KDE

Yet another virtual fosdem. The organizer team does an amazing job putting it together, but fosdem without the hallway track will never be the same. Nevertheless, I gave two talks in the Conference Organisation devroom. One on the topic of of the ... [More] video flow that is used at foss-north, using OBS, Jitsi and Kdenlive. The other talk was about using pgeu-system to run a conference. Here, I was joined by the project author, Magnus Hagander, during the Q&A. All in all, good fun. But I’m already looking forward to 2023 and a physical event in Brussels. Take care and I’ll see you there! [Less]

KUserFeedback is a library for collecting user feedback for apps via telemetry and surveys.Version 1.2.0 is now available for packaging. https://download.kde.org/stable/kuserfeedback/kuserfeedback-1.2.0.tar.xz Signed ... [More] byE0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <[email protected]>https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg https://download.kde.org/stable/kuserfeedback/kuserfeedback-1.2.0.tar.xz.sig Changes: bump version for new release opengl source: Do not crash if we could not make our context current Add Linux Qt6 CI Make UserFeedbackConsole build with Qt6 Fix linking libKUserFeedbackCommon.a Build with C++17 Build docs on Qt6 too Adapt CMake code to make it build with Qt6 Add auto generated files to .gitignore Add FreeBSD CI Add Android CI Enable Linux CI Fix typos found by codespell Qt 6: Replace calls to removed QDateTime(QDate) constructor Qt 6: Fix issues caused by size() returning a qsizetype Qt 6: Remove QNetworkRequest::FollowRedirectsAttribute Replace declarations of QVector, QStringList CMake: Allow building with Qt 6 Qt 6: Replace QMap<QVariant … Qt 6: Fix signature of methods for QQmlListProperty Fix cmake warning Port away from ECMSetupVersion's deprecated *_VERSION_STRING CMake variable Make the survey expression variant comparison work with Qt6 as well Use non-deprecated QStandardPaths enum values Make QString to QUuid conversion explicit fix Windows compile, no unistd.h needed Update historical links to cgit.kde.org. Check for invalid JSON first, then for empty objects Don't record telemetry-less survey queries, that just produces empty rows Fix php unit tests Also record the device pixel ratio [server] Convert JSON fetch to stream data Provider: add API to restore default user-visible settings Always show the "View previously submitted data…" link Add appdata file for UserFeedbackConsole KUserFeedback: Convert license headers to SPDX expressions Fix area charts with Qt 5.14 Use KDE_INSTALL_LOGGINGCATEGORIESDIR with ECM >= 5.58 Make it compile without deprecated method [Less]

Hey! This is my second post for SoK 2022. Its going to be lot more technical than my last one. Lets dive into all that we did in past few days. Learning packaging As I had mentioned in my last post, I already knew the basics of packaging. Flatpak is ... [More] certainly new for me though. I have used Flatpaks, but never published them. It was easy to learn packaging and writing manifests. I submitted a couple of easy applications to Flathub before the contribution period started, so as to get a good idea of what I'll be doing during the coming weeks. Challenges faced Incomplete Appdata info Many upstream packages did not have a complete appdata.xml file. Most noticeably, the OARS data was missing. However, I did not get to know about it until I submitted my first package, and it failed CI test. Logs made it clear the appdata was at fault. Poking around, I fixed the appdata, but I needed a quick way to verify appdata for future packages. I made an alias in my shell, which would do the job for me. alias ad="flatpak run --env=G_DEBUG=fatal-criticals org.freedesktop.appstream-glib validate \$(find . -name \"*appdata.xml\")" You need to first cd into your build directory. And then simply run ad. It will find all appdata files, and validate them. Using right sources My first three submissions used a git source rather than release tarballs. While using a git source doesn't pose major issues, release tarballs are easier to work with. Using right permissions Back when I started, I did not know which permissions I had to use for different packages. All it required was to read the documentation on Flatpak website. Running an app with missing permissions usually printed errors in the console, which could be used to verify permissions. Nearly every GUI application requires --socket=fallback-x11, --socket=ipc, --socket=wayland, and for applications using OpenGL, --device=dri. If application required network access, add --share=network. For filesystem access, you can use --filesystem=host, but most of the times, you don't need such a broad permission. You have options like --filesystem=home, --filesystem=/path/to/dir and --filesystem=xdg-name, where name is one of the XDG directories. These can be used to limit filesystem access, and be more closer to the idea of sandboxing applications. Other minor issues There were a couple of other minor issues with my initial few manifests. Reviewers suggested changes, and I gradually understood them and avoided them. Portal exists So, I had zero idea about Portals, which allow a Flatpak application to access files on the user filesystem, without requiring explicit permissions in manifest. I only got to know about it during reviews. Submissions list I'm listing only the accepted submissions here. Submissions to Flathub KFind Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kfind Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kfind Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2748 KRuler Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kruler Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kruler Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2750 Cantor Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.cantor Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.cantor Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2762 KDiff3 Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kdiff3 Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kdiff3 Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2764 KColorChooser Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kcolorchooser Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kcolorchooser Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2766 KAlgebra Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kalgebra Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kalgebra Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2771 KPhotoAlbum Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kphotoalbum Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kphotoalbum Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2775 Falkon Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.falkon Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.falkon Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2781 KGeoTag Flathub listing : https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.kgeotag Repo : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kgeotag Pull request : https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/2814 Upstream code patches Thanks to help from Albert Cid, I was able to push some minor updates to KDF. KDF has option to open disk with a custom command from the user. By default, this opens disk in Dolphin file manager. However, this fails when Dolphin is not installed on system. The issue arose when packaging KDF for Flathub required including Dolphin in the manifest, which was not ideal. As a result, KDF was put on hold, and I was suggested to add a feature that would open drives in system default file manager. Thanks to Aleix Pol, I already had an idea about the changes to make in source code. My first pull request was closed because I removed the feature for using custom file manager command. In my second pull request, I added the feature to open disk in system default file manager, and retained the option to specify a custom file manager command. User can easily switch them in settings. Albert suggested I send a patch to disable option to specify custom command, as they aren't supported in Flatpak environment. Pull request adding feature to open drive in default file manager : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kdf/-/merge_requests/5 Pull request disabling file manager command option in Flatpak environment : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kdf/-/merge_requests/7 Minor patch to update condition check to be more idiomatic : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kdf/-/merge_requests/6 Updates pushed Falkon update to 3.2 : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.falkon/pull/2 Exiv2 update for Koko : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.koko/pull/2 Exiv2 update for Kdenlive : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kdenlive/pull/165 Exiv2 update for Krita : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.krita/pull/51 Exiv2 update for GwenView : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.gwenview/pull/22 Exiv2 update for KPhotoAlbum : https://github.com/flathub/org.kde.kphotoalbum/pull/1 Exiv2 update to Flatpak master repo : https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-applications/-/merge_requests/74 Eigen update to Flatpak master repo: https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-applications/-/merge_requests/72 Boost update to Flatpak master repo : https://invent.kde.org/packaging/flatpak-kde-applications/-/merge_requests/71 Upstream appdata patches KFloppy : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kfloppy/-/merge_requests/1 KRuler : https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kruler/-/merge_requests/5 Cantor : https://invent.kde.org/education/cantor/-/merge_requests/37 KFind : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kfind/-/merge_requests/8 KDiff3 : https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kdiff3/-/merge_requests/37 KAlgebra : https://invent.kde.org/education/kalgebra/-/merge_requests/22 Akregator : https://invent.kde.org/pim/akregator/-/merge_requests/22 KPhotoAlbum : https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kphotoalbum/-/merge_requests/18 KGeoTag : https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kgeotag/-/merge_requests/13 KDF : https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kdf/-/merge_requests/3 Dolphin : https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/325 Falkon : https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon/-/merge_requests/27 Thanks to the KDE team for being patient with reviews and helping me in the roadblocks I faced! 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We have put the finishing touches on Plasma 5.24 and started to work on 5.25 stuff, with two big improvements already merged: keyboard navigation for Panels, and the start of Discover’s UI redesign! Check those out below: 15-Minute Bugs Resolved ... [More] Current number of bugs: 83, same as last week. Current list of bugs Plasma, Discover, and many other apps no longer sometimes always crash on launch when you’ve turned on User Feedback sharing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KUserFeedback 1.1.0) Changing user properties in the System Settings’ accounts page once again works if you happen to have version 22.04.64 or newer of the AccountsService package (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24) Discover no longer sometimes randomly freezes when you’re looking at an app’s details (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.1) Other Bugfixes & Performance Improvements Gwenview is once again able to open RAW files, at the cost of sometimes being unable to open files that have the wrong filename extension. A patch that fixed that but broke RAW support was reverted (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 22.12.2) Dolphin no longer crashes when you cancel an archiving job in the middle that was initiated from one of Dolphin’s context menu “Compress” items (Méven Car, Ark 21.12.3) When browsing an FTP server in Dolphin, opening files once again opens them in the correct app rather than your web browser (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 21.12.3) In the Plasma Wayland session, Kate no longer flashes when you hit Ctrl+S to save your changes (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.04) The NOAA Picture of the Day wallpaper now works again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24) In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging-and-dropping various things to XWayland apps no longer sometimes makes them stop accepting clicks until the system is restarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24) Spectacle’s Rectangular Region overlay now appears above all full screen windows, not just some of them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24) Network and System information display in System Monitor now always works every time you open it after logging in, not just sometimes only working the first time you open it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24) System Monitor bar chart bars no longer disappear when you make the chart really narrow (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24) When dragging-and-dropping items onto the desktop, now all of them are placed at the dragged location, rather than only one of them being placed there there and all the other ones being placed after other icons (Severin Von Wnuck, Plasma 5.24) Discover no longer crashes when you install or uninstall more than one Flatpak apps at once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24) Discover now shows the correct size for very very large packages (Jonas Knarbakk, Discover 5.24) In the Plasma X11 session, using 30-bit color now works (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24) The System Tray’s popup now has the correct background color when the widget is located on the desktop rather than on a panel (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.1) System Monitor CPU sensors can no longer ever briefly display negative values (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.1) Discover’s screenshots popup is no longer overlapped by the sidebar after you resize the window to be small and then big again (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.1) The Battery & Brightness applet no longer inappropriately shows the “Low Battery” icon when the only batteries present are from external wireless devices with an adequate charge level (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25) KIO no longer inappropriately tries and fails to handle non-file-based URLs registered to apps (e.g. tg:// for Telegram or mailto:// for your email client) when the apps advertise that they accept URLs (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91) KWin’s keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt+Tab) no longer sometimes break after KWin is restarted (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 5.91) QtQuick-based apps are now slightly faster to load and run just in a general sense (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91) When using a dark color scheme, the Breeze icon for the KDE Plasma logo no longer partially disappears at large sizes (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.91) Fixed a couple of inconsistencies and glitches in various Breeze folder and mimetype icons (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.91) User Interface Improvements You can now drag tabs from one Kate to another (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04) Okular’s Bookmarks sidebar page now has an improved UI, with buttons that have text and an “Add Bookmark” context menu item (me: Nate Graham, Okular 22.04): Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows “Dimensions” by default instead of separate “Image width” and “Image height” fields (Méven Car, Dolphin 22.04) When compressing multiple files from Dolphin’s context menu, the menu now tells you the name of the resulting archive (Fushan Wen, Ark 22.04) You can now find Konsole by searching for “cmd” or “command prompt” (Someone going by the pseudonym “M B”, Konsole 22.04) When searching for System Settings pages, exact title matches are now weighted much more heavily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24) You can no longer use Discover to uninstall itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24) Discover’s App page has been redesigned for greater aesthetics and usability (me: Nate Graham and Manuel Jésus de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25): You can now use the new default Meta+Alt+P shortcut to cycle keyboard focus between your panels and activate applets with the Keyboard (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25) The clipboard applet’s settings window is now much more comprehensible (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25) Searching for “switch user” no longer finds an item named “New Session”; it is now called “Switch User”, as you would expect (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25) …And everything else Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing. How You Can Help If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation. [Less]

We have put the finishing touches on Plasma 5.24 and started to work on 5.25 stuff, with two big improvements already merged: keyboard navigation for Panels, and the start of Discover’s UI redesign! Check those out below: 15-Minute Bugs Resolved ... [More] Current number of bugs: 83, same as last week. Current list of bugs Plasma, Discover, and many other apps no longer sometimes always crash on launch when you’ve turned on User Feedback sharing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KUserFeedback 1.1.0) Changing user properties in the System Settings’ accounts page once again works if you happen to have version 22.04.64 or newer of the AccountsService package (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24) Discover no longer sometimes randomly freezes when you’re looking at an app’s details (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.1) Other Bugfixes & Performance Improvements Gwenview is once again able to open RAW files, at the cost of sometimes being unable to open files that have the wrong filename extension. A patch that fixed that but broke RAW support was reverted (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 22.12.2) Dolphin no longer crashes when you cancel an archiving job in the middle that was initiated from one of Dolphin’s context menu “Compress” items (Méven Car, Ark 21.12.3) When browsing an FTP server in Dolphin, opening files once again opens them in the correct app rather than your web browser (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 21.12.3) In the Plasma Wayland session, Kate no longer flashes when you hit Ctrl+S to save your changes (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.04) The NOAA Picture of the Day wallpaper now works again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24) In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging-and-dropping various things to XWayland apps no longer sometimes makes them stop accepting clicks until the system is restarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24) Spectacle’s Rectangular Region overlay now appears above all full screen windows, not just some of them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24) Network and System information display in System Monitor now always works every time you open it after logging in, not just sometimes only working the first time you open it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24) System Monitor bar chart bars no longer disappear when you make the chart really narrow (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24) When dragging-and-dropping items onto the desktop, now all of them are placed at the dragged location, rather than only one of them being placed there there and all the other ones being placed after other icons (Severin Von Wnuck, Plasma 5.24) Discover no longer crashes when you install or uninstall more than one Flatpak apps at once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24) Discover now shows the correct size for very very large packages (Jonas Knarbakk, Discover 5.24) In the Plasma X11 session, using 30-bit color now works (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24) The System Tray’s popup now has the correct background color when the widget is located on the desktop rather than on a panel (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.1) System Monitor CPU sensors can no longer ever briefly display negative values (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.1) Discover’s screenshots popup is no longer overlapped by the sidebar after you resize the window to be small and then big again (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.1) The Battery & Brightness applet no longer inappropriately shows the “Low Battery” icon when the only batteries present are from external wireless devices with an adequate charge level (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25) KIO no longer inappropriately tries and fails to handle non-file-based URLs registered to apps (e.g. tg:// for Telegram or mailto:// for your email client) when the apps advertise that they accept URLs (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91) KWin’s keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt+Tab) no longer sometimes break after KWin is restarted (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 5.91) QtQuick-based apps are now slightly faster to load and run just in a general sense (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91) When using a dark color scheme, the Breeze icon for the KDE Plasma logo no longer partially disappears at large sizes (Gabriel Knarlsson, Frameworks 5.91) Fixed a couple of inconsistencies and glitches in various Breeze folder and mimetype icons (Gabriel Knarlsson, Frameworks 5.91) User Interface Improvements You can now drag tabs from one Kate to another (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04) Okular’s Bookmarks sidebar page now has an improved UI, with buttons that have text and an “Add Bookmark” context menu item (me: Nate Graham, Okular 22.04): Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows “Dimensions” by default instead of separate “Image width” and “Image height” fields (Méven Car, Dolphin 22.04) When compressing multiple files from Dolphin’s context menu, the menu now tells you the name of the resulting archive (Fushan Wen, Ark 22.04) You can now find Konsole by searching for “cmd” or “command prompt” (Someone going by the pseudonym “M B”, Konsole 22.04) When searching for System Settings pages, exact title matches are now weighted much more heavily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24) You can no longer use Discover to uninstall itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24) Discover’s App page has been redesigned for greater aesthetics and usability (me: Nate Graham and Manuel Jésus de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25): You can now use the new default Meta+Alt+P shortcut to cycle keyboard focus between your panels and activate applets with the Keyboard (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25) The clipboard applet’s settings window is now much more comprehensible (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25) Searching for “switch user” no longer finds an item named “New Session”; it is now called “Switch User”, as you would expect (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25) …And everything else Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing. How You Can Help If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation. [Less]

As of some of you might remember, Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) added a new Privacy tab to the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences. 

Since a few hours ago the Okular version available in the Microsoft Store for Windows has the same signature support than the Linux/FreeBSD versions. Some screenshots, though it's nothing impressive, it's the same User Interface that we already have ... [More] had for a while A file I just signed, showing the Signature and Certificate panels The PDF backend settings This "new feature" has been delivered with the update of the just released Okular 21.12.2.The interesting part is that adding Signature support for Okular on Windows didn't actually require *any* change in Okular itself, its code was already good. What we needed was to add NSS [1] to Craft [2] and also some tweaks to poppler [3], because sadly NSS doesn't behave exactly the same on Linux than on Windows, and once that was in, just start Okular again and voilà everything was working as expected :)Relevant Merge Requests:https://invent.kde.org/packaging/craft-blueprints-kde/-/merge_requests/301https://invent.kde.org/packaging/craft-blueprints-kde/-/merge_requests/304https://invent.kde.org/packaging/craft-blueprints-kde/-/merge_requests/305https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1038https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1042https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1044https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1056https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1057https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/merge_requests/1059 [1] NSS = the library poppler uses for signature support [2] Craft = the meta build system we use for building KDE software on Windows[3] poppler = the library that Okular uses for PDF support [Less]

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-05. Facebook loses users for first time in history - The Washington Post Tags: tech, facebook, gafam, attention-economy, surveillance The beginning of the end for this one? Too early to tell and so big it ... [More] can limp along for a long time. As one could suspect the moves toward VR are to try to counterbalance their current situation which was clearly to come… still can it be their new cash cow? Hard to tell. If only it means that the war for attention and the accompanying surveillance is likely to rage on even more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/facebook-earnings-meta/ Adblocking People and Non-adblocking People Experience a Totally Different Web – I’m Left Handed Tags: tech, web, advertisement I think we’re doomed to never get rid of our adblocking extensions… https://imlefthanded.com/2022/adblocking-people-and-non-adblocking-people-experience-a-totally-different-web/ GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful - Irish Council for Civil Liberties Tags: tech, gdpr, privacy, surveillance You don’t like consent popups? Luckily you’re not the only one. https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/ In Defence of the Boring Web Tags: tech, web, low-tech I obviously agree quite a lot with this. https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2022/boring/ Kate Editor Set to Become KDE’s Answer to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code - It’s FOSS News Tags: tech, kde, programming If you didn’t try Kate for a while… the next release in the spring will be a good time to try it again. https://news.itsfoss.com/kate/ There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code Tags: tech, craftsmanship, programming Good reminder that the words we use matter. Fuzzy terms like “clean” indeed hide various dimensions to look at the code and the tradeoffs we make. https://www.steveonstuff.com/2022/01/27/no-such-thing-as-clean-code Extreme (Programming) Thoughts Tags: tech, xp, agile, craftsmanship, tests, refactoring, mob-programming Interesting musing on the skills required, why it’s actually hard to apply them… clearly it’s because you never find a real place to learn them so that ends up being on the job. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-z022/01121/extreme-thoughts/ How Prime Video updates its app for more than 8,000 device types - Amazon Science Tags: tech, webassembly, rust, amazon, performance, javascript Interesting use of WebAssembly for fast and very portable code. Also especially interesting is the care in the move to the new software architecture. https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types Settings are not a design failure Tags: tech, design, settings I like this position. There’s been too much of a move to “kill all the settings!” in some products. Some of them definitely make sense, and the “on boarding” point of view mentioned here makes sense. https://linear.app/blog/settings-are-not-a-design-failure the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed — Ask a Manager Tags: hr, interviews, hiring, bizarre Now this is truly bizarre… but apparently this happens. https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension | Scientific Reports Tags: science, reading, cognition Unsurprising following previous findings with ebooks. It’s interesting to see the potential reasons of why this happens though… the link with respiration is fascinating. Now it’s early days and a small study so usual disclaimers apply. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0 Bye for now! [Less]

Recently I got an older Intel tablet, specifically the mpman Converter 102. It is one of the devices that have a 64-bit processor but a 32-bit UEFI. This makes booting normal linux distribution images impossible. This device had another limitation ... [More] , it didn’t have a menu to boot from USB. Taking good pictures at 3 am is hard. Luckily this isn’t a problem, since the refind boot manager can be installed from within Windows. The author of refind maintains good documentation on how to do that. The refind that will be booted afterwards is still 32-bit, so normal distros will still not boot. To work around that, we need an install media that contains a 32-bit grub build. Since the default iso files from debian are a ISO 9660 filesystem, it’s not trivial to add new files to the boot media. While you can unpack the iso and repack it, I just used unetbootin and copied the file afterwards. Unetbootin leaves a fat32 filesystem instead of the ISO 9660 one. The 32-bit grub I used is unfortunately just a random file from GitHub. You may find better, more trustworthy builds of it, but this is what worked for me. You can now boot the media from within refind, and you will see the debian grub menu, rendered in a very basic way because the grub build is old. Finally the Debian installer can be ran as usually. Unfortunately these kind of tablets can contain hardware that linux-firmware doessn’t have firmware for, so it’s likely that you have to find some of them on the internet. If you have the same tablet, I can give you the files I used. They are for a different tablet (One called jumper-ezpad-mini3), but turned out to work. The uefi bootorder editing that the debian installer did didn’t work for me, maybe because I installed on an external SD-card. So I had to select refind in the UEFI menu after pressing ESC. Then I could launch the Grub which the Debian installer installed and boot the new system. We can set up refind as the primary bootloader again using efibootmngr. efibootmngr -o {list of numbers} can be used to set the bootorder. The boot entry numbers can be retrieved by running efibootmngr without arguments. So far the screen was always rotated to the right. Luckily with current linux kernels this can be easily changed. For that, /etc/default/grub needs to be edited. We need to find out the name of the internal display. This can be done using xrandr xrandr --listmonitors. Then we can change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to quiet splash video={display_name}:panel_orientation=right_side_up. I decided to hide grub as much as possible, since my primary bootloader is refind. Grub is still needed to cross the 32-bit / 64-bit boundary, but it can be hidden using the following lines: GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_TIMEOUT=0 After all changes are done, we can run update-grub as root. I wrote this down mostly for reference in the future, but maybe it can help you with a device of yours. [Less]

Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear. Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations. Distro and app store packagers should ... [More] update their application packages. 21.12 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues. Package download wiki page 21.12.2 source info page 21.12.2 full changelog [Less]