Tag Archives: linux

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 little Linux “commandlinefu” fun to share – for geeks & nerds

Computers

Let’s imagine that you wanted to make Proton Drive work in Linux because the people from Proton only appears to provide Proton Drive apps for MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android. And you found this blog post Sync Proton Drive on Linux with Rclone and you went ahead without reading all that carefully first and created a new folder

~/ProtonDrive

Then after reading some more (and you see that you need to first configure rclone), you realize you were pretty tired already and wanted to do other things, including this wonderful thing called sleep.

And you think “Let’s remove that new folder” so I will not be distracted by that tomorrow when I’m busy with other computer things.

You type in :

rm ~/ProtonDrive

And you get an error because it is a directory and the rm command needs more powers from you to be able to remove a directory.

Now instead of getting annoyed and wanting to remove all that you had typed in, you can simply add the needed “minus rf” to what you already typed, so it will look like this :

rm ~/ProtonDrive -rf

You see ? Linux can often be very flexible.

And how do I know this ? I liked to experiment and do crazy things in the past, e.g. testing whether little Linux tools would use -h or –help and whether –hel would also work and for some tools it turned out it really DID. Now that I’m a bit older I don’t do that anymore (jk).

I mentioned commandlinefu in the title, here’s a site only about real commandlinefu :

https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse