All posts by voltooidverledentijd

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! 🙂

 

Onpopulaire opinies (1) NOS mag de biezen pakken, en terug naar de schoolbanken

Gedachten Delen, ,

Nieuw plan, zowel in Engels als in Nederlands posten. En dan ook een nieuwe serie, zoals in de titel. En wat dan wel. Een oproep om de NOS minder te raadplegen. Toen ik als kind opgroeide was het NOS journaal standaard. Later kwam daar ook nog het NOS Jeugdjournaal bij. Het jeugdjournaal vond ik fantastisch, het was verfrissend, en er kwamen niet alleen overstromingen, tornado’s, vulkaan uitbarstingen, kettingbotsingen, oorlogen en andere rampen voorbij maar ook nieuws waar je blij van kon worden.

Maar de tijden zijn veranderd. Zo viel voor de 2e kamer verkiezingen 2023 op de website van het NOS Jeugdjournaal de fascho Geert W. te zien bij een kattenasiel, katten aaiend.

Ik vind dat onverantwoordelijk gedrag. Als er iets geleerd kan worden van de tijd van voor WO-II is het wel dat fascisten niet genormalizeerd moeten worden, en dat er niet mee te praten valt.

Maar decennia terug dacht ik al dat als steeds meer de survivors van WO-II gaan sterven er minder te vertellen valt over WO-II, en dus minder te leren.

En nu denkt u misschien : “Hoe weet jij dat nou snotneus en kwajongen ?”.

Nou, als voorbeeld, ik was ooit bevriend met een jongeman, en ik kwam daar wel eens thuis op bezoek. Zijn vader was compleet paranoia, levend in het verleden van WO-II. Ieder gelegenheid in een gesprek greep ie aan om weer over WO-II te beginnen en de Nazi’s uit te schelden.

Een overvliegende helikopter buiten dat was dan bijna paniek bij hem. Tragisch maar die verhalen raak je dus wel kwijt, vooral nu met generaties van telefoon-verslaafden (met radicaal-rechtse algoritmen gebaseerde asociale media) die misschien steeds minder kritisch worden en die misschien ook het geschreeuw van de fobe en verwarde persoon Geert W. in politiek Den Haag voor waarheid aannemen.

Dit even als inleiding anders wordt deze post veeeeeeeeeeeel te lang. Het is Zondag vandaag, en ook andere dingen te doen nog. In een andere blog post wil ik wat voorbeelden laten zien waarom ik vind dat mensen de NOS beter kunnen vervangen door ander nieuws (b.v. RTL) of de NOS wat minder als 1e keuze te raadplegen.

Ik heb namelijk als een bezetene na de 2e kamer verkiezingen 2023 dagelijks NRC, Volkskrant, Trouw, NOS en nog wat sites door gebladerd (tot meer dan een maand terug, toen ben ik gaan nieuws detoxen, er komt via Mastodon toch al wel flink wat binnen, zelfs met filters 🙂 ) en mijn conclusie is dat de NOS

als enige overduidelijk zakt voor het examen dus EXIT voor de NOS en terug naar de schoolbanken!

p.s.

En morgen de 20e Januari 2025 zal een en ander duidelijk worden over de VS.

Ik wil er niet dramatisch over doen maar ik verwacht dat er, meer dan gemiddeld, doden gaan vallen onder de nieuwe President Trump. 🙁

 

 

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.

Oproep : Noem het beestje bij de naam – de VS is en blijft de VS

Gedachten Delen, ,

De VS.

Bijna iedereen in Nederland die ik hoor of lees, en vooral inwoners van de VS oftewel de USA zelf, noemt het land Amerika en de inwoners Amerikanen.

Buitengewoon arrogant!

Het hele continent met Zuid- en Noord-Amerika heet Amerika en is genoemd naar een Italiaans “ontdekkingsreiziger” (Amerigo Vespucci zo leerde ik ooit op school) die vooral in Zuid-Amerika bezig ging.

Mensen in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika zullen je vermoedelijk stilletjes dankbaar

zijn als je de VS van nu af aan de VS noemt en niet Amerika.

Daarnaast kan het ook verwarrend zijn voor sommige taalgevoelige mensen en sommige mensen in het neuro-diversity spectrum.

In het Engels is het gemakkelijk : The US or USA, with its inhabitants, the US-citizens.

In het Nederlands zijn dan wat meer woorden nodig : De VS, en de inwoners van de VS (VS-burgers of VS-inwoners bekt nog niet lekker maar wie weet went dat gewoon op den duur).

Zo, nu dat gezegd is wil ik nog even dit kwijt. Het moet een keer over zijn met de verafgoding van de VS. Het is saai, dodelijk vermoeiend, en inmiddels ook levensgevaarlijk, als het dat al niet was.

Ik weet van familieleden die voor WO-II geboren waren (of zijn. Van die laatsten zijn er nog erg weinig in leven) die mij keer op keer vertelden over de Engelsen (De Tommies) en de Canadezen, die met chocola en sigaretten aankwamen nadat ze stap voor stap Nederland hadden bevrijd.

Dus laten we vooral niet doen alsof we voornamelijk of alleen aan de VS onze vrijheid te danken hadden en dat we uit een soort ereschuld de VS moeten nadoen, achterna lopen, of de hielen moeten blijven likken.

Mooi zo, bedankt alvast. Ik reken op u 🙂

¡Muchas gracias!

Fetch Apple iPhone photos to your Linux computer (1)

Computers, ,

Let’s imagine you have a visitor which is not very familiar with computers and phones but wants to share their 1 Gigabytes of photos with you on their Apple iPhone.

You probably know that until recently Apple was about incompatible as possible when it comes to software and hardware. For example, if you work in an office and your iPhone battery is almost empty then in the last few decades none of the Android phone chargers would rescue you. In the future Apple will iirc have to adjust and allow USB-C connections.

In this blog post I will focus on LocalSend because I believe it is an elegant solution

for all kind of operating systems and it is not super difficult.

For example, with Linux you can also go for the tools of libimobiledevice project

but this is not only more difficult but it can be very confusing. Because if you use libimobiledevice to mount the iPhone and you think you will quickly copy photos across and then delete a few hundreds photos via the mount point you will be in for a surprise.

libimobiledevice can only copy from the phone and it cannot delete photos from the phone although it will not complain about the latter.

So, without further ado and without further delays let’s check out the wonderful LocalSend application :

  1. Install LocalSend on the phone and on your Linux computer.
  2. Make sure you are on the same WiFi network without client isolation on (this can be the case if you have a Guest WiFi network option).
  3. On your Linux laptop open port 53317 for incoming traffic.
  4. Start the LocalSend app on both phone and your Linux computer.
  5. At the Linux computer click the Receive button
  6. On the phone select which images you’d like to send.
  7. On the Linux computer when the phone has been discovered, click on the nickname of the phone to receive the photos which in my case were downloaded in the ~/Downloads folder.

Alternatives ? KDEConnect or the GNOME counterpart of KDEConnect is also available for Linux, Android, Apple iOS and more.

Part 2 will be about how to convert the photos from HEIC to png or jpg format.

Linux application firewall OpenSnitch

Computers, ,

For many years there was no decent application firewall software for Linux.

Since a few years OpenSnitch has been packaged for a few Linux distributions.

Is OpenSnitch for you ?

Maybe not actually, it can be quite annoying having to choose what to allow and what not after a reboot of your computer if you are using more than just a few applications that need network access.

Why would you use it ? If you like to have more control about outgoing network connections from applications on your Linux desktop.

Do I like it ? Yes.

What did I learn with it ? Not much, but I remember wanting to saving html content from a newspaper site in LibreOffice for a friend (Usually I skip photos and want only text when I save an article for myself to read again later) and OpenSnitch came with a pop-up question because LibreOffice tried to connect to the newspaper site to fetch some missing images (or fonts ?).

Correction : Apologies. My memory was wrong. It was LibreOffice itself that asked to download missing remote content.

This information (That LibreOffice wants to fetch things) is not completely unimportant to me because I use VPN or Tor browser or i2p or Tor by other means or just plain Internet, and when I use the latter I prefer to only do this for a limited amount of sites.

More on OpenSnitch, Key Features, OpenSnitch in action (video) and more,

see here : https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch

 

Annoyances fixed (1)

Computers, ,

Since a long time I was annoyed about the blurred screenshots on my Linux computer. I like Flameshot. It allows to make a screenshot and then draw circles or squares or insert some text, use a marker. But just like with the PrintScreen button on the keyboard it gives blurred screenshots.

<inserting blurred screenshot made with Flameshot>

Example of a Flameshot screenshot showing a new blog post in progress.

A few days ago I found enlightenment with the good old (old school) scrot command line tool, which gives no such blurring.

I already had a script for scrot made a long time ago but didn’t use it very often :

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/scrot -d 5 -e 'mv $f ~/Pictures'

<inserting screenshot made with scrot>

Example of a screenshot made with scrot tool showing a new blog post in progress

See the shiny difference ?

Drawback is that I need to crop the result manually but since it is only for uploading to Mastodon, which I don’t do very often, this is OK for now.

Years ago I used Shutter to screengrab but the development of that was stalled (Cause sometimes there’s for example GKT3 -> GTK4 or Python2 -> Python3 migrations needed for a programmer and that can take a lot of time. I think this was the case with Shutter too) and I stopped using it. It is back though. Maybe I’ll try that again too.

 

A minor privacy thought about Signal usage

Privacy, , , , ,

Now that Meta (Zuck in Texas) has gone berserk like ex-Twitter did in 2022 several people on Mastodon are suggesting to use Signal to people asking how to quit Meta products.

<Intermezzo Matrix>

And then some people start to comment to the suggestions that people really should use Matrix. Well, I thought it was a bit too tiring to read into all the comments. I do have some doubts about Matrix (for some purposes and in certain setups) and I’d like to write a blog post about that one day.

Perhaps it is interesting from encryption point of view to read what experienced encryption person Soatok (Search with a search engine for “soatok blog” with Mojeek, DDG and you’ll find it. Has at least one blog entry about Matrix) has to say about Matrix.

</Intermezzo Matrix>

In this post I’d like to share the following :

In the past Signal was using Amazon services for their hosting, and Signal was blackmailed more or less into making changes because Amazon could not read enough meta-data. Anyway, currently Signal is apparently using Google servers (e.g. check : storage.signal.org which iirc stores your avatar – block this one and you can’t change your avatar) and CloudFlare (e.g. check cdn2 dot signal dot org) services and maybe more from others.

Why am I saying this ? Just for one reason : It is all USA based.

The thing I’d like to share here is something else. If you are in a Signal chat group with

let’s say twenty people, twenty activists, and you share one web link of an article, and all of the users do have the default web link preview on, then it seems to me the activity of the group could be tracked. This is maybe not very likely, but you can be sure that “control-freaks” country USA will track Internet traffic, and if the web link you share is a little obscure, let’s say you post a link from a Lemmy, Mbin or PieFed post posted in a new and small community about guerilla gardening (just an example, can’t think of a more obscure but important thing right now! :)) then all the link preview traffic could reveal a thing or two especially if the website in question is also hosted in the US of A or within the 5 eyes or 8 eyes or 14 eyes countries and so on.

So, take off your tin foiled hat for a moment and consider turning off link previews in Signal so you have some more control about when and where you will “leak” meta data from your chat group.

/Happy chatting 🙂

Part of letter from Amazon to Signal, 2018