Home on Psy-Q's Braindump

Superior self-hosted music streaming without Spotify

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 07:17:00 +0000

There are enough reasons to avoid using Spotify (and most other streaming services). For me the big reasons are:

Bad players with very limited functionality, for example:
- Can’t shuffle-play your entire library
- Can’t add your own tags and other metadata
- Must use resource-hungry client applications, no third party clients can be used that might offer better features
No way to easily pre-download as much of your music as you need
Can’t upload your own music (YouTube Music allows it, but it’s a mess)
Limited catalog, some artists or albums are missing, sometimes for silly reasons like geofencing

Add to that the problem that music streaming services don’t pay artists nearly enough and that they can remove music you like from their catalog any time they want. It’s enough for me to see streaming as a toxic mess.

Fun with Citrix Escape Sequences

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 09:02:44 +0200

Recently I had to use Citrix on a Linux client to access some Windows remote desktops. I know people like to give Citrix shit all the time, I used to be one of them myself. But the Linux client actually has some really good features:

Drive and device redirection actually works
Wayland poses no problems for it
Many, many things can be customized

I want to focus on the last point. My problem is that in a full-screen Citrix session, it’s not easy to escape to the local desktop environment. I use Plasma with four virtual desktops and would like desktop 2 to show the remote Citrix session in full-screen mode while desktop 1 has all my usual Linux stuff. Switching between them usually means exiting Citrix full-screen mode and going windowed so that local keyboard shortcuts work.

Jumping the WordPress ship

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 19:11:56 +0200

I’m kind of happy this war between WordPress and WP Engine happened, and I hope the people who took the severance package are doing okay. WordPress has often felt more like a messy crutch than anything else, and I’ve been wanting to get rid of it for surely a decade. The thing has developed in a direction I’ve never liked, trying to be a full-fledged CMS when originally it had just been a shitty pile of spaghetti code that shat out blogs.

A better Google Photos alternative

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 17:02:44 +0000

Just two short years ago I had cobbled together a Google Photos alternative using a couple of separate pieces of free/open source software. Now in 2024, things have become a lot easier. You basically need only one thing now: Immich. Both for mobile and for desktop use.

Development is currently in a very fast and early phase but I can say that for the last several months I had no problems at all with it.

Rescuing an old Kobo Aura H2O that keeps bricking itself

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 13:46:41 +0000

I used to be a big fan of Kobo ereaders because they let you install your own fonts and gave you (often, not always) DRM-free ePub files. But my opinion changed a little when they bricked my beloved Kobo Aura H2O via a regular software upgrade.

To add insult to injury, the built-in recovery procedure is broken as well. Once your device is restored, Kobo claims that it must connect to a wireless network in order to add an account. Otherwise it won’t even let you read books you copy over via USB. But it can’t connect to wifi, presumably because the rescue firmware is so old.

Render emoji in color even if your default font doesn’t want to

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 19:57:18 +0000

In some situations, you may end up with emoji displaying in color in GTK applications but not in Qt ones (such as Kate, Konsole, etc.)

If you’re sure you have a color emoji font installed (e.g. fonts-noto-color-emoji) and still get most emoji in black and white, it might be because your system default font provides black and white emoji already. The color font further down the line is never matched so you get black and white emoji instead.

Preventing MPD’s HTTP audio stream from turning silent on song change

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 07:55:47 +0000

If you stream audio in various formats from MPD to music clients, you may have run into a problem. Sometimes audio might simply go silent on a track change even though your MPD client says it’s playing the next song. This might actually have something to do with your player: some players don’t deal with audio frequency or resolution changes well. If you have audio in various resolutions and bitrates, this can trigger such a silence.

Google’s monopoly on the APK trust chain

Mon, 17 May 2021 16:30:59 +0000

Tomáš has an interesting article on trusting APKs from third-party mirrors.

Since Google is the gatekeeper of the APK trust chain, it’s not easy to independently verify APKs; Google doesn’t even give you the package signatures. The article shows a nifty method for extracting them by (ab)using the εxodus privacy audit project.

Do you know of a better way?

Fix for keyboard layout resetting to US on every login after installing Zoom

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:18:51 +0000

For several months now, my keyboard layout would reset to English (US) every time I log into Plasma. I’ve tried every possible way to force it to my preferred layout, EurKey, but nothing worked: xorg.conf snippets, localectl configurations, it seemed Plasma simply ignored these settings.

At first I blamed Plasma, but it’s innocent: The problem is Zoom! The Zoom package contains an unnecessary dependency on IBus, at least in the RPM that Zoom packages for openSUSE. IBus comes with its own keyboard handling and is useful if you want to type text in Chinese, Japanese, Korean or other languages using non-Latin characters. But it also means that if you don’t configure IBus, your Plasma session will start with English (US) no matter what XKB keyboard layout you have set in Plasma.

Improving fan noise on AMD GPUs using software only

Fri, 01 May 2020 08:42:48 +0000

Update 2025-09-17: This article is five years old. Nowadays the problem is better solved using LACT.

My RX 580 has been giving me trouble recently. There is now an audible clicking when its fans spin up from zero RPM, and unfortunately, this happens a lot in desktop use.

Not wanting to invest in an aftermarket fan just yet, I looked for ways to manage the fan RPM curves while overriding the GPU BIOS and I found amdgpu-fan.

Automatically unlock kwallet after KDE/Plasma login on openSUSE Tumbleweed

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 12:36:22 +0000

There’s a reason for the very specific title: It seems this feature is configured a little differently on Tumbleweed than on openSUSE Leap and I haven’t found any up-to-date information on this. So I’m writing this down as a note to myself.

A default Plasma desktop will use kwallet to save passwords for various desktop services (802.11x passwords, Nextcloud/ownCloud logins, SSH key passphrases, etc.). This can get inconvenient when e.g. Nextcloud wants to access the Internet, but the wallet isn’t unlocked yet, so Plasma can’t decrypt the WLAN PSK.

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior, Zen buddhism?

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 09:46:51 +0000

I’m (re)reading a lot of Brad Warner’s books during these holidays. If you ever feel like learning about no-bullshit hardcore Zen buddhism from a punk bass player and ordained Zen master (who hates that term), I can recommend: Sit Down and Shut Up, Don’t Be a Jerk and It Came From Beyond Zen, in that order. You can also try Hardcore Zen, the original work

Brad explains Zen itself and Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō in plain English so you don’t have to spend 30 years studying classical Japanese. Dōgen was about 800 years ahead of his time, so reading him now is excellent timing

Making Steam’s magic work when using a Dual Shock 4 controller

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 12:10:33 +0000

A few kernel versions (or Steam versions) ago, my Dual Shock 4 controller spontaneously stopped working in Steam. Big Picture mode said “no controller detected” and only games that had their own native DS4 support managed to still use it.

Looks like you need some udev rules to make sure all things are good. For my wired DS4v2 I stuck this:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666"
KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="myusername", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="09cc", MODE="0666"

into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ds4.rules. And reloaded udev. Thanks Xard and others from Freenode’s #gamingonlinux for the pointers.

Getting rtl8814au USB sticks like the ASUS USB-AC88 to actually connect

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 06:24:18 +0000

If you’re forced to use newer and more bizarre USB wifi sticks that rely on the rtl8812au/rtl8814au chipset, you need to do two things:

Compile the driver yourself, since most distros don’t include one
Tell NetworkManager to stop randomizing MAC addresses for that device

You can get the updated source from diederikdehaas’ project on GitHub. The build instructions there are great and the driver integrates with DKMS. However, you won’t be able to connect because NetworkManager is scrambling your MAC address. To make it stop, add this to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf:

Wanna use a Mayflash DolphinBar with Dolphin on Linux? You’ll need this udev rule

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 09:15:07 +0000

This is what I needed, I put it in /etc/udev/rules.d/80-dolphinbar.rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="057e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0306", MODE="0666"

I can’t remember where I found this, I’m pretty sure I didn’t figure this out for myself. If you need a DolphinBar, Aliexpress should have you covered. It could be that the vendor code differs for yours, so make sure to watch dmesg when you plug it in.

Game recommendation: JYDGE

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 18:29:26 +0000

JYDGE by Finnish twin-stick shooter experts 10tons is for you if you enjoyed Hotline Miami, Robotron 2048, Crimsonland or JYDGE’s sister game Neon Chrome.

Yet another way to get a tear-free, stutter-free desktop with Plasma/KDE and Nvidia

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 19:45:23 +0000

Note 2024-10-07: None of this should be necessary nowadays as the components in play here have come a long way since 2018.

So the proprietary Nvidia driver is a large, steaming, smelly pile of shit. At least that’s the impression you get when you read what developers say about it. There’s a bug here and a workaround there, and we haven’t even started talking about the messy situation that is EGLstreams yet. So why do people use Nvidia cards on Linux? Because so far, they give good bang for the buck, use relatively little energy for what they do and work with all commercial games. I’m pretty sure those are the reasons, anyway.

Working around broken firmware for Realtek USB WLAN adapters on newer kernels

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 18:32:20 +0000

If you run a combination of newer (4.9ish) kernels and systemd, your USB wifi networking gear probably now gets funky names such as “wlx74da387e95fe” instead of “wlan0” like you were used to back in the good days. This wouldn’t be so bad, only that the firmware on those dongles can mess up when the device gets a long name. Suddenly it won’t let you connect to your wireless network, claiming that the network does not exist, even though you know for a fact that it does. What your machine is actually trying to say, I believe, is that the network device doesn’t seem to exist.

Using Xbox 360-compatible controllers properly inside WINE

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 15:49:02 +0000

Update: There are now easier ways to manage this, for example through Lutris. If you manage your WINEs in Lutris, you simply have a checkbox whether to include dumbxinputemu or not.

If you need to use WINE to play some Windows games, the lack of Xinput support might get on your nerves. WINE maps joystick devices to Dinput. That works for some older games, but buttons need to be mapped manually, and many newer games don’t detect the controllers at all because they expect Xinput.

Our terrible future of closed protocols and proprietary systems

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 11:06:49 +0000

TL;DR (1072 words): The current trend towards closed communications systems like Slack, Facebook and the like can only hurt us as society. An open standard needs to emerge. Who’s volunteering to support things like Matrix and the “new decentralized Internet”?

I’m trying to illustrate the newly closed nature of the Internet using team chat and team collaboration as an example. But you can expand this example to pretty much anything nowadays. Because the solution to combat this closed-ness applies equally to all of these issues, I hope you can extrapolate from this as necessary.

Google shutting down XMPP interoperability is a sad sign of the age of communication silos

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:00:16 +0000

Update: With XMPP slowly dying (at least IMHO), maybe you should consider Matrix instead of XMPP and ignore everything I write below.

Google just shut down the last piece of Google Talk, killing XMPP. This means that people using standards-based open and interoperable chat systems can no longer talk to their friends who use Google’s proprietary and closed chat system, Hangouts. For example, people who use Pidgin on any of the thousands of free and open XMPP servers in the world cannot message Google users anymore.

Google is trying to destroy the ad blocker market

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 15:30:37 +0000

Like I guessed about two years ago, Google are now trying to undermine the ad blocking market by releasing their own ad blocker, which will of course not block ads served by Google. It will probably also not block other privacy invasions or tracking systems that would benefit Google or its customers. Since Google is the world’s largest advertisement company, that’s quite a few.

This is likely just the first step of several that they might take while abusing their browser dominance. Watch carefully as things get worse the higher Chrome’s market share climbs.

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will buy (at least a stake in) Canonical

Wed, 10 May 2017 05:53:19 +0000

Canonical are apparently preparing for an IPO. If that happens, I’m pretty sure Microsoft will grab a good chunk of them and maybe absorb them completely later.

While Microsoft has been focusing more on the container side with Docker lately, they have also been cuddling with Ubuntu. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which runs Ubuntu in a cage, is only one of these examples. Observe also that e.g. Microsoft’s MS-SQL adapter for PHP only explicitly supports Ubuntu and RedHat, none of the other distros.

How Microsoft and Google are manipulating your children

Thu, 04 May 2017 06:26:34 +0000

Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of Windows 10 for the education market. They plan to make it available to PC makers to sell laptops with, for as little as US$ 200 a pop. “Like a Chromebook, then”, you say? Exactly, like a Chromebook.

Services as drugs for kids #

This is the start of a new turf war for child mindshare. Like drug dealers, Microsoft and Google know that it’s best to get them early, get them young, make them depend on your products. Microsoft even helpfully supplies teaching aids.

Fix crackling audio in some games in WINE

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 08:29:00 +0000

Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Some games happen not to be available natively for Linux, like… err… also Wolfenstein: The New Order. So we play them with WINE, and sometimes there are slight audio issues.

But have no fear: If you get audio crackling in such games (especially if your audio device is not running at 44.1 KHz), the following environment variable might fix it for you like it did for me:

Bidirectional clipboards in KVM guests are as easy as spice-vdagentd

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 11:09:13 +0000

For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM. It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent. You may have to start the service afterwards:

apt-get install spice-vdagent
systemctl start spice-vdagentd

Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system you just have to make sure you’re connecting through spice with a spice client (outdated documentation about that is here). If you use the Virt-Manager GUI, this is all set up correctly by default for Linux guests.

My favorite vim color schemes have been ported to Atom

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 13:01:20 +0000

The PaperColor theme has been my favorite vim color theme for quite some time now, and I’m happy to find the same theme in Atom as well, even by the same author!

They have been ported to the Base16 color scheme system. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t matter at all. Thanks a lot, Nguyen Nguyen, aka NLKNguyen. If I knew how to reach you, I’d send you beer money.

Did your mouse turn all weird in Debian and now you suck at Quake?

Wed, 11 May 2016 17:11:12 +0000

Update: This issue is largely resolved nowadays because modern desktop environments include configuration tools for libinput and its acceleration profiles.

If you have a recent Debian testing release, you might have noticed that your mouse now behaves very differently. For me, I noticed it when my aiming turned wobbly in Quake. Quake has extremely tight controls and shouldn’t feel as if you’re playing a 2016 console FPS with jelly dildos in place of fingers. So I was a bit surprised when it suddenly did. Also, I couldn’t reliably hit e.g. a close button on a window.

To defend the free web, you must save Mozilla

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 15:42:06 +0000

TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of companies to keep it independent, to fight Google’s increasing browser dominance and to ensure our privacy. We must also let Mozilla know what we expect from them.

Read on to hear my reasoning.

Decentraleyes: An additional defense against large companies analyzing you

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 17:23:14 +0000

I recently found out about the Decentraleyes add-on for Firefox. To understand why Decentraleyes is a good idea and why it can help you protect your privacy, here’s what’s been happening so far:

Web developers all over the world have started using the same libraries of Free Software code to solve the same common problems. This is good.
Web developers thought it would be a good idea to host this code on CDNs (distributed content delivery networks). This makes pages load faster and takes the (financial) burden of hosting them off the web developers. This is also good.
Large companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook – who make money by analyzing and recording your behavior in order to sell private details about you to other companies – have started offering such library hosting for free. This is bad.

Because every time you visit a website that refers to such a hosted library, and that’s hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, you give away your intentions to the company hosting the library. You tell Google where you’ve been on the Internet, and by pinging them every time you open any number of websites, they can track where you’re going, whether you’re using your phone, your tablet or your computer, when your preferred time for web surfing is, etc.

Tear-free video on GNU/Linux when using Intel graphics cards

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:17:35 +0000

Once again, I’m on a rampage to destroy all tearing. But this time not on Nvidia but on Intel. I had this problem on both 4400 and 3000 series Intel chips, but I fixed it with this option for the graphics device in xorg.conf:

Option      "TearFree"    "true"

Thanks, one more time, the Arch Linux wiki.

Handling logspam like "action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe')" on Debian Jessie

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 07:45:24 +0000

If you’ve upgraded to Jessie on a server (or any other machine without X), you might have started noticing strange new messages in your logs that look like this:

Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd0: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/0 ]
Nov 4 06:33:21 mail rsyslogd-2359: action 'action 20' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2359 ]

As discussed in this bug report, that shouldn’t really happen and you can get rid of it by disabling logging to xconsole in rsyslog. Find this section of /etc/syslog/rsyslog.conf and comment it:

Backing up email from any IMAP server (plus: syncing and migrating)

Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:43:31 +0000

I recently migrated email providers (several times, actually) and came across the fantastic tool mbsync. It’s included in most GNU/Linux distributions, though sometimes called by its old name, “isync”.

mbsync is very powerful, it can not only sync between a remote IMAP server and e.g. a local on-disk mirror that you want to keep so you can back it up, it can also sync between two remote IMAP servers directly.

Many very advanced configurations are possible from your own personal .mbsyncrc file. But since it took some time to puzzle together a good config from the semi-cryptic manpage, here are two configs I used for two typical situations.

Another way to fix tearing and vsync issues using the Nvidia driver

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:18:56 +0000

Nvidia’s proprietary driver is notorious for having a lot of tearing and vsync issues. Even if you use their control panel to enable vsync, more often than not it will have no effect. I’ve seen this on a GTX 560, on a 650 Ti, 660 Ti, 860M. Previously I tried using compton to fix this issue, but compton sometimes makes e.g. video display sluggish or seems to add some delay and irregular framerate to games. This won’t work, since for games I want a constant framerate, and drops below 25 or so are unacceptable.

For news junkies who want to stay organized and happy: NewsBlur and TinyTinyRSS

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 03:57:16 +0000

In 2013, the famous online ad reseller Google shut down their Google Reader service. If you ask me, and I do have an arsehole as well as an opinion, it was to drive people towards their less customizable, not standards-based News product that they can pepper with ads. But there are other RSS clients and news readers, and of all of those I’ve spent almost two years with TinyTinyRSS and now a month with NewsBlur.

If you get a lot of logspam from systemd in your /var/log/syslog, this might help

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 09:41:37 +0000

Do you get log entries that look like this?

Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd-logind[329]: New session 3264 of user foo.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session opened for user foo by (uid=0)
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting user-1000.slice.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Created slice user-1000.slice.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting Session 3264 of user foo.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Started Session 3264 of user foo.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Starting User Manager for UID 1000...
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Paths.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Paths.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Timers.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Timers.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Sockets.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Sockets.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Basic System.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Basic System.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Starting Default.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Reached target Default.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[16056]: Startup finished in 13ms.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www systemd[1]: Started User Manager for UID 1000.
Jun 29 10:40:31 www console-kit-daemon[1489]: missing action
Jun 29 10:40:32 www systemd-logind[329]: Removed session 3264.
Jun 29 10:40:32 www systemd: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session closed for user foo

I got hundreds upon hundreds of kilobytes of logspam like that and I wanted to solve the root cause, not just ignore it in logcheck. I happened to stumble upon the solution on LinuxQuestions.org, and promptly made a fool out of myself there, too. One solution is to enable lingering for user accounts that have cronjobs. For root, that would be: loginctl enable-linger root Since I searched for quite some time but this didn’t come up immediately, I’m putting it here to increase findability.

Why I'm switching from Jolla's Sailfish OS back to CyanogenMod for now

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 04:19:00 +0000

Before you throw any bricks, know that I’ve been a Jolla supporter from before day one. I had my preorder in there and my money earmarked the moment I knew it wasn’t going to be vaporware. I ran the Swiss Jolla Twitter community for several months even before there was a product and I have a TOHKBD and a Jolla Tablet preordered, as well as a second spare Jolla phone sitting in its original packaging.

About

Tue, 12 May 2015 12:46:22 +0000

I’m an seasoned nerd, semi-professional programmer, sort of a gamer, music lover and beer drinker with a weird taste. This is my blog, where I write mostly about technology these days. It’s basically a notebook for some tweaks I would otherwise forget.

I used to write about society and culture as well, but the older I get, the less I understand either one of them.

Contact #

If you want to contact me, I like plain old email. You can also encrypt it with my public PGP/GPG key. The key is listed on my Keybase page and the correct fingerprint is:

Ebook market still broken

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 23:35:11 +0000

In the last 8 years or so, I’ve regularly looked at the ebook market to figure out if they’ve fixed it yet. In 2015 I can say: no, they haven’t. But there is a new star on the horizon, at least.

Let’s start with a harmless example: Out of the five sci-fi ebooks that Kobo recommends for 2014, they refuse to sell you three. They claim that the books are not available in your country, Switzerland in my case. However, if you check out the competition, you notice that even newcomers to the ebook market like Thalia/Orell Füssli have the ebooks. What’s even worse, Amazon will not hestitate to sell all those five books to you for Kindle.

Presenting the EurKEYboard: A mechanical keyboard for Europeans and coders

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:21:52 +0000

For several months, I’ve been using Steffen Brüntjen’s EurKEY keyboard layout. That layout combines a general US feel with special characters for many western European languages.

That’s fantastic for programmers. You get easy access to keyboard shortcuts that would otherwise be impossible or in weird locations – try typing Alt-` on a Swiss-German keyboard for example, you’ll find it’s impossible.

When it comes to braces, most keyboard layouts in Europe are a nightmare. Some require shifting, some require alt-shift to get to the braces and quotes you need several hundred times a day as a programmer. EurKEY instead makes all manner of braces available with one keystroke, just like on a US keyboard. This makes it much more relaxing to type, whether on the shell, in an editor or in some heavyweight IDE.

Marrying Pulseaudio to KDE’s multimedia settings

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 08:50:48 +0000

If you’re running KDE and Pulseaudio and have the problem that you can’t configure your audio sources in KDE’s multimedia settings, there might just be a component missing:

apt-get install vlc-plugin-pulse

I’m not sure if this is usually part of some KDE desktop metapackage, but for me this package had been missing and one of the symptoms was that only “alsa” and “oss” were shown as audio sources, with no sound playing at all. Those icons also had little VLC traffic cones on their heads.

Syncing Sailfish OS's native calendar/contacts with ownCloud

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 09:57:34 +0000

I just found this very helpful blog post by Alexander, listing the proper CalDAV/CardDAV URLs to use with SyncEvolution on Sailfish OS if you want to sync with ownCloud. Make sure to make backups of your contacts and calendars before you start, since setting the wrong side to be master can potentially wipe out all your data on the other end (as it should, you fool!)

An input method for Chinese in KDE 4

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 13:32:55 +0000

If you need Chinese character input in KDE (typing in pinyin and then selecting the correct word), it’s quite simple on Debian GNU/Linux:

apt-get install task-chinese-s-kde-desktop fcitx-pinyin

That’s all there is to it. Afterwards you should be able to start fcitx in KDE and you get a new icon in your system tray. Go there to configure your input methods. By default, ctrl-space will switch to another input method, if you don’t have anything else installed, that will be pinyin input. Ctrl-space again will take you back to one of your previous input methods.

A secure, free alternative to WhatsApp that is fully under your control

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 10:50:00 +0000

Update: Nowadays, better look into a Matrix homeserver.

With Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, many people are turning to alternatives such as Threema or MyEnigma. But these alternatives, while offering better security than WhatsApp, are still based on proprietary technology and controlled by a single company. Also, they have somve privacy issues:

Threema requires that you have the Google apps installed on your Android phone. This is nonsense, since you can buy the .apk file directly from Threema, but cannot use it unless you have the Google apps, and in that case you could have bought it through Google Play as well.
Threema uses Google Cloud Messaging for notifications. That means Google still knows about your chat activity.
Threema and myEngima are both closed source, so you cannot be sure what they actually do. You also cannot get them through F-Droid or other app stores that carry Free Software.
myEngima seems to not be available through any other means than through Google Play. Update: This is wrong, myEngima customer support gave me a direct URL to the .apk file. I just don’t know if they use Google Cloud Messaging, they didn’t respond to that.

If you want to avoid these problems, you can, thanks to Free Software. You can offer your friends and family your own solution for chatting, and as a free bonus, this stuff comes with full desktop support, not just mobile. So you can transparently chat with your friends either from a mobile device, your tablet, your laptop or your desktop, and you have the full source code of all the components involved.

Swiss churches pay for pro-church-tax campaign using church tax

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 06:49:33 +0000

In Switzerland, any registered company is forced by the government to pay a percentage of its income as church tax. This feels like something out of the middle ages, and so political parties in several cantons are now launching an initiative to remove this tax, turning religion more into something private instead of something state-sponsored.

The funny thing is: Those who oppose forced church taxes for companies have an advertisement budget of CHF 15'000 that they had to cram together from donations. The Christian churches, on the other hand, paid their counter-advertisements using CHF 110'000 gained from, you guessed it, church tax. So companies are paying the advertisement fees to support something that they want to get rid of. Perverse!

The first week with a Jolla phone and Sailfish OS

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 08:35:07 +0000

I’ve had my Jolla phon e for a little over a week now and I’ve completely switched off my Android phone. Time to see how well things are going!

Some native applications I had to grab from alternative sources:

Mitäkuuluu, the WhatsApp client. I got this from OpenRepos.net, a repository of Sailfish and Meego Harmattan apps.
Harbour Tethering GUI. I got this straight from GitHub.

I had to install both on the terminal using rpm: devel-su rpm -i package.rpm. You can execute this either on the built-in terminal application or by SSHing into your phone. The SSH server is built right into Sailfish, by the way, all you need to do to get it is to enable developer mode in phone settings. It even helpfully tells you its own IP.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself, part 7: Deleting your account

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 18:29:28 +0000

So you’ve found replacements for all the things you used to get from Google, and you’re ready to delete your account. Nice! Good job. I just did the same thing yesterday:

Make sure to tick every single box, otherwise they won’t let you go. Also, be sure to download any YouTube clips you may have uploaded. I had a YouTube clip with over half a million views and 3000 thumbs up, so that hurt a little bit. But it’s all good, I will be hosting that clip here in the future.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself, part 6: Browsers and syncing

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 14:26:00 +0000

There is something that is so basic and common to using the Internet that I perhaps overlooked it in my earlier articles: the web browser.

Google Chrome has been gaining market share at an alarming rate over the last few years. Whatever Google’s marketing is doing, it’s working, as even people who don’t know how to install a program have installed Google Chrome and are using it as their default browser. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but I know several people who aren’t really good around technology, who were using Internet Explorer before (!) and are now Chrome users. With no help from anyone.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself, part 5: Translation, dictionaries and online video

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:00:07 +0000

After all my other posts and about a year of activity on the subject of ungoogling yourself, I have come to the point where I only depend on Google for two things:

YouTube videos. Funny cat videos. Zefrank. Video game reviews and such.
Translations, especially of phrases and sentences.

The former hole can’t really be plugged. For video game reviews and other fun clips, I’ve subscribed to The Escapist’s publisher thingy. That way I get HTML5 video instead of Flash video, and they give me a higher quality as well. Eurogamer and Gamespot also have some video reviews. I only miss having the community reviews you find on YouTube.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself, part 4: Mobile phone operating systems

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 06:52:17 +0000

Google’s Android rules the mobile phone market like some sort of ad-flinging gorilla, and it’s not easy to escape its grasp. On a default Android phone your mouth is firmly pressed against several of Google’s teats:

Google Play, their app store, which requires a Google account.
Gmail
Contacts (integrated with Gmail)
Google Calendars
Google Maps
Google+
Online photo galleries (integrated in Google+)
Hangouts (replaces Google Talk)
Currents (so they know what news you read)
News and Weather

There might even be more, but those are the worst offenders. To get rid of all of those in one shot, I moved away from Android to CyanogenMod. The transition was very smooth, I didn’t even lose the data on my (virtual) SD card. Since my phone has no physical card slots, I was a bit worried. Now that I have root, I can remove those Google apps. On a normal Google-flavored Android phone, those applications are protected and can’t be removed.

You cannot buy an ebook in Switzerland without surrendering to two foreign companies

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 11:16:01 +0000

I recently started reading Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. It’s a fantastic series of books. I had downloaded a cracked MOBI format version from somewhere – something that is legal in Switzerland.

However, I also want the publisher and hopefully Dan Simmons himself to make some money, since I’m liking the books a lot and will probably read all four in the series. What I discovered is that even today, in 2013, it is impossible to legally buy an ebook in Switzerland without giving money to two companies known to be tax evaders and surrendering your personal information to at least one US entity.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself, part 3: Maps

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 21:29:09 +0000

This is just a short article to let you know that life without Google’s mapping and navigation systems is possible.

For mapping, I now use OpenStreetMap on the PC and OsmAnd on Android. For navigation, I also use OsmAnd on Android and Yournavigation on PC. So far, everything worked really, really well. I just have to use my eyes a bit more often and actually read what’s written on the map instead of relying on some weird additional overlay to take care of that for me.

Using joysticks/controllers with keyboard-based games in GNU/Linux

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 06:39:20 +0000

If you’re one of those people who only now discover GNU/Linux for gaming (with Steam and all), you might find this useful:

http://www.ryochan7.com/projects/antimicro/

I’ve tried several tools that map controller input to keyboard keys, but AntiMicro is the most reliable and easiest to use in my opinion. Many GNU/Linux developers forget to implement native Linux joystick device support into their games, but often this is crucial for games like Stealth Bastard Deluxe or Super Meat Boy. If you encounter such a game, AntiMicro will let you play it just fine with any USB controller, ranging from cheap-ass $2 Chinese crap up to expensive Logitech controllers.

Nvidia Optimus support now built-in on Debian testing

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 20:03:29 +0000

I was very surprised to see that Bumblebee (a way to use Nvidia’s Optimus technology on GNU/Linux) now works flawlessly on GNU/Linux. The Debian guys somehow managed to get all the fiddly components talking to each other, and this shit works flawlessly. You’ll need jessie (the current testing release).

It’s as easy as:

apt-get install bumblebee nvidia-kernel-dkms glx-alternative-nvidia nvidia-glx

After that, I just had to do:

update-alternatives --config glx

To select my old Mesa GLX so that by default, it would use the built-in Intel graphics card even for 3D stuff. Finally there’s this handy hint from the GNU/Linux devs at Valve.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself part 2

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:16:59 +0000

I’ve written about getting rid of Google before, and that was before the whole NSA/PRISM shitstorm. I’m sure people today find even more reasons to get Google out of their lives.

I wasn’t just doing nothing all this time either. Since the last post, the following has happened:

My contacts are synced with my own CardDAV server instead of to Google, so Google won’t get their hands on my friends’, colleagues’ and family’s personal data through me anymore.
My calendar goes to my own CalDAV server, so Google no longer knows what I’m doing when, where and with whom.
DuckDuckGo has improved so much as a search engine that I don’t feel like I’m missing something by not searching on Google anymore.

One problem still remains: I use an Android device, so you never know what else Google might be collecting through there. I’m watching Jolla and Sailfish as well as Firefox OS to see if and when there is some way to get a truly independent mobile device. That is the only piece of the puzzle still missing, and Google Play is the only way Google still gets at my stuff.

Cracking the DRM on Kindle ebooks

Sat, 25 May 2013 08:32:53 +0000

I recently bought a book through Amazon because their price was ridiculously cheaper than the competition’s.

Of course their crazy DRM prevented me from using the book on my open and friendly Boox reader, but then I found Alf the Apprentice’s tools on his blog.

I used Calibre, Wine and the Windows version of Kindle’s reader software, and ten minutes of fiddling later I could actually read the book I bought.

Google no longer supporting XMPP/Jabber

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:42:56 +0000

Update: Just like XMPP is slowly dying, Swissjabber has also kicked the bucket. Rest in peace, my friend.

If you’re Swiss and need to have a Google Talk alternative for your XMPP-based chat needs, consider Swissjabber.

I’ve created an account there and discontinued my Google Talk one, so if you want to contact me via XMPP, add psy-q@swissjabber.org.

IT archaeology: Virtualizing RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 (Taroon) with VirtualBox in the year 2013

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:26:09 +0000

One of my customers is in a very unhappy situation: He bought a piece of proprietary software that runs on RedHat’s Enterprise Linux 3, and now the company he bought it from is no longer available. What’s worse, they’ve tied their software to a USB copy protection dongle that uses a homemade Linux kernel module that only works on Linux 2.4.

This customer’s entire business depends on this piece of software. And now the server it’s running on is slowly falling apart, entire CPUs have burned due to failing fans, and there’s a proprietary RAID controller doing dangerous things to old and strange SCSI disks that have been unavailable on the market for several years already.

Proxying from Apache HTTPS to some backend server that only speaks HTTP

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:02:38 +0000

Here’s a use case: You want to run an application server that only speaks HTTP, but securely, over HTTPS. The problem is that the application server won’t know that it’s being accessed via HTTPS, so any URLs and redirects it generates might point to HTTP. Here’s an example virtual host entry that takes care of that by rewriting the header.

You need Apache, mod_proxy and mod_headers.

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName foo.bar.example.com

  SSLEngine on
  SSLCertificateFile    /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
  Header edit Location "^http:(.*)$" "https:$1"

  PassengerEnabled off
  ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/

  DocumentRoot /var/www/foo/bar
  <Directory /var/www/foo/bar>
    AllowOverride none
    Options -MultiViews
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The magical line is the one with “Header edit…”. This makes sure any request your app server would have sent to HTTP are rewritten to HTTPS.

The slow and painful act of ungoogling yourself

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:15:12 +0000

With Google’s questionable treatment of privacy, you might want to gain some distance from that company.

I’ve done that myself a couple of steps at a time, and now I’m at the point where only one or two unhappy circumstances keep me nailed to the crucifix of Google systems and services.

Here’s what worked well:

Replacing Google Reader with my own TinyTinyRSS instance.
Replacing Picasa with my own Gallery instance.
Replacing Gmail with my own Postfix and Courier servers. I use a fucking awesome email client and organize my stuff well, so I never need to rely on Gmail search anyhow.

Creating your own Steam Cloud (or how to reliably sync any two directories)

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:42:37 +0000

I was quite annoyed that the Steam Cloud seems to misread file timestamps some of the time, resulting in game saves being overwritten with older versions. And since Steam doesn’t offer a way to reliably find out which save is the most recent one, I needed something better.

The things I need:

Connects over SSH, works with an SFTP/SSH server
Transmits only file differences
Reliably determines which copy of the pair is the newest
Takes any required actions to make the older copy be identical to the newer one
Works on GNU/Linux and Windows, since some games still aren’t available on Linux
Should be able to save sets of pre-defined sources and targets so I can sync with one click or command

If you have similar needs, I might have a recommendation for you: Unison. Unison is not new, but directory synchronization (especially cross-platform) is not a trivial problem, and Unison has had a solution since 1998 and has only improved since then.

Building your own Sublime out of free components with vim

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 06:40:04 +0000

I recently discovered Sublime Text and bought a license even though I rarely use proprietary software for work. That’s how good it felt to me.

But if you’re comfortable with an editor like vim, you can make vim feel almost like Sublime, using only free and open source software (FOSS). vim (and emacs) have had many of the features that Sublime has, in some cases for decades. Here’s a very small and simple guide for making vim look and behave a little like Sublime.

Super-legible Heiti-style Chinese font for Debian GNU/Linux

Sun, 27 May 2012 12:07:21 +0000

I’m struggling with those crazy Chinese fonts in Mingti and Kaiti style and couldn’t find a goot Heiti font, but now this page:

http://wiki.debian.org.hk/w/Where_can_I_find_fonts_for_GNU/Linux

Mentions that there is a perfectly fine Heiti-style font available in Debian: ttf-wqy-zenhei. So do this and be happy: apt-get install ttf-wqy-zenhei

Here’s a sort of preview from Wikipedia’s multilingual support page:

The samples above are in Heiti, the ones below in Mingti. Putting it into a screenshot makes it look shitty, so you’ll have to install the font (don’t install any other Chinese fonts!) and look at the page zoomed in to see it really well.

Avoding "Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8" with Ruby and CSV files

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:14:57 +0000

If you’re running into a ton of problems reading e.g. an ISO-8859-1 encoded CSV file into your (probably UTF-8) Ruby or Rails application, and if the error you get is “Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8” even though you’re giving CSV.open the correct encoding options, here’s a solution.

The example CSV file is a tab-separated, ISO-8859-1 encoded file with CRLF line endings. You’d expect the following to work:

CSV.open(@infile, "r:ISO-8859-15:UTF-8", {:col_sep =&gt; "t", :headers =&gt; :first_row})

But it fails mysteriously! Even though the conversion to UTF-8 goes without problems, you get an ArgumentError complaining about some illegal byte sequence. If you analyze deeper, you might find (in this case) a complaint about rn. The solution is very, very non-obvious: You need to specify the row separator in addition to your encodings!

Watch TV on your PC, no ads, no Flash

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:55:48 +0000

Roman Haefeli strikes again: Watchteleboy makes it possible to watch dozens of live TV channels using mplayer in your very own machine, without the need for Flash, a web browser or any other such nonsense.

Here’s the source code: https://github.com/reduzent/watchteleboy

Here are Ubuntu packages he maintains: https://launchpad.net/~reduzierer/+archive/reduzent

Caveat: This only works if you’re located in Switzerland or in some other place that Teleboy’s geotargetting likes (such as Italy).

Vegan Black Metal Chef, Ep. 1

Fri, 20 May 2011 13:53:58 +0000

Give this a look:

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/12/vegan-black-metal-ch.html

Thanks, lix! 🙂

Moving from Google Reader to Tiny Tiny RSS

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:15:06 +0000

In my quest for more freedom from companies that don’t take privacy too seriously (such as Facebook or Google), I found a fantastic FOSS replacement for Google Reader: Tiny Tiny RSS. It does everything important that Google Reader does and even has its own little syncable native Android app called ttrss reader (available through the Google Android Market).

The only additional feature I’d appreciate is a Reader Play-style view for very important tasks, such as scrolling through large amounts of animated gifs or lolcats quickly. Tiny Tiny RSS’s code seems to be clean and concise, though, so it might not be that much work to make such a feature if I ever find the time (which won’t happen).

Why is Switzerland/Norway so rich/expensive/not part of the EU?

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:17:38 +0000

This is a great Google Suggest Venn diagram generator:

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn.

Only a fool would suggest that not being part of the EU makes a country rich and expensive 😛

Good quality music from your PC, Mac or NAS: Music Streamer

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:54:09 +0000

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound OK.

But there’s a cheap way out of that. The Music Streamer by High Resolution Technologies. It’s an external USB sound interface with a very good D/A converter. This is a semi-audiophile device, yet it costs only about the same as your average USB audio interface these days.

This isn’t made for 5.1 surround sound, it only has two analog RCA (Cinch) outputs to hook up to your amp. Of course you can also play games in stereo on it and watch films. Both sounds crystal clear.

Sidegrading from Ubuntu 9.10 to Debian squeeze: It's a breeze

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:58:30 +0000

Since I’m switching many machines from Ubuntu to Debian, I was wondering if I could just keep my home partition intact and simply install Debian “over” Ubuntu, or if that would cause major problems with application configuration files etc.

Here’s the good news: It’s absolutely no problem to sidegrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to Debian squeeze (testing). I chose to keep the /home partition unformatted in the installer, but formatted the / partition. When the system rebooted, I logged in and my entire desktop looked exactly the same as under Ubuntu. Even my GNOME settings were intact, down to the desktop background.

How to decrypt an Adobe DRM-crippled ePub eBook file

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:09:18 +0000

I used to have a mirror of all sorts of decryption tools here, but the legal situation has improved over the last few years so that this is no longer necessary.

Instead, I am happy to refer you to Apprentice Alf’s blog with his decryption tools.

Nitpicking: KDE vs. Windows 7 window controls

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:16:35 +0000

I’m using Windows 7 a bit more regularly for gaming purposes now, so I thought I’d start on a series of articles about Win 7 vs. KDE. I’ve given up on GNOME until 3.0 rolls around, but once that’s out, I can do three-way comparisons 🙂

Today I’d like to nitpick on something. Observe the following screenshot from the top right corner of a KDE 4.3 window using the default theme:

A week with KDE 4.3

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:53:29 +0000

I’ve been using the new KDE 4.3 for a week now, and I think I’ll stick with it. There are still some issues to fix, but they are small things, I’m sure 4.3.1 will take care of them.

The fun I’ve had so far, and this is why I’d recommend trying KDE 4.3 to any computer user, is in the subtle little helpful things KDE does:

When you move a file to a folder that already contains that file, Dolphin (the file manager) will ask what to do with it. It even recognizes the file if they have different names! You can choose to skip, auto-skip, overwrite… No more manually trying to find duplicate files to interleave one directory with another.
In Dolphin, clicking on the filesystem path shown on top of your file list lets you edit it and manually enter paths. Very quick.
The widgets on the desktop are both silly and useful, depending on which ones you choose. I have the latest lolcats, Penny Arcade, XKCD and Nichtlustig comics on my desktop. But I also have a dictionary widget, the weather, a fuzzy clock (says “half past eleven” in so many words) and the files in my homedir. I can also add the files from my former desktop directory, and they show up in orderly fashion. Compare this to your average desktop, where there’s just clutter and no real useful features. In the worst case, I can glance at the weather and some lolcats. In the best case, I’ll quickly navigate to a file I was looking for.
Dolphin as file manager is amazing. I can have OS X-style columns in the window, then split the window and have your usual detail view on the right half. I can mix and match view modes as I please and use the one that’s best for each situation. When navigating the hierarchy a lot, column view might be good, but when sorting audio files from left to right it’s better with a side-by-side detail view.
Alt-F2 (this is freely configurable) brings up a quickstart dialog that is really powerful. If I enter “fire” and hit enter, firefox will launch. If I enter “22+3=” the bottom of the window will show “25”. If I enter “Ruben” and some Rubens are in my address book, one of the choices will be “Write e-mail to Ruben”. If I enter “gmail”, my Gmail opens because I visited that site in my browser once before. This is all done 100% automatically and transparently, without any configuration. I’m sure if I configured this thing, it would be even cooler. Very, very, very fast working is possible this way.
Kate is a wonderful text editor, it has probably the most beautiful code folding I’ve ever seen.
Choqok and other social networking tools integrate nicely with the desktop and also make use of the cool notification feature.
If your machine is doing something in the background (copying a bunch of files), your screen isn’t cluttered up with useless progress dialogs. Instead, all current tasks are summarized in the lower right corner in your notification area. Once the task is finished, you will be notified. If you want to look at the progress, hover your mouse over the notification area.
I have OS X’s Exposé and other window management features at my disposal, but I don’t need to use OS X for them 😛

The kickoff menu in the lower left is very convenient as well. I think you can see that I’m very happy with KDE 4.3. If some of the issues (like the WLAN network manager that can’t connect to corporate WPA2-TKIP networks) are fixed, I see no reason not to recommend this stuff.

Checking out KDE 4.3 – it's a winner

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:44:20 +0000

If you have Ubuntu, give KDE 4.3 a try or check out some information first.

I’ve followed the KDE development since version 1.0. I remember installing it in circa 1999 on a PowerPC machine with a 200 MHz 603e and 24 MB RAM, and it ran faster than the native OS I had on that box, Mac OS 7.6.

When the KDE team hit version 3.0, I thought development got very slow, KDE itself slowed down as well, and things weren’t looking great all in all. Now that I’m trying KDE 4.3, I’m surprised at every corner. This thing rocks. It’s fast, it’s quite different to any other desktop, but extremely configurable. I can set this thing up to work like Mac OS X, like Windows, like a mix between the two, like none of them. I can add the latest lolcats to my desktop in a widget, with a dictionary and my home dir next to it, and they’re available at the push of a button.

How competition in the browser market helped all of us

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:01:04 +0000

Remember the 90s, when Microsoft had illegally established a dominant position in the browser market and the dominant browser was MSIE? You might think that was harmless, but it has caused several problems:

No competition means websites were written for a specific browser instead of to a standard (that the W3C publishes)
MSIE (purposefully?) broke this standard in order to make sites written for MSIE incompatible with other browsers and further strenghten Microsoft’s position
MS started adding tags to MSIE that didn’t exist on any other browser. Not for the good of mankind, but to lock people onto the MS product
Lack of competition meant that innovation stagnated
There are plenty of security holes in MSIE, and there was little incentive for MS to fix them
Ask a web developer to tell you just how broken MSIE’s HTML rendering engine is

Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3.5 with many new features (mostly under the hood) and speed boosts. People have noticed this new competition and are no longer happy with an old and broken browser like MSIE 6.0, which used to be the default for many. When we look at our website stats at work, about 35% of our users use Firefox, another 35% use Safari and only 25% use Internet Explorer (either 6, 7 or 8). This is excellent news because it is living proof of competition. Competition gave us many improvements:

More than half of Standard Norge resigns over Microsoft OOXML fiasco

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:10:48 +0000

After the Norwegian ISO standards body, Standard Norge, accepted Microsoft’s MSOOXML file format even though only two of 23 members voted in favor, it became clear that some manipulation had been going on behind the scenes.

Apparently, nearly 40 strong and powerful Microsoft partners had sent identical letters to Standard Norge urging them to adopt MSOOXML, and Standard Norge’s own expert committee’s strong vote against the format was simply ignored.

KDE 4's ultra-sexy text editor control

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:20:24 +0000

I like simple editors and use Kate a lot. It’s like Kdevelop, but without all the additional baggage. It does syntax highlighting and indentation just fine, and it has code folding and can comment and uncomment entire text blocks. If an editor has all of that, it’s already making me very happy.

I was curious to see what will change with Kate in KDE 4, so I installed the KDE 4 version today on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), since it’s nicely packaged there. The screenshot above is from that version. Just wow. Text display is crisp and look at those code folding depth indicators (the gradually greener line on the side). When I took the screenshot, I was hovering my mouse over the greenest part, which highlights the block at this depth. The triangles let you fold code, of course.

Popcorn Hour A-100: A proper media player box

Tue, 20 May 2008 19:38:39 +0000

I’ve tried the Xbox Media Center, I’ve tried hooking up a full PC to my TV, but nothing beats the tiny little Popcorn Hour A-100 I just received. It’s silent, only wants 12V of voltage, has a BitTorrent downloader built-in and can access an internal hard drive if you mount one. It plays Full HD 1080p video smooth as butter in XviD, H.264 (even in Matroska containers), WMV – whatever you toss at it. And it costs less than USD 200.

French court forces dealer to refund Windows price

Mon, 19 May 2008 05:27:37 +0000

This is the third time that a French court had to force a PC dealer to return the money for an unwanted copy of Windows. The Slashdot article has some more information in English. The refunds were between 100 and 300 Euros, depending on version of Windows etc.

Do the math. Laptops nowadays often cost under 700 Euros. Laptop makers still bundle Windows and force it down customer’s throats, but if you don’t want that software, return it! It can shave up to a quarter off the price of your laptop, as you can also get a refund for MS Works or other software that was included without asking you. You can then use some other operating system on the machine, or if you want to keep using Windows, you can use your existing license. Tying a license you’ve already bought to a specific laptop you bought it for is also not legal in many countries. If this happens to you, check what the situation is for your country and perhaps sue the company.

Chairman of Norwegian ISO mirror committee reveals whole story

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:03:48 +0000

The chairman of the Norwegian standard body’s SC34 (K185) group has resigned after 13 years, in protest of the recent acceptance of MS-OOXML by Standard Norway. He now reveals details on the entire (farcical) voting process:

http://topicmaps.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-norway-vote-what-really-happened/

The Swiss working group may have gone through some of these things as well.

Norwegians protest against OOXML

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:52:19 +0000

While Switzerland’s people can see nothing wrong with the scandalous acceptance of MSOOXML as an ISO standard, Norway sees it differently. Perhaps that’s because Norway is more successful in the international software business (Opera, Funcom, Trolltech etc.) and therefore has something to lose, while Switzerland has a very passive and consumerist attitude.

But never mind the reasons, Norwegian people were smart enough to gather in front of the ISO SC34 meeting for a demonstration to kick OOXML out of ISO. One sign even asks Neelie Kroes to intervene. Seeing that the EC has started an investigation into the irregularities encountered during the OOXML voting process, it looks like she read the sign.

ISO approves broken standard amidst massive irregularities

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:01:56 +0000

The whole voting process for fast tracking DIS 29500 (i.e. MS-OOXML, Microsoft Corp’s broken new format for office documents) was full of irregularities. Votes that were not counted or counted wrongly, Microsoft Gold partners that were bribed into joining national standards bodies to swing their opinion around in the last minute, meeting rooms for discussing these issues that were deliberately too small for people who could point out the flaws in the formats, but not too small for its supporters.

Gbarcode Support for Ruby FPDF

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:08:08 +0000

I was going mad fixing a bug in a very convoluted barcode printing feature in the equipment management system we’re developing. After a while I gave up – we must have triggered something deep within Rails or Ruby, and it wasn’t going to go away soon. The details are complicated and boring, and I ended up rewriting our barcode handling. As a side effect developed an extension for Ruby FPDF to support Gbarcode.

Our OpenVZ Virtualization Experience

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:02:26 +0000

We are currently finalizing the server consolidation in our department. The product we chose for virtualization is OpenVZ, because it sports creepy Russians.

All in all, it was a bit of a roller coaster ride, but once we figured out that most of the problems came from our own incompetence, we quickly stopped pointing fingers and shaking fists and instead read some documentation. Then all was good. We went from 12 servers to 5, killing 7 physical servers and saving roughly 1500W of power consumption. The new virtualization servers we used were actually the old database server and the old main web server, both overpowered. A change in the mentality and the technical competence level required from our students in the last few years has made the extra power for these boxes unneccessary. Now we’re using them much more efficiently because each of them runs several virtual servers.

From Zero to Virtualization: Linux-Vserver vs. OpenVZ

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:15:40 +0000

We’re currently evaluating solutions for virtualizing GNU/Linux servers at the HGKZ in order to replace seriously aging hardware (700 MHz P3’s!). At the same time, we can be hip like you and use important-sounding words such as “machine consolidation”, “hypervisor” and “cuttlefish”.

Gino is evaluating OpenVZ while I’m looking at Linux-Vserver. Both solutions have a similar approach: Don’t create virtual machines. Instead, create virtual servers that are sealed away from each other, but running on the same kernel. This has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but I won’t go into that, you can read about it elsewhere.

Dell Germany Refunds Vista/Works Price to Swiss Customer

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:50 +0000

Hurrah! “mad” from TheAlternative.ch created a fantastic precedent for us silly Swiss people: He sent one e-mail to Dell and immediately got a refund for both the unwanted Vista and the copy of MS Works included with his new laptop. He saved 15% on the laptop’s price this way, as well as getting rid of software he doesn’t use. Read his story in English or German.

How to get a refund for the unused copy of Windows that is chained to your new laptop

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 11:21:15 +0000

Serge Wroclawski tells us how to get the Windows tax back that you pay with almost any laptop on the market, whether you want Windows or not. I’m not sure if this strategy only works for the USA, though.

I have a few personal experiences with this problem. I have tried several times to get my money back for unused Windows licenses, and every time I was told it’s impossible. One afternoon, I insisted enough to be put through to Microsoft Switzerland’s licensing person, and he himself told me it’s impossible to get your money back, even though Windows’ very own license agreement says you will get cash back if you don’t need Windows. It’s a horrible situation. They sell you a product you don’t need and then trap you in legalese when you want to exercise your right of returning it for a refund.

Some brainlessness in rsnapshot

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:30:57 +0000

I love rsnapshot, for the most part. It’s one of the most efficient and straightforward incremental backup solutions I’ve ever used – much more reliable than some of the commercial solutions I’ve tried. It leverages the power of GNU cp, your filesystem, rsync and others and smashes them all together into a big happy chunk of reliability.

However, it must contain some idiocy, and I guess it’s somewhere in parse_config_file. I just set up another server, the same way I usually do, but it needed a slightly different rsnapshot.conf. So I edited the one that was there and known to work because it automatically comes off my server images. Afterwards I wanted to do a test run of each of the backup intervals, because that’s what you do. But rsnapshot didn’t agree. It didn’t disagree either. It didn’t do anything.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000