Culture

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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! ...

I’ve had my Jolla phone 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...