Category Archives: Computers

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! 🙂

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! 🙂

 

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.

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.

 

Part 2 – self-host – A video and audio calls alternative with XMPP/Jabber

Computers, , ,

In the previous blog post (posted 6 January 2025) I’ve talked about the easiest way of having video- and audio-calls without self-hosting. In this post let’s look at one way to self-host an XMPP server for audio and video calls.

Warning : self-hosting services is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve never done this before, I’d suggest to first do some generic reading on self-hosting or maybe ask here or here.

The perhaps easiest way to self-host an XMPP server that can do video- and audio-calls is to use Snikket.

What is needed for this from you as the admin that will self-host ?

It’s been a while since I tested self-hosting Snikket but I remember that it was a matter of installing Snikket on a server, then log in to the web interface for the admin user, and then create invites for the users you want to have on-board.

After the user receives an invite they will be asked to install the Snikket app on their Android phone (The Snikket app is a soft-fork of the Conversations app. Note that -afair- installing the Snikket app is not a must. If you know your way around you can stick with the Conversations app) and continue to start using their Snikket user account on your server. And then starting an audio- or video call should be the same as in the previous blog post (posted 6 January 2025).

I’d also like to share some information for people with more experience with self-hosting. This could be difficult but perhaps not impossible 😉

Yunohost (link to their app catalog) is software made by a group of volunteers (Mainly in France it appears) that makes self-hosting easier. After a fresh installation you would be ready to install “apps” from the Yunohost apps catalog.

Some users have asked for the feature that the XMPP software that comes with Yunohost (Metronome) can also do video- and audio-calls. In this Github issue (from May 2020) some users claim that they got it working by changing some settings.

Note, if you scroll down to the last comment you can probably see that someone commented that Metronome has become an app instead of coming with a default Yunohost installation.

Happy chatting 🙂