4get a proxy search engine

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For years I have used a certain SearXNG instance as proxy search engine with great pleasure. As a miracle it gave me good enough search results I needed all the time. But one moment in time it stopped working well or not at all and other SearXNG instances didn’t perform good enough for what I needed. Then I started to be happy with Mullvad’s Leta search engine. Till the day that Mullvad announce they could no longer keep up with the changes and had to shut it down. For a while I reverted to the noai of DuckDuckGo but I also found (via a Lemmy post) a search engine I never heard of : 4get.

Here’s the source code with some README :

https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get

Here’s an instances health overview :

https://4get.ca/instances

So far my search results are pretty good and sometimes remarkably good. There’s one catch. When it shows Wikipedia pages in the search results it shows the web link as a sort of bread crumbs. If you are not aware of it you should just click on the very right of the link so you end up at the correct Wikipedia page.

Just like SearXNG you can change settings of 4get.

Here an example of the theme options.

Theme options with 4get using the gentoo theme colors

detox : A “lazy” way to remove spaces in filenames in Linux

Computers,

There’s several ways to remove spaces from file names. For other options see this post that I found with a search engine search.

In this writing I’ll write about an easy way with a tool called detox.

On Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint or any other Debian or Devuan based Linux, open a terminal and type or copy&paste :

sudo apt-get install detox

After that, if you want to remove spaces from all your ODT (LibreOffice) files, type :

detox *odt

After this is done for example your “Notes from last night’s meeting.odt” will be renamed to “Notes_from_last_night_s_meeting.odt” or something like that.

There’s some exceptions that detox will not be able to convert.

If you did save your file like this for example  :

“‘Notes from today’s meeting.odt'” detox will not succeed. The combination of the ‘ and ” characters are a show stopper.

If you want to learn more about detox command-line options, for example the recursive and the dry-run option, type :

detox -h

Have a nice “lazy” detox day!

 

Hoe voeg je DuckDuckGo (noai) toe aan Firefox

Internet, , ,

Ga naar Instellingen

Ga naar Zoeken 

Blader naar beneden naar Zoeksnelkoppelingen

Klik op Toevoegen (Onder het vierkant en naast Standaardzoekmachines terugzetten)

Vul een naam in bij het veld Naam zoekmachine (Bijvoorbeeld : DDG noai)

In het veld met URL met %s op de plaats van de zoekterm vul je in :

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

Klik daarna op Zoekmachine opslaan

Blader naar boven naar Standaardzoekmachine

en maak DDG noai de standaard.

Meer informatie over DDG noai hier :

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/ai-features/about-noaiduckduckgocom

If you’d prefer an AI-free DuckDuckGo Search experience, start your searches on noai.duckduckgo.com instead of on duckduckgo.com. Searching on noai.duckduckgo.com works the same as search on duckduckgo.com, except all AI features are turned off and AI-generated images are filtered out of results by default.

How to add DuckDuckGo (noai) to Firefox

Internet, , ,

Go to Settings

Go to Search 

Scroll down to Search Shortcuts

Click on Add (under the box and next to Restore Default Search Engines)

Fill in a name in the field with Search Engine Name (For example : DDG noai)

In the field with URL with %s in place of search term fill in :

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

Scroll up to the top of the page to Default Search Engine

and make DDG noai the default.

More information about DDG noai here :

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/ai-features/about-noaiduckduckgocom

If you’d prefer an AI-free DuckDuckGo Search experience, start your searches on noai.duckduckgo.com instead of on duckduckgo.com. Searching on noai.duckduckgo.com works the same as search on duckduckgo.com, except all AI features are turned off and AI-generated images are filtered out of results by default.

Testing Galene videoconference server software

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During the Covid-19 pandemic Jitsi-Meet was one of the more popular software among some people for videoconference calls. However, Jitsi-Meet is not very secure. If people choose a very simple room name and no password then it can happen that suddenly strangers join your video call. Self-hosting and maintaining Jitsi-Meet is also not super easy.

Galene is different because it comes with the feature to create users, and users can have operate privileges to create invite links for other users. The invite links can be time limited.

I’ve tested self-hosting Galene and I was happy to see that it ran pretty well on moderate hardware (VPS with 1 GB RAM, with a swap file. Using Debian Linux as OS).

The question remains how many calls and users it can handle very well.

Galene has community provided packages for Yunohost, Arch Linux (AUR) and FreeBSD. A drawback of Galene is that it appears to be a one person project but there’s many one person projects and software can be forked when a project becomes dormant for some reason.

Off-topic : On the same VPS I’ve also installed Prosody with Yunohost and after getting the DNS settings right, as suggested by Yunohost, video-calls with Conversations IM app worked out of the box. Very cool! Thank you people at Yunohost!!! :)))

Hints about Yunohost + Nextcloud Office

Computers, , ,

Some short hints. This is not a complete howto (yet). It assumes that you are running Yunohost and you did install Nextcloud and you remembered or wrote down which of your Yunohost users was made admin for your Nextcloud installation.

nano /etc/php/8.3/fpm/pool.d/nextcloud.conf

Change the 128 of php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 128M into 512. And ignore the read-only warning.

sudo /etc/init.d/php8.3-fpm restart

Login as admin of the Nextcloud installation.

At the Apps section install : Collabora Online – Built-in CODE Server and the Nextcloud Office (RichDocuments).

Login with ssh, and :

sudo -u nextcloud bash

cd /var/www/nextcloud

php –define apc.enable_cli=1 occ richdocuments:activate-config

At this point perhaps a reboot or a restart of certain services is needed.

/happy YH! 🙂

Using the Mullvad repository on Linux Mint

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Mullvad does not officially support Linux Mint and suggests manual installation for Mullvad VPN and Mullvad browser. However it turns out that it can work nevertheless. Here’s how to do that for the default Linux Mint based on Ubuntu. Below that I’ll write something about LMDE, the Debian based Linux Mint.

In this example I am going to be using Intel x86_64 and Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia, which is based on Ubuntu Jammy :

  1. # Download the Mullvad signing key (Below is one line!) It is the curl step from here : https://mullvad.net/en/help/install-mullvad-app-linux#install-repo


sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc

2.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list

3. Copy and paste the following line (This should be all in one line without any carriage return!) into that new file and save the file and exit the nano editor :

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=amd64] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable jammy main

4. Run : sudo apt update

5. Run : sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

and optionally : sudo apt install mullvad-browser

If you have Mullvad-browser already installed manually and you did create a menu icon with :

./start-mullvad-browser.desktop --register-app

you can undo that with the unregister command. For details about the exact characters check :

./start-mullvad-browser.desktop --help | grep register

For LMDE, Debian based : This is the same except replacing jammy with bookworm.
After this is done go to the Cinnamon menu and search for the word Mullvad.

It could still show identical looking entries. For me the manually installed had a (Sh) added. Continue to add icons to panel or desktop or favorites to your liking.

And a word of caution : It will likely all work till you upgrade to a newer
distribution version. In that case figure out the new release name and
replace it in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list file

p.s. Don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret 🙂

Annoyances fixed (3) slapstick mode

Computers, , ,

With too many things to do (and no time to waste in this chaos world rat race in outer space) I tried a new idea today.

Imagine this annoyance : Desktop running Debian (with surname GNU/Linux if you prefer) with a desktop environment which is not KDE, GNOME or does not depend on fvwm95. After logging out, when going out or going to sleep I’ve been furious that lots of commands keeping running in the background.  And I was currently too impatient to search for a really really long time for logout session files options where this could be worked around.

So today I tried a new idea before … (cough) … NOT logging out :

pkill -u my_desktop_username_here

Works great! Can recommend! 🙂

btw

/me faithful fan of pkill since long long time.

/leave

/join

 

Playing music with Mopidy or with mpd (music player daemon) part 1

Computers, , ,

This is just an introduction post to Mopidy and mpd (Music Player Daemon).

Both are music players that come without GUI but there’s a wide choice of client software for it (Console and GUI). Both default to be using localhost as server, but they can be configured to be used over a network e.g. a LAN at home or – dare I say it ? (hahaha) – a company office or government building, a desert island in the Pacific Ocean and so on.

I used to happily use mpd for years on a Raspberry Pi … but not Every After … until one day probably due to a software upgrade or some glitch or user mistake it stopped working. Because I had not documented how I configured the audio for server usage I started to try to fix and got lost in Internet searches and it was then that I decided to test Mopidy. It turned out that Mopidy was even more difficult to get going, at least for me, but it was not an uninteresting journey. I learned that Mopidy uses GStreamer, and Mopidy only supports audio files, or it seems so. Perhaps I couldn’t figure out how to let it play audio from video files with extensions like avi, mp4, mkv, webm. And converting all these music videos into audio would take a lot of time (Yes, no top500 super computer in the basement here :^).

My plan now is to use another computer here to setup mpd, and then figure out how to configure PulseAudio to make mpd available over the LAN, document that, and then do the same for Mopidy and then blog-report that into a how-to back here.

Till next time! 🙂