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

Internet, , , , ,

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

Internet, , ,

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! 🙂

 

Annoyances fixed (2) search engines

Internet, ,

For years I loved to use the SearXNG based searx.be (From the same maintainer as Invidious instance yewtu.be) but for me it is broken since weeks. It used to give me the best results for my use-cases and without distractions, and with nice cache button options for archive.org

I can see that the maintainer switched from Google to Bing as the first choice of search engine and I see that the maintainer is very often the first of all SearXNG instance with applying the latest software update but it is no longer working for me. Almost always no results at all.

Luckily I have a solution now. Mullvad has its own metasearch engine called Leta (SearXNG and Mullvad Leta are both metasearch engines, meaning that they do not index sites themselves but they query e.g. Google, Bing or Brave and so on) and I love it.

It works very well. But only available for Mullvad customers and a maximum of 100 search queries per day.

With Mullvad Leta you can choose Google or Brave, and it looks like Mullvad added a country pull-down menu option recently. If my memory serves me well it was not there a few weeks ago.

What I do not like so much is that with some queries it gives Reddit results, but it is easy to refine the search query and add

-reddit.com

Besides Mullvad Leta I also use DDG, Startpage, Disroot SearXNG or another instance, and if I need something on Wikipedia I use Mojeek. Variety is good 🙂

Search results with Mullvad Leta metasearch engine

Fetch Apple iPhone photos to your Linux computer (2)

Computers, , ,

In part 1 photos from an Apple iPhone were copied to a Linux computer with LocalSend. In that case the resulting files will be having the HEIC file extension. That is OK for viewing the photos with image viewers that support the heic file extension.

Converting to png or jpg may be useful if you want to upload the photos to the Internet.

On Linux :

  1. Install the libheif-examples package. It is called like that on Debian or Ubuntu or Linux distributions based on Debian or Ubuntu (e.g. Linux Mint, MX Linux). On other Linux distributions like
  2. Open a terminal. Start conversion of a file named photo1.HEIC would go like this :
heif-convert photo1.HEIC photo1.jpg

If you want to use a batch operation on a lot of files on the command-line,

or want to use a GUI application, see for example here : Ubuntuhandbook site,

or use DDG, Startpage or a good search engine to search for something like :

heic convert linux files

p.s.

If you are interested in trying out the libimobiledevice method like mention in part 1,

see here the Arch Linux wiki entry to get some hints about how to apply it for your Linux distribution. I’ve written that it can be confusing because you cannot delete files and only copy but the interesting thing I forgot to mention is that with this method you can see a lot more of the file structure and other files on iOS.