Skip to main content

Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu

Using an external USB drive on your PS3 game console

I have just spent all day today trying to fix what could be mechanical issues on a 115GB Western Digital external USB drive. Every so often, I would hear that deathly clicking noise from the external hard drive and then lose connection to the contents of the drive. I fear that it’s life is numbered so I moved the contents to another location and low-level formatted the disk with hopes of getting more life out of it.

In order to use a USB drive with a Sony PS3 game console, it has to be formatted with FAT32 file system. Using the utilities that come with Windows XP SP3, I cannot format the entire drive with FAT32 using “format /fs:fat32″ because of FAT32 file system limitations. I searched around for a utility and found freeware SwissKnife. This software let me format the entire 115GB capacity.

After that, I tried to copy all the contents back to the extenal USB drive but I ran into roadblocks again. Using Windows Explorer, the copy would start but fail after a few minutes with an unrecognized sector error message. This only seems to happen with big files over 600MB. I had no issues copying small text files however, so I attributed the error to the FAT32 limitations in Windows rather that bad blocks in the drive. I dropped to a MSDOS command prompt and used XCOPY to copy the same big files that errored out, and I was able to complete the copy with no issues.

One final tip I learned from my brother Nick. Copy your videos and photos into folders named VIDEO and PICTURE respectively. Make sure it’s all in uppercase. Doing this will let you display the contents easily from your PS3 game console. Enjoy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Udacity Front-end Developer Challenge Daily Sprint Updates

As per the Next Generation Tech Booster Challenge Program, we are asked to submit a daily progress report on slack. We just need to answer these three questions in the post: • What did I work on today? • What I will work on tomorrow? • What issues are blocking my progress? I take this logging opportunity to also report on the progress I am making with my Coursera course “Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB”; and my Linux Foundation course “LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals”.  To help with completing above, here are some links posted by the slack moderators that I try to use to get through my workload: How to Organize your Desk like a Pro Tips on how to achieve consistency Strategies we can employ to stop Procrastination Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the Eisenhower Box Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy The Ivy Lee Method The 15-Minute Routine Anthony Trollope Used to Write 40+ Books The instructor for the course is Daniel and is pure entertainment.  Ther

Wall of Graduates from the AI Product Manager Nanodegree

The "Wall of Graduates" is a Google sites page showing a profile list of students who graduated from the Udacity AI Product Manager nanodegree. We were asked two questions to include in our profile and there are those two questions.  What obstacles (big or small!) did you face during Phase 2 & how did you overcome them?    I think the biggest was time constraint. I was also doing my Georgia Tech course in the spring and this fell on the same timeline. The other obstacle is that the course material was not technical but more for product managers. This meant a lot of time was spent networking in slack participating community-driven initiatives. I did learn Artificial Intelligence concepts but it didn't need to last from December 2020-December 2021.  How are you making use of your newfound skills?  I don't use AI at work but it has allowed me to open my eyes to possibilities. We recently implemented MS Azure Cognitive service utilizing text translation. Although not

How I passed the AZ-104 Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate Exam

I had been planning to take the Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect track back when the prerequisite was AZ-303 and AZ-304. Life got in the way and now these two prerequisites have been deprecated and replaced by AZ-305. However, in order to take this exam, I needed to get through AZ-104 first. Here are resources that I used to prepare for it: * GlobalKnowledge/Skillsoft 4-day BootCamp. I have been using this training company for a while now but it has steadily just gotten worse. The trainers are outsourced and not very professional in my opinion. I do not recommend GlobalKnowledge at all. I didn’t really learn much from the lesson material but the lesson/challenge labs were very helpful. This bootcamp comes with an Azurepass subscription and a free exam voucher. I actually racked up to $90 out of the $100 credit provided on this subscription which expires in 12 days so I better delete all the resources before then to avoid incurring more. I initially booked the exam the end of Dec