Reviews

On things about which I have an opinion

The end of a comic era

Sunday, May 14, 2023 

Tonight I listened to the last episode of NPRs excellent and hilarious Ask Me Another, though originally broadcast on 2021-09-24, it didn’t reach my ears until tonight thanks to the magic of podcasts. It was genuinely hard to hear them sign off for the last time.  I will really miss this show and the warmth and good spirits of Ophira Eisenberg and Jonathan Coulton.

I’ve been listening to this show since it started, back so far as to have been over syndicated FM broadcast on KQED at home and since on various digital media over the years wherever I’ve been, even here in Iraq.  It suffered when Covid hit, the energy and charm didn’t translate well to zoom and without an audience as so many things didn’t and sadly didn’t live to see Covid restrictions lifted.  It would have been fitting if they’d been able to record their last show at The Bell House one more time.  Maybe someday they can have a reunion show.

US Public Radio has been an anchor of good quality programming, from Car Talk, which I still listen to weekly despite the questions being increasingly out of touch (though the cars have long been fairly irrelevant) and Fresh Air and Terry Gross‘ voice, which came from my mother’s kitchen radio every afternoon from WHYY about as far back as I can remember.

Posted at 17:42:12 GMT-0700

Category: EventsFunnyMediaPositiveReviews

Save your email! Avoid the Thunderbird 78 update

Saturday, June 19, 2021 

History repeats itself as the TB devs learn nothing from the misery they created by auto-updating 60x users to 68 without providing any warning or option to avoid the update.  This is crappy user management.  On updates that will break an installed add-on, the user should be informed of what will be disable and asked if they want to proceed with the update, not silently forced to conform to a stripped-down, unproductive environment as if the user’s efforts at optimization were childish mistakes unworthy of consideration or notice.

The Thunderbird devs have increasingly adopted a “if you’re not doing it our way, you’re doing it wrong and we’re going fix your mistake whether you like it or not” attitude.  This is highly annoying because the org already alienated their add-on community by repeatedly breaking the interface models add-on developers relied on.

For a while add-on devs gamely played along dealing with reputational damage as idiotic and poorly planned actions by Thunderbird devs broke their code and left them to deal with user frustration and scrambled to fix problems they didn’t create.  Many, if not by now most, add-on developers finally had enough and abandoned ship.  This is tragic because without some of the critical modifications to Thunderbird provided by developers it is essentially unusable.

I eventually came to peace with the add-on-pocolypse between 60 and 68 as add on developers worked through it and very carefully set my TB 68 to not update ever again, even though 90a finally fixes the problem that 68 caused where it became impossible to display dates in ISO 8601 format, but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Still, despite trying to block it, I got a surprise update; if this keeps up, I’ll switch to Interlink Mail and News.

So if you, like I did, got force “upgraded” to 78 from a nicely customized 68, this is what worked for me to undo the damage: (If you weren’t surprise updated, then jump right down to preventing future surprises.)

  • Uninstall thunderbird (something like # sudo apt remove thunderbird)
  • Download the last 68:
  • Extract the tar file and copy it (sudo) to /usr/lib/thunderbird
sudo mv ~/downloads/thunderbird/ /usr/lib/thunderbird
  • Create a desktop entry

 

# nano ~/.local/share/applications/tb68.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Thunderbird-68
Icon=thunderbird
Exec="/usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird"
Comment=last TB version
Categories=Application;Network;Email;
Terminal=false
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;application/x-xpinstall;
StartupNotify=true
Actions=Compose;Contacts

 

  • Prevent future updates (hopefully) by creating a no-update policy file:
# sudo nano /usr/lib/thunderbird/distribution/policies.json

{
  "policies": {
      "DisableAppUpdate": true
  }
}

and then, just to be sure, break the update checker code:

# sudo mv /usr/lib/thunderbird/updater /usr/lib/thunderbird/no-updater 
# sudo mv /usr/lib/thunderbird/updater.ini /usr/lib/thunderbird/no-updater.ini
  • Start the freshly improved and downgraded to the last remotely usable version of Thunderbird with a special downgrade allowed option the first time from the command line:
# /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird --allow-downgrade

If you were unlucky enough to launch TB 78 even once, your add-ons are screwed up now (thanks devs, Merry Christmas to you too).  Those that have a 78 compatible version will have been auto-updated to the 78 version which isn’t compatible with 68 (w00t w00t, you can see why the plugin devs quit in droves).  At least this time your incompatible add-ons weren’t auto-deleted like with 68.  Screen shot or otherwise capture a list of your disabled plugins, then remove the incompatible ones and add them back to the 68-compatible previous release.

If the “find plugins” step doesn’t find your 68 plugin (weird, but it happens) then google it and download the xpi and manually add it.

  • Restart one more time normally to re-enable the 68 compatible add-ons without 78 updates that the 78 launch disabled.

One more detail – if find your CardBook remote address books are gone, you need to rebuild your preferences.

  • Find your preferences folder: help->Troubleshooting Information-> about:profiles -> Open Directory
  • Back up your profile (good thing to do no matter what)
  • Uninstall the CardBook plugin
  • Quit TB
  • In your profiles directory, delete all files that end with .sqlite (rm *.sqlite)
  • Restart TB (the .sqlite files should be recreated)
  • Reinstall the CardBook plugin.  Your address books should reappear.  (if not, the advice on the interwebs is to create a new profile and start over).

PHEW! just a few hours of lost time and you’ve fixed the misery the TB devs forced on you without asking.  How nice.  What thoughtful people.

[poll id=”2″]

Posted at 07:16:58 GMT-0700

Category: HowToLinuxNegativeReviewsSecurityTechnology

Compile and install Digikam 8.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish)

Friday, March 26, 2021 

Digikam is an incredibly powerful media management tool that integrates a great collection of powerful media processing projects into a single, fairly nice and moderately intuitive user interface. The problem is that it make use of SO many projects and libraries that installation is quite fragile and most distributions are many years out of date – that is a typical sudo apt install digikam will yield version 4.5 while release is (as of this writing) 8.1.

In particular, this newer version has face detection that runs LOCALLY – not on Google or Facebook’s servers – meaning you don’t have to trade your personal photos and all the data implicit in them to a data broker to make use of such a useful tool.  Sure, Google once bought and then improved Picasa Desktop which gave you this function, but then they realized this was cutting into their data harvesting business and discontinued Picasa and tried to convince people to let them look at all their pictures with Google Photos, which is massively creepy.  We really, really need to make personal data a toxic asset, such an intolerable liability that any company that holds any personal data has negative value.  But until then, use FOSS software on your own hardware where ever possible.

You can compile the latest version on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), though not exactly painlessly, or you can install the flatpak appimage easily. I hate flatpaks with a passion (appimage is much better, it is self-contained, though still breaks the integration value of having a program installed on your computer just because library maintenance is tedious and devs can’t be bothered), so I went through the exercise and found what appears to be stable success with the following procedure which yielded a fully featured digikam with zero dependency errors or warnings and all features enabled using MariaDB as a backend.

Updating Ubuntu from 20.04 to 21.10 (or any other major update too) will (as typical) break a ton of stuff.  For “reasons” the updater uninstalls all sorts of things like MariaDB and many of the dependencies.  Generally, as libraries change versions, recompiling is required.  This is so easy with FreeBSD ports…

Install and configure MariaDB

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mariadb-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation

The secure options are all good, accept them unless you know better.

Start the server (if it isn’t)

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb --now
sudo systemctl status mariadb.service

Do some really basic config:

sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf

and set:

character-set-server = utf8mb4
collation-server = utf8mb4_general_ci
default_storage_engine = InnoDB

Switch to mariadb and create an admin user account and (I’d suggest) one for digikam as below.  It seems this has to be done before the first connect and can’t be fixed after.  You’ll probably want to use a different ‘user’ than I did, but feel free.

sudo mariadb
CREATE USER 'gessel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'gessel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
CREATE DATABASE digikam;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON digikam.* TO 'gessel'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

should correctly create the correct user – though check the instructions tab on the database connection options pane for any changes if you’re following these instructions for install of a later version. You will need the socket location to connect to the database so before exit; run:

mysqladmin -u admin -p version

Should yield something like:

Enter password: 
mysqladmin  Ver 9.1 Distrib 10.3.25-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu on x86_64
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Server version		10.3.25-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
Protocol version	10
Connection		Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket		/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime:			5 hours 26 min 6 sec

Threads: 29  Questions: 6322899  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 108  Flush tables: 1  Open tables: 74  Queries per second avg: 323.157

And note the value for UNIX socket, you’re going to need that later: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock – yours might vary.

Install digiKam Dependencies

Updates 2021-10-30 🎃

  • Updated to libx264-163 and libx265-199
  • Added libopencv-dev dependency
  • Version change from 7.2.0 to 7.3.0

Updates 2022-02-01 🧧

  • Installing on Ubuntu 21.10 “impish”
  • Version change to 7.5.0 (note camelcase used for file name now, “digiKam” not “digikam“)
  • Problem with libopencv-dev required selecting a # sudo aptitude install solution to get past a libilmbase-dev but it is not installable error.

Updates 2023-09-29 🥮

  • Installing on Ubuntu Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish”
  • Version change to 8.1.0 (note camelcase used for file name now, “digiKam” not “digikam”)
  • libjasper4 → libjasper7
  • version 8 migrated to QT6
  • libx264-163 → libx264-164
  • Qt x11 extras removed with QT6
  • libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev replaced with Rajce plugin
  • Marble (geolocation) won’t work with QT6 quite yet (as of writing). A patch was pushed 2023-09-24 but hasn’t hit repros.

Digikam has just a few dependencies.just a few... the below command should install the needed for 7.30 on Ubuntu 21.10. Any other version combination might be different. Things are a bit screwy between QT5 and QT6, apologies if this is mixed up:

sudo aptitude install \
bison \
checkinstall \
devscripts \
doxygen \
extra-cmake-modules \
ffmpeg \
ffmpegthumbnailer \
flex \
graphviz \
help2man \
jasper \
libavcodec-dev \
libavdevice-dev \
libavfilter-dev \
libavformat-dev \
libavutil-dev \
libboost-dev \
libboost-graph-dev \
libeigen3-dev \
libexiv2-dev \
libgphoto2-dev \
libjasper-dev \
libjasper-runtime \
libjasper7 \
libjpeg-dev \
libkf5akonadicontact-dev \
libkf5calendarcore-dev \
libkf5contacts-dev \
libkf5doctools-dev \
libkf5filemetadata-dev \
libkf5kipi-dev \
libkf5notifications-dev \
libkf5notifyconfig-dev \
libkf5sane-dev \
libkf5solid-dev \
libkf5threadweaver-dev \
libkf5xmlgui-dev \
liblcms2-dev \
liblensfun-dev \
liblqr-1-0-dev \
libmagick++-6.q16-dev \
libmagick++-6.q16hdri-dev \
libmagickcore-dev \
libmarble-dev \
libqt5networkauth5-dev \
libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev \
libqt6core5compat6-dev \
libqt6opengl6-dev \
libqt6openglwidgets6 \
libqt6sql6-mysql \
libqt6svg6-dev \
libqt6networkauth6-dev \
qt6-webengine-dev \
libqt6webview6 \
qt6-webview-dev \
libqtav-dev \
libqtwebkit-dev \
libswscale-dev \
libtiff-dev \
libusb-1.0-0-dev \
libx264-164 \
libx264-dev \
libx265-199 \
libx265-dev \
libxml2-dev \
libxslt1-dev \
marble \
pkg-kde-tools \
qt6-base-dev \
qt6-base-dev-tools \
qt6-multimedia-dev \
qt6-webengine-dev \
libopencv-dev \
qt6-webengine-dev-tools

Compile Digikam

Switch to your projects directory (~/projects, say) and get the source, cross your fingers, and go to town. The make -j4 command will take a while to compile everything.  There are two basic mechanisms for getting the source code: wget the taball or git pull the repository.

Download the tarball

Check the latest version at https://download.kde.org/stable/digikam/ It was 7.3.0, but is now 8.1.0 and will, certainly change again. This is currently a 255.3 MB download (!). Note the csclub mirror below has 8.0.0.

wget https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/kde/Attic/digikam/8.0.0/digiKam-8.0.0.tar.xz
tar -xvf digiKam-8.0.0.tar.xz
cd digiKam-0.0.0.tar.xz

git pull the repository

Git uses branches/tags so check the pull down list of latest branches and tags at the top left, below the many, many branches is the tag list at https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam/-/tree/v8.1.0 , latest on top, and currently 8.1.0. This is currently a 1.4 GB git pull (!!).
There was an issue in the v7.3.0 tag that caused built to fail that was fixed in current, so building “stable” isn’t always the best choice for stability.

git clone -b v8.1.0 https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam
cd digikam

Then follow the same steps:

./bootstrap.linux
cd build
make -j4
sudo su
make install/fast

Compiling might take 15-30 minutes depending on CPU.  Adjust -jx to optimize build times, the normal rule of thumb is that x=# of cores or cores+1, YMMV, 4 is a reasonable number if you aren’t confident or interested in experimenting.

The ./bootstrap.linux result should be as below; if it indicates a something is missing then double check dependencies.  If you’ve never compiled anything before, you might need to install cmake and and some other basics not in the apt install list above:

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--  digiKam 7.2.0 dependencies results   <https://www.digikam.org>
-- 
--  MySQL Database Support will be compiled.. YES (optional)
--  MySQL Internal Support will be compiled.. YES (optional)
--  DBUS Support will be compiled............ YES (optional)
--  App. Style Support will be compiled...... YES (optional)
--  QWebEngine Support will be compiled...... YES (optional)
--  libboostgraph found...................... YES
--  libexiv2 found........................... YES
--  libexpat found........................... YES
--  libjpeg found............................ YES
--  libkde found............................. YES
--  liblcms found............................ YES
--  libopencv found.......................... YES
--  libpng found............................. YES
--  libpthread found......................... YES
--  libqt found.............................. YES
--  libtiff found............................ YES
--  bison found.............................. YES (optional)
--  doxygen found............................ YES (optional)
--  ccache found............................. YES (optional)
--  flex found............................... YES (optional)
--  libakonadicontact found.................. YES (optional)
--  libmagick++ found........................ YES (optional)
--  libeigen3 found.......................... YES (optional)
--  libgphoto2 found......................... YES (optional)
--  libjasper found.......................... YES (optional)
--  libkcalendarcore found................... YES (optional)
--  libkfilemetadata found................... YES (optional)
--  libkiconthemes found..................... YES (optional)
--  libkio found............................. YES (optional)
--  libknotifications found.................. YES (optional)
--  libknotifyconfig found................... YES (optional)
--  libksane found........................... YES (optional)
--  liblensfun found......................... YES (optional)
--  liblqr-1 found........................... YES (optional)
--  libmarble found.......................... YES (optional)
--  libqtav found............................ YES (optional)
--  libthreadweaver found.................... YES (optional)
--  libxml2 found............................ YES (optional)
--  libxslt found............................ YES (optional)
--  libx265 found............................ YES (optional)
--  OpenGL found............................. YES (optional)
--  libqtxmlpatterns found................... YES (optional)
--  digiKam can be compiled.................. YES
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Launch and configure Digikam

(if you’re still root, exit root before launching # digikam)

The Configuration options are pretty basic, but note that to configure the Digikam back end you’ll need to use that MariaDB socket value you got before and the user you created like so UNIX_SOCKET=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock:

 

On the first run, it will download about 350mb of code for the face recognition engine.  Hey – maybe a bit heavy, but you’re not giving the Google or Apple free lookie looks at all your personal pictures.  Also, if all this is a bit much (and, Frankly, it is) I’d consider Digikam one of the few applications that makes the whole flatpak thing seem somewhat justified.  Maybe.

Some advice on tuning:

I recommend mysqltuner highly, then maybe check this out (or just leave it default, default works well).

Tuning a database is application and computer specific, there’s no one size fits any, certainly not all, and it may change as your database grows. There are far more expert and complete tuning guides available, but here’s what I do:

Pre-Tuning Data Collection

Tuning at the most basic involves instrumenting the database to log problems, running it for a while, then parsing the performance logs for useful hints. The mysqltuner.pl script is far more expert at than I’ll ever be, so I pretty much just trust it. You have to modify your mysqld.cnf file to enable performance data collection (which, BTW, slows down operation, so undo this later) which, for MariaDB, means adding a few lines:

sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
# enable performance schema to allow optimization, but ironically hit performance, so disable after tuning.
# in the [mysqld] section insert
performance_schema=ON
performance-schema-instrument='stage/%=ON'
performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-current=ON
performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-history=ON
performance-schema-consumer-events-stages-history-long=ON

Follow the instructions for installing mysqltuner.pl at https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl#downloadinstallation

I rather like this guide’s helpful instructions for putting the script in /usr/local/sbin/ so it is in the execution path:

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl/master/mysqltuner.pl -O /usr/local/sbin/mysqltuner.pl
sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/sbin/mysqltuner.pl
sudo mysqltuner.pl

Then restart with sudo service mariadb restart then go about your business with digikam – make sure you rack up some real hours to gather useful data on your performance. Things like ingesting a large collection should generate useful data. I’d suggest doing disk tuning first because that’s hardware not load dependent.

Disk tuning

Databases tend to hammer storage and SSDs, especially SLC/enterprise SSDs, massively improve DB performance over spinning disks – unless you have a massive array of really good rotating drives. I’m running this DB on one spinning disk, so performance is very MEH. MySQL and MariaDB make some assumptions about disk performance which is used to scale some pretty important parameters for write caching. You can meaningfully improve on the defaults by testing your disk with a great linux utility called “fio”.

sudo apt install fio
fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75

This will take a while and will give some very detailed information about the performance of your disk subsystem, the key parameters being average and max write IOPS. I typically create a # performance tuning section at the end of my [mysqld] section and before [embedded] and I’ll put these values in as, say: (your IOPS values will be different):

# performance tuning

innodb_io_capacity              = 170
innodb_io_capacity_max          = 286

and sudo service mariadb restart

Using mysqltuner.pl

After you’ve collected some data, there may be a list of tuning options.

sudo nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf

Mine currently look like this, but they’ll change as the database stabilizes and my usage patterns change.

# performance tuning

innodb_io_capacity              = 170
innodb_io_capacity_max          = 286

innodb_stats_on_metadata        = 0
innodb_buffer_pool_size         = 4G
innodb_log_file_size            = 512M
innodb_buffer_pool_instances    = 4
skip_name_resolve               = 1
query_cache_size                = 0
query_cache_type                = 0
query_cache_limit               = 2M
max_connections                 = 175
join_buffer_size                = 4M
tmp_table_size                  = 24M
max_heap_table_size             = 24M
innodb_buffer_pool_size         = 4G
max_allowed_packet              = 128M

and

sudo service mariadb restart

Note max_allowed_packet = 128M comes from this guide. I trust it, but it isn’t a mysqltuner suggestion.

Posted at 17:11:21 GMT-0700

Category: HowToLinuxphotoPositiveReviewsTechnology

Tagging MP3 Files with Puddletag on Linux Mint

Tuesday, March 23, 2021 

A “fun” part of organizing an MP3 collection is harmonizing the tags so the datas work consistently with whatever management schema you prefer.  My preference is management by the file system—genre/artist/year/album/tracks works for me—but consistent metainformation is required and often disharmonious.  Finding metaharmony is a chore I find less taxing with a well structured tag editor and to my mind the ur-meta-tag manager is  MP3TAG.

The problem is that only works with that dead-end spyware riddled failing legacyware called “Windows.” Fortunately, in Linux-land we have puddletag, a very solid clone of MP3TAG.  The issues is that the version in repositories is (as of this writing) 1.20 and I couldn’t find a PPA for the latest, 2.0.1.  But compiling from source is super easy and works in both Linux Mint 19 and Ubuntu 20.04 and version  2.20 on 22.04 which contains my mods to latinization of foreign scripts (yay open source!):

  1. Install pre-reqs to build (don’t worry, if they’re installed, they won’t be double installed)
  2. get the tarball of the source code
  3. expand it (into a reasonable directory, like ~/projects)
  4. switch into that directory
  5. run the python executable “puddletag” directly to verify it is working
  6. install it
  7. tell the desktop manager it’s there – and it should be in your window manager along with the rest of your applications.

The latest version as of this post was 2.0.1 from https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtsvg python3-pyparsing python3-mutagen python3-acoustid libchromaprint-dev libchromaprint-tools libchromaprint1 
wget href="https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag/releases/download/2.0.1/puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz 
tar -xvf puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz
cd puddletag-2.0.1/ 
cd puddletag 
./puddletag 
sudo python3 setup.py install 
sudo desktop-file-install puddletag.desktop

A nice feature is the configuration directory is portable and takes your complete customization with you – it is an extremely customizable program so you can generally configure it as fits your mental model.  Just copy the entire puddletag directory located at ~/.configure/puddletag.

Posted at 15:19:01 GMT-0700

Category: AudioHowToLinuxPositiveReviews

EZ rsync cheat sheet

Wednesday, December 30, 2020 

Rsync is a great tool – incredibly powerful for synchronizing directories, copying over a network or over SSH, an awesome way to backup a mobile device back to a core network securely and other great functions.  it works better than just about anything else developed before or since, but is a command line UI that is easy to forget if you don’t use it for a while and Windows is a challenge.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide, they’re are lots of those, but a quick summary of what I find useful.

There’s one confusing thing that I have to check often to be sure it is going to do what I think it should – the trailing slash on the source.  It works like this:

A quick summary of useful command options (there are many, many) is:

-v, --verbose               increase verbosity
-r, --recursive             recursive (go into subdirectories)
-c, --checksum              skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size (slow, but accurate)
-a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X) (weird with SMB/CIFS)
-z, --compress              compress file data during the transfer, should help over slow links
-n, --dry-run               trial run, don't move anything
-h, --human-readable        display the output numbers in a human-readable format
-u, --update                only copy files that have different sizes and equal or later modification times (-c will enable checksum comparison) 
    --progress              show the sync progress during transfer
    --exclude ".*"          exclude files starting with "."
    --remove-source-files   after synced, empty the dir (like mv/merge)
    --delete                any files in dest that aren't in source are deleted in destination (danger)
    --info=progress2 --info=name0  This yields a pretty usable one line progress meter.

I do not recommend using compression (-z) on a LAN, it’ll probably slow you down. Over a slower (typically) WAN link it usually helps, but YMMV depending on link and CPU speed. Test it with that one line progress meter if it is a long enough sync to matter – it shows transfer rate a little like this:

1,770,984,121   2%  747.54kB/s   27:46:38  xfr#2159, ir-chk=1028/28648)

If the files really have to be accurately transferred, the checksum (-c) option is critical – every copy (or at least “move”) function should include this validation, especially before deleting the original.

Posted at 11:53:28 GMT-0700

Category: FreeBSDLinuxPositiveReviews

Dealing with Apple Branded HEIF .HEIC files on Linux

Saturday, August 22, 2020 

Some of the coding tricks in H.265 have been incorporated into MPEG-H coding, an ISO standard introduced in 2017, which yields a roughly 2:1 coding efficiency gain over the venerable JPEG, which was introduced in 1992.  Remember that?  I do; I’m old.  I remember having a hardware NUBUS JPEG decoder card.   One of the reasons JPEG has lasted so long is that images have become a small storage burden (compared to 4k video, say) and that changing format standards is extremely annoying to everyone.

Apple has elected to make every rational person’s life difficult and put a little barbed wire around their high-fashion walled garden and do something a little special with their brand of a HEVC (h.265) profile for images.  Now normally seeing iOS user’s insta images of how fashionable they are isn’t really worth the effort, but now and then a useful correspondent joins the cult and forks over a ton of money to show off a logo and starts sending you stuff in their special proprietary format.  Annoying, but fixable.

Assuming you’re using an OS that is neither primarily spyware nor fashion forward, such as Linux Mint, you can install HEIF decode (including Apple Brand HEIC) with a few simple commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jakar/qt-heif
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install qt-heif-image-plugin

Once installed, various image viewers should be able to decode the images.  I rather like nomacs as a fairly tolerable replacement for Irfan Skiljan‘s still awesome irfanview.

 

Update: 2022-09-22

Jammy isn’t supported by the jakar PPA, but there are a few other options:

Easy, from Hritik Chaudhary in this post,

sudo apt install heif-gdk-pixbuf

should give gdk access, but not (it seems) qt.  You can use gpicview as an imageviewer with this library.

sudo apt install gpicview

Or build the qt-heic-image-plugin from source:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/novomesk/qt-heic-image-plugin
cd qt-heic-image-plugin
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
sudo make install

This machine required ECM from extra cmake modules, which I hadn’t previously installed.

sudo apt install extra-cmake-modules

to successfully cmake.

Update: 2023-01-18

A few updates, as is the way these days with built-from-git software,

cd qt-heic-image-plugin
git pull
sudo rm -r build
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
sudo make install

Get the C API version of libheif instead of C++ and an error handling fix.

Posted at 03:56:36 GMT-0700

Category: CodeHowToLinuxphotoPositiveReviewsTechnology

How to stick with a decent version of Firefox (pre-Quantum)

Friday, June 1, 2018 

Firefox (52) remains my browser of choice – entirely because of plug-ins. When Firefox completely destroyed the UI/UX with “Australis,” a horrific UI change that basically made Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome, the only thing that made Firefox usable was “Classic Theme Restorer.” Apparently, unsatisfied with the damage Mozilla had managed to wreak on their user-base with idiotic UI decisions, over the past year or so, a new version called “Quantum” (57) was rolled out that broke the functionality of almost every important plug-in.

This utterly disastrous and truly unforgivable transgression against the user-base was only slightly mitigated by sustaining 52-ESR, at least until the Sept of this year. After that, everyone who cares about having a decent alternative to Chrome will have to migrate to Waterfox.

In the mean time, one really important thing you have to remember to do if you stuck reinstalling your system on Linux (e.g. Linux Mint) is to immediately uninstall Firefox before using it even once.  Then change your install version to ESR and install. If you let Quantum run even once, it will mark all your good plugins as disabled and you need to reinstall them one at a time to get them working again.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/firefox-esr
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-esr

Well, that’s the end of Firefox….  Sad to see it go after all these years, but the new plugin concept has made Firefox a subordinate version of Chrome rather than a powerful, customizable tool.

 

I followed these fine directions and now have waterfox running.

echo 'deb https://web.archive.org/web/20190207094152/https://dl.bintray.com/hawkeye116477/waterfox-deb/ release main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/waterfox.list
curl https://web.archive.org/web/20200209091904/https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=hawkeye116477 | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install waterfox

Just import your firefox preferences on starup and walla, you instant happiness with all the plugins that Quantum broke restored, including such absolute essentials as “Classic Theme Restorer” (which undoes the absolutely horrible UI changes that Mozilla adopted) and downthemall, privacy plugins, etc. If you’ve updated some plugins to be Quantum compatible, you’ll have to back those up (for me that’s things like FoxClocks and Noscript, which managed to hack together semi-viable Quantum compatible plugins after slogging through Mozilla’s buggy WebExtensions API and HTML5 quirks).

This whole translation is quite unfortunate. Waterfox is dependent on the Firefox code base, so this solution may have a finite lifespan, but for now it works and undoes the horror of Firefox 57+/Quantum.

Posted at 11:43:58 GMT-0700

Category: NeutralReviewsTechnology

Turn off windows update now!

Monday, March 14, 2016 

If you haven’t already, turn off Windows update now.  Microsoft has recently started installing Windows 10 spyware without consent.  A good friend of mine had a bunch of systems at the company where he runs IT hacked by Microsoft over the weekend, which broke the certificate store for WPA-2 and thus their wifi connections.

To be clear, Windows 10 is spyware.  Microsoft has changed their business model from selling a product to selling data – your data – to whoever they want.  Windows 10 comes with a EULA that gives them the right to steal everything on your computer – your email, your private pictures, your home movies, your love letters, your medical records, your financial records – anything they want without telling you.  “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

If this happens to you,  I suggest contacting your state attorney general and filing a complaint against Microsoft.  Hopefully a crushing class action suit or perhaps jail time for the executives that dreamed up this massive heist will help deter future corporate data thieves, though that’s certainly irrational optimism.

I wish I could recommend switching to Linux for everyone, but there’s a lot of software that still depends on Windows and a lot of users that will have a hard time migrating (developers: please stop developing for Microsoft).  Apple seems unequivocally better in refusing to act as key player in bringing about Total Information Awareness.  I’m not a huge fan of their walled garden and computers as overpriced fashion accessories approach, but it is far better than outright theft.  For those that are slightly computer savvy, there’s Linux Mint, which is quite usable and genuinely free.

These instructions might help prevent that disaster of an update being visited upon you (and possibly law enforcement visits to come after Microsoft starts sifting through all your datas and forwarding on whatever they find).  The latest reports suggest they aren’t enough, but it is the best I have found other than isolating your windows box from the internet completely.

Posted at 14:27:03 GMT-0700

Category: NegativePrivacySecurityTechnology

Green Lacewings

Sunday, January 10, 2016 

I noticed that my avocado tree was developing brown spots on the leaves, which were almost certainly the result of Persea mites.

Leaf Symptoms

 

So I looked up some possible cures, and it seemed like introducing a predator would be the best option and the least hassle.  I’d had good luck with introduced ladybugs a few years back, which formed a stable population that survived for many years after introduction.  For this pest, green lacewings are recommended.  I found a nearby insectary that could provide larvae on cards and they shipped them overnight.

Green Lacewing egg cards

 

 

The little guys look cute just waiting to hatch…

Green Lacewing Eggs

 

I hung he cards on the leaves of the tree after incubating them overnight in a warm room, and they should hatch sometime in the next day or two, as long as the ants don’t find them first…

Card in tree

 


Update 8 Sept 2016:

The green lacewings seem to have eaten all the mites.  It has been 9 months and there aren’t any signs of damage to this spring’s leaves.  Yay!

No mite bites

The new leaves that grew seem to be developing without any bites at all.  The old leaves that were too damaged have fallen off, but the surviving older leaves still show the scars of the mites.  Green lacewings seem to have done the trick.

Posted at 14:40:47 GMT-0700

Category: photoPositiveReviews

Signal Desktop: Probably a good thing

Tuesday, December 8, 2015 

Signal is an easy to use chat tool that competes (effectively) with What’sApp or Viber. They’ve just released a desktop version which is being “preview released/buzz generating released.”  It is developed by a guy with some cred in the open source and crypto movement, Moxie Marlinspike.  I use it, but do not entirely trust it.

I’m not completely on board with Signal.  It is open source, and so in theory we can verify the code.  But there’s some history I find disquieting.  So while I recommend it as the best, easiest to use, (probably) most secure messaging tool available, I do so with some reservations.

  • It originally handled encrypted SMS messages.  There is a long argument about why they broke SMS support on the mailing lists.  I find all of the arguments Whisper Systems made specious and unconvincing and cannot ignore the fact that the SMS tool sent messages through the local carrier (Asiacell, Korek, or Zain here).  Breaking that meant secure messages only go through Whisper Systems’ Google-managed servers where all metadata is captured and accessible to the USG. Since it was open source, that version has been forked and is still developed, I use the SMSSecure fork myself
  • Signal has captured all the USG funding for messaging systems.  Alternatives are not getting funds.  This may make sense from a purely managerial point of view, but also creates a single point of infiltration.  It is far easier to compromise a single project if there aren’t competing projects.   Part of the strength of Open Source is only achieved when competing development teams are trying to one up each other and expose each other’s flaws (FreeBSD and OpenBSD for example).  In a monoculture, the checks and balances are weaker.
  • Signal has grown more intimate with Google over time.  The desktop version sign up uses your “google ID” to get you in the queue.  Google is the largest commercial spy agency in the world, collecting more data on more people than any other organization except probably the NSA.  They’re currently an advertising company and make their money selling your data to advertisers, something they’re quite disingenuous about, but the data trove they’ve built is regularly mined by organizations with more nefarious aims than merely fleecing you.

What to do?  Well, I use signal.  I’m pretty confident the encryption is good, or at least as good as anything else available.  I know my metadata is being collected and shared, but until Jake convinces Moxie to use anonymous identifiers for accounts and message through Tor hidden nodes, you have to be very tech savvy to get around that and there’s no Civil Society grants going to any other messaging services using, for example, an open standard like a Jabber server on a hidden node with OTR.

For now, take a half step up the security ladder and stop using commercial faux security (or unverifiable security, which is the same thing) and give Signal a try.

Maybe at some later date I’ll write up an easy to follow guide on setting up your own jabber server as a tor hidden service and federating it so you can message securely, anonymously, and keep your data (meta and otherwise) on your own hardware in your own house, where it still has at least a little legal protection.

 

Posted at 10:21:22 GMT-0700

Category: PositivePrivacyReviewsSecurityTechnology