty long thread on the Dropbox Forum. There’s also ongoing discussion on reddit. ...

While creating a Pull Requests it’s good to squash all of our intermediate commits into one to avoid clutter in the git log, simplify analysis and allow for simple code revert when necessary. Solution #1 Some time ago I’ve found project http://rebaseandsqua.sh/ made by Jake Wharton. It’s really useful, handy and allows us to rebase and squash commits quite easily. We can just call: curl rebaseandsqua.sh | sh then edit our commit messages and push the changes. ...

Today, I’ve released next version of my most popular open-source project - ReactiveNetwork. I’ve released version 0.12.4 for RxJava1.x and version 1.0.0 for RxJava2.x. Please note, RxJava1.x is no longer officially supported and I’m going to follow the same approach in my RxJava-based projects. It’s not the first release of this project, but I’m breaking the API and removing existing methods, so I decided to stick to proper versioning standard. I didn’t always do it properly in the past, but it’s never too late. ...