Technology

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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?

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. ...

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. I prefer this to the other solutions out there for a few reasons: ...

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. ...

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: ...