The gThumb photo editor/viewer is one of my go-to apps in Linux. It allows you to edit JPEG captions, among other photo-editing tasks, and is great for my use case. It's available as a Flatpak and in many distro repos. https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.gThumb

If you find yourself at just about any major university and see the overwhelming number of Mac laptops, you can see how vitally important the Asahi Linux project is to the future of free desktop software https://asahilinux.org/

I installed Distrobox on my Debian 11 system by downloading the latest release and running the install script. Then I used apt to add podman, and now I'm ready to run containers in Debian. https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/releases/tag/1.4.2.1

Ubuntu removes Flatpak by default from Kubuntu and other flavors https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-flavor-packaging-defaults/34061/8

As a desktop system, I couldn't ask for better performance that I'm getting from Debian Stable

Today I couldn't get the Vivaldi browser to work without continually, intermittently freezing. I can't keep waiting to click things.

The Debian security patch on libde265 rolled onto my system already. I appreciate Debian's focus on security and LWN's posting of advisories so we know what's happening. https://lwn.net/Articles/923130/

I need to learn how to write a script that takes every file in a directory and its subdirectories, does some regex-type changes, and writes the new files to a new directory.

Is the Twitter API still alive? (Answer is yes if you see this)

Burt Bacharach, legendary composer of pop songs, dies at 94 – Daily News https://www.dailynews.com/2023/02/09/burt-bacharach-legendary-composer-of-pop-songs-dies-at-94/

Did my app survive the Twitter API crisis of early 2023? If you see this, the answer is yes for today.

I haven't used LibreOffice Writer in a long time, and I have to say I'm enjoying it. Once I zoomed in to make the text bigger, I was good to go.

This post is brought to you by my blogPoster app. It uses the Twitter API, which will no longer be free in a few days. It's a Ruby script coded by and for one person (me). Luckily it still posts to Mastodon and my own microblog. https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster

I'm back in full-time Vivaldi browser use for work. There are just so many little features here and there that help me get things done. Google should take notes and add all this stuff to regular Chrome.

I'm using mail to monitor unattended upgrades in Debian, and this helped me: How do you open mailx (aka mail) to read old mail when you have no new mail and view a list of old emails? - Super User https://superuser.com/questions/441871/how-do-you-open-mailx-to-read-old-mail-when-you-have-no-new-mail-and-view-a-list

My unattended upgrades in Debian worked!

Jamsync is a open-source version control system that enables software engineers to develop and deploy faster https://jamsync.dev/

Jeff Beck, a true original: Cause We've Ended as Lovers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aWd88rs6JE

How to set up automatic updates on Fedora Linux - Bobby Borisov/Linuxiac https://linuxiac.com/how-to-set-up-automatic-updates-on-fedora-linux/

Strange title for an article about the popularity of CW in amateur radio:

Looking to Ditch Twitter? Morse Code Is Back - Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/morse-code-back-looking-ditch-twitter-180981309/

I had a pretty good day with the Vivaldi web browser. Looks like some bugs got squashed on Linux.

I started using the Vivaldi browser today by mistake -- I pretty much moved to "regular" Google Chrome -- but so far, so good

I needed to replace a couple of plain steel strings on the guitar. I went into my stash of old strings, and everything was a little bit oxidized. Saving guitar strings for a decade = not a great idea. I also had classical wound strings go bad. Old flatwounds seemed OK.

I am doing my first ever Déjà Dup backup. Thanks to @brideoflinux for the encouragement.

I don't know what #Debian is doing to run so quietly on my HP laptop with Intel i7, but I'll take it.

I had to re-generate my Twitter API key, secrets and token after temporarily deactivating my Twitter account https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/authentication/oauth-1-0a

Twitter API test

I don't know if having the same OS (Debian Stable) on both computers makes a difference, or if I'm doing things in a more systematic way, but I have had no Syncthing issues — and I'm syncing 187 GB.

My Debian Stable system wouldn't update from 11.5 to 11.6. I tried apt-get clean, but that didn't work. Instead I removed the package lists with # rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists and then did an apt update. Then I got all the new packages.

With all this talk about The Document Foundation, LibreOffice development and Collabora, I probably should figure out what Collabora even is (and does) https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

The complete CREEM Magazine Archive - /month. This might be worth it. https://archive.creem.com/

I just got started on http://tilde.club. The server runs #Fedora, and it looks like a great community.

Debian is a strange and wonderful project. One of the best things about #Debian is its approach to security. I know that the kernel will always be patched for vulnerabilities.

Every so often, a critical package — like Chromium or Firefox ESR — will not get the patches it needs. I complain, and nobody tries to silence me. I appreciate that. And the ship that is Debian usually rights itself, and a neglected package tends to find new-maintainer life.

While http://centos.passthejoe.net publishes updates for #CentOS Stream 8 and 9, until now http://passthejoe.tilde.institute/centos has only published Stream 8 updates. I am attempting to add Stream 9 to that site. Let's wait and see if it works.

These sites only exists due to the work of @rbowen@mastodon.social — thanks, Rich for your Python script. I hope the sites prove useful. While they were borne out of frustration, the project became a learning experience for me in Hugo, Bash and cross-OS scripting.

I've been posting in the #Fediverse for a couple of years now, and until recent events on #Twitter, there hadn't been quite the critical mass of users to make being here vs. there extremely compelling. Those users are here now, and if these communities (very much plural) survive the growing pains, we will continue to really have something special — and not corporate.

I hate to say it, but I decided to go with the Google Chrome browser from the #Flatpak instead of Chromium from the #Debian repo or #Vivaldi from the project's own repo. I ran #Chromium for YEARS until the project decided to kill sync. I resented being pushed into Google Chrome and ran Vivaldi for awhile. But between bugs, performance issues and lack of a Flatpak, I went from Vivaldi to Chrome. Google's browser is smoother and runs cooler, though I miss the Vivaldi features.

I have been running Debian Stable with as many GUI apps installed as local Flatpaks as possible due to issues with root disk space on my encrypted installation. Instead of a full root, I now have 13 GB free out of 29 GB total. Performance of Debian is always excellent on my 2017 HP Envy laptop, and Flatpaks are quick to start and fast to run. I made this change (to free up the root space) a few weeks ago, and it has been great.

Epson is going to stop selling laser printers. Here's why - Liam Tung/ZDNET https://www.zdnet.com/article/epson-is-going-to-stop-selling-laser-printers-heres-why/

Intentionally making close friends | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33774353

Intentionally making close friends — Neel Nanda https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/43-making-friends

Mastodon isn't just a replacement for Twitter - Nathan Schneider and Amy Hasinoff/Noēma https://www.noemamag.com/mastodon-isnt-just-a-replacement-for-twitter/

How do transistors work, anyway? - lcamtuf’s thing https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/how-do-transistors-work-anyway

Dropbox acquires Boxcryptor assets to bring zero-knowledge encryption to file storage - Paul Sawers/TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/dropbox-acquires-boxcryptor-assets-to-bring-zero-knowledge-encryption-to-file-storage/

Goodbye, data science – r y x, r https://ryxcommar.com/2022/11/27/goodbye-data-science/

Where does all the cardboard come from? - Matthew Shaer/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/magazine/cardboard-international-paper.html

Ruby adds a new core class called Data to represent simple immutable value objects - Swaathi Kakarla/Saeloun Blog https://blog.saeloun.com/2022/11/22/data-immutable-object.html

Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder – James Wallace Harris/Auxiliary Memory https://auxiliarymemory.com/2017/01/06/rereading-the-soul-of-a-new-machine-by-tracy-kidder/

Marie Kondo your software stack with open source - Mike Melanson https://github.com/readme/featured/open-source-minimalism

Lemmy - A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts (it's like federated Reddit) https://lemmy.ml/

Digital books wear out faster than physical books - Internet Archive http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/15/digital-books-wear-out-faster-than-physical-books/

Fix choppy YouTube video playback in Firefox and firefox-esr in Debian Bullseye - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/723814/how-to-fix-choppy-youtube-video-playback-enable-webrender-debian-bullseye

I hate to say it, but I decided to try Google Chrome in a Flatpak, and it runs a lot better than Vivaldi, which SHOULD be in a Flatpak at this point (but is not).

Raspberry Pi Zero W is mostly frustration if you try to use the GUI. I forgot how crushingly slow it is. I'm getting the no-GUI build of the OS.

I just got an email from the Mozilla Foundation asking for donations. Then I found this article: Mozilla expects to generate more than in revenue this year https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/13/mozilla-expects-to-generate-more-than-500m-in-revenue-this-year/

Some cool Raspberry Pi projects are available from Guysoft https://guysoft.wordpress.com/

I had no idea you can't get Raspberry Pi board anymore. I've had a couple of Pi Zero W boards in a drawer, and I'm starting to put them back into service. The first is going to be a persistent Syncthing desktop that should help my syncing setup. At this point, I'm using 100% Syncthing and 0% Dropbox.

This is a reminder that I have an independent microblog full of short, social-media style posts http://updates.passthejoe.net

The #Debian installer decided to give my fully encrypted 1 TB drive a 30 GB root, and I didn't take the time to make it bigger. Now I'm running out of space, so my workaround (which IS working) is installing Flatpaks with the --user flag so they go in /home, which is HUGE.

I'm having a problem with stuttering YouTube video in #Firefox — the ESR version — in #Debian Stable. Videos from Twitter, Vimeo and Instagram play fine. All problems clear up in the Firefox Flatpak. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox-esr

Does Amazon intentionally slow down your deliveries when you don't have Prime?