Microsoft Software for NUS Students

Posted on by Jason

I can’t really believe why there are only several students who knew that we can get tons of licenses for Microsoft products under the education scheme (We probably paid for it under our school fees)

Anyways, here are the steps:

  1. Go to Microsoft Site
  2. Login with NUSNET account
  3. Download them all

Examples of cool software:

  • Windows 7/8/8.1/10 Licenses
  • Visual Studio Ultimate

Clean Ubuntu Install

Posted on by Jason

Quick cheatsheet which I often use to bring up a Ubuntu machine.

Update

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Minimal GUI (might not work well on ubuntu 16)

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xorg xterm gdm menu gksu synaptic 
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnome-session gnome-panel metacity gnome-terminal indicator-session
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

Coding Environment


# vscode apt
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/
sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'

apt-get update
apt-get install code terminator

VScode Settings

Other Software

apt-get install software-properties-common

Faster

echo "vm.swappiness=1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p

Mastercard Rates Application

Posted on by Jason

Basically Youtrip is offering Mastercard exchange rates for 140+ currencies without any bank fees which is awesome. The only issue is that their exchange rate check is via the Mastercard calculator, which is slow and inefficient.

So, to speed up currency conversion, I have coded yet another currency converter, but it displays the converted amount using the actual mastercard rates (which may have different spreads compared to google or xe.com)

Link

Screenshot: