Author: wjl

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KDE vendors

In yesterday’s post “Try before you buy” I listed some examples of hardware vendors who include free and open source software. Today, The Register reports about the Spanish vendor Slimbook who offer a notebook in two different screen sizes and with KDE Neon pre-installed. They also link to the hardware page of KDE which in turn has many vendors who ship with that desktop in case you like it, from games consoles to phones to notebooks starting at around the 200$ range, you’ll get it. Of course, at some of those vendors you are free to choose whatever distribution you would like, an example for a German-based shop like this is Tuxedo computers. Very much like my own German division of ZaReason (RIP).

I’d still rather build computers myself, but if I was in need of a cheap alternative to a Chromebook or something like that right now, I’d have a closer look at the Pinebook Pro… maybe you could even order this with Debian, or with a standard Arch installation? If not, Manjaro with KDE Plasma would be perfectly fine as well…

As always, thanks for reading.

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Pictures from JWST

Wow, these are good… I forgot that NASA also has a Flickr account, so they’ve uploaded some of their (and ESA’s) first JWST images to Flickr – and the Flickr team blogged about them in The Universe is on Flickr: See NASA’s first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The problem with astrophotography is that it’s a numbers game – you’ll have to invest quite a bit even as a hobbyist to just get some decent gear, both hard- and software. And then you’ll have to spend many nights out in the dark and cold, and later assemble all these taken images, and still you’ll be nowhere near the quality of Hubble, or now, the James Webb telescopes. Except of course if you’re a conglomerate of NASA, ESA, and others who put up some 10 billion dollars for such a thing…

Me, I don’t have any motors for my telescope, so even with manually tracking the moon (which is quite fast if you view it through some 1500mm-equivalent “lens”), it’s still a challenge to overlay all of the taken images, plus you can’t even really focus the whole thing – touch it, and you’ll see nothing except some dancing large object. For deep space imaging, you’ll really have to go outside and far away from any nearby city, and spend your night in the dark. And freeze – you’ll get the best ones in winter.

So bravo to the big agencies, and to anyone who really is into this – and thanks for the nice photos.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Trying RawTherapee

My camera is set to black & white most of the time. So the preview image both in its electronic viewfinder as also on its display are black & white, and so is the raw file if you open it with Olympus (or now, rather OM Systems) Workspace which is the proprietary raw converter you’ll get for free together with the cameras.

Problem is, that’s for Windows and MacOS only which I don’t like.

If I open the file with other raw converters on Linux, like RawTherapee or Darktable, I see the raw file in colour of course. And since both have good black & white film emulations, and mostly everything looks just fine in Ilford FP4 or HP5, this time I decided to leave it in colour. So here is Wilma on our veranda from today:

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Wilma, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

After using RawTherapee for the conversion with pretty much its standard settings meaning that I did nothing else than im- and exporting it, I still took the converted image into Gimp to apply “Auto White balance” which just stretches the contrast quite nicely – much faster than trying this inside the raw converter.

So that’s it – a colour photo treated with free (as in speech *and* as in beer) software only. The only disadvantage is that I’ll *have to* see the image in colour first, even if I want it to be in black & white.

Anyway, as always, thanks for reading and for viewing.

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Cat siesta

It’s warm, and so the cats are resting. Here are Cookie from yesterday, and Wilma from today:

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Cookie resting, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022
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Wilma resting, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Cookie just came back and is eating while Wilma is on the sofa still…

As always, thanks for viewing.

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Try before you buy

I read last week already that Lenovo seems to be selling notebooks now which don’t allow to boot Linux or any other operating system from USB sticks anymore. Matthew Garrett, a Debian developer had discovered this, and I’ve found his blog post about it via Planet Debian. Now The Register also reports about it. And who asked Microsoft to “support” secure boot in the beginning? A bad idea in not only my opinion… this should be fixed, ASAP please.

So the best advice at the moment is that you should try before you buy – any new notebook or computer which comes pre-installed with Windows or with MacOS is generally a bad idea, and the best solution would be to build it yourself, and install your OS of choice. Since not everyone can do that, look out for vendors who pre-install Linux or other Libre software. This is possible and advisable even on “smart” phones, as this article from the FSFE shows. See here about what is possible with a phone, and with some good intentions…

We shouldn’t let the wrong people decide about the future, we’ll have to do that ourselves…

In case you’ll go to any big consumer electronics store/chain to try out notebooks, this would be a good OS to test them with.

As always, thanks for reading.

Update, from Friday July 15th, 2022: here’s an update from Michael Larabel on booting a new Lenovo X13 with Linux. You still have the problem that the reason for first boot failures is not even shown, thanks to Micro$oft. Fix this, guys… we don’t need that crap. Thanks.

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Everybody owns a Jazz Snare…

Have a listen to this, from 25 years ago:

Superbass: Two for the Blues (1997)

The bassists are, from left to right: John Goldsby, Christian McBride, Ray Brown, and John Clayton, four real superstars on bass. Note that John Goldsby (who plays the first and longest solo) was the student of John Clayton and Ray Brown, and John Clayton was also Ray Brown’s student. I don’t know that much about Christian McBride, but he’s also a monster player, no questions there…

Edit: just read that all three “other” bass players were students of Ray Brown who invented the group “SuperBass”. See Wikipedia.

Also note that John Riley plays on a Telephone book from the city of Cologne, Germany. And bravo to Carmen Bradford on vocals as well, what a lovely performance 🙂 Proves again how well a human voice goes together with upright bass, a fact that Ray Brown knew very well – he was married to Ella Fitzgerald…

Found via Bonedo who in turn got it from No Treble.

As always, thanks for viewing.

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A Linux system you should have with you

Tails

see and read more at tails.boum.org – you can thank me later 😉

No joke: put this onto a bootable USB stick, if you must then make a persistent (and of course encrypted) storage on the same, and use it wherever you might be. The machine you are using wouldn’t even know that you’ve been there. Recommended by top security experts, and feared by the NSA and other non-privacy guys.

As always, thanks for reading. Oh, and in case you were wondering: yes, I’ve written this blog post using Tails exactly as you see it above.