Music. Photography. Thoughts.
In case you’d like to see Arch Linux in action, you could of course install it the recommended way, following their installation guide, or you could use the archinstall script which is included since a while. Stephen gives a nice example on how to do this in a virtual machine, including tips on btrfs and snapshots, so enjoy his howto:
Like always, thanks for reading and for viewing.
My computer normally runs with a 48000Hz sampling rate for audio, that’s the one you would also use for most video productions like when producing something for the ‘tubes and such.
But CDs had 44100Hz which is also perfectly fine, and which saves some space if you record with that frequency – and so some (or even most?) of my friends over at Wikiloops use that sampling rate for their music.
No problem; Ardour checks when importing, and would normally automatically convert the imported 44.1kHz files to 48kHz ones. But that would mean that I’d make it harder for others who would probably like to add my single tracks to the rest (with 44.1Khz). And also, each conversion diminishes the quality just a tiny bit, so it’s always best if/when you can avoid these and use the material as it comes. Even Ardour says so:
But how to temporarily set Ardour to 44.1kHz? Easy in case you’re using the new pipewire! I just wrote the following short shell script which I named ‘ardour44k.sh’:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 44100
PIPEWIRE_LATENCY=128/44100 pw-jack ardour
wait
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 0So if I start Ardour using that, I can use 44100Hz just perfectly fine – and when Ardour ends, the system will be set back to 48000Hz; just what I wanted. Here are some screenshots from Ardour’s Edit and Mixer windows while it ran with 44100Hz:
And when I stop Ardour, the script ends with:
set property: id:0 key:clock.force-rate value:0 type:(null)Just what I always wanted, as Tigger would say 🙂 Thanks to the pipewire crew, and thanks also to my friends over at Wikiloops 🙂
Oh, and what I’m also using with pipewire (which is now the standard audio “engine” on Debian and most other Linux distributions) is a program called qpwgraph, and that is a graphical patchbay like the older tools (qjackctl, Carla, Catia & Co). Looks like this:
Here you see three inputs for my upright bass on the left, which go into Ardour. The right side shows Ardour’s monitor section and its metronome going out into my sound interface, and from there, into my headphones. The outputs of individual tracks go back into Ardour’s master track, which gives you this figure 8 shape. Easy peasy, isn’t it? Virtual cabling, so to say…
Thanks to you for reading.
Just found this CC drawing by David Revoy in the Fediverse:
Brilliant, isn’t it? Merci beaucoup David 🙂
Congrats go out to Peter Hickman who won this year’s “Senior TT” race, and who also scored a new lap record (on a stock machine, not on his superbike!) of over 136mph on average on the Snaefell Mountain Course which is a bit over 60km for one lap. Congrats again to Michael Dunlop as well, who now has 25 TT wins if I counted correctly.
Thanks go out to the Debian girls & guys who at this time are still busy (in Cambridge, England, and all over the world) to release Debian 12 aka “Bookworm”. You can read about their progress in the Micronews site if you wish. Once they are ready, the download link on Debian’s main page will lead you to version 12, as long as it’s still 11.7 it’s still ongoing work. Thanks folks; you rock!
We were busy shopping and treated ourselves with some ice-cream afterwards. And like so often, we also brought some nice little bits for our neighbours’ cat whom we call “Cookie” – and who regularly falls asleep after eating:
I am by the way now also “microblogging”, but not on Twitter – I’ve never even tried that – but on Mastodon. The small server where you can find me hosts the picture above, since I cancelled my Flickr Pro account and therefore I’m now restricted to a maximum of 1,000 photos there. If you want you can also follow me there, but I don’t post that much and that often (yet) as this is all still very new for me. I’m an old school “blogger” as you can see here… 😉
And finally – in case you’d like to visit the Isle of Man for next year’s Tourist Trophy races (take two weeks off in case you want to see everything), here are some great tips from Frank, a Douglas Councillor who named his YT channel “amadeusiom“:
I thanked Frank for his very nice reports from besides the tracks, and for his helpful tips, and I asked him if I may embed them here, to which he kindly agreed. Thanks mate!
Thanks to everyone for reading and viewing, like always.
Update from Sunday morning: here it is, as expected:
You can read all about it and how to get it at https://bits.debian.org/2023/06/bookworm-released.html
Again, thanks for reading.
In two days from now, Debian 12 “Bookworm” (like always, code-named after a character from Toy Story) will be released. The Bits from the Release Team are promising, and like Liam Proven from The Register, I also want a “boring”, or as he put it, “excitement-free” operating system on my computer 😉
What I could *not* reproduce here were his problems with pipewire, maybe because I had used that on Arch before, but on my installation (a fresh one on a new partition), everything worked out of the proverbial box. What I did install additionally were things like pw-jack or qpwgraph, because I wanted to use it together with Ardour to record music – also works fine.
So in case you haven’t tried Debian yet, from Saturday on I’d say give it another chance. This is the system I would recommend to friends and to family. Unlike Red Hat (and soon, its derivatives), it still provides things like LibreOffice in case you choose the “desktop” variant during installation, and unlike Ubuntu, it still provides Firefox (ESR) from its own repositories instead of only as a snap package. Clean & lean is the way to go, I’d much prefer that instead of endless redundancies with snaps, flatpacks, or docker or other “images”. So thanks to the sisters & brothers over at Debian for still doing all that work.
Like always, thanks for reading.
Wow, time is flying, isn’t it?
It’s June already, and in 9 days from now, the Debian developers will release their latest and greatest version 12, which I have running here since April already. So they are planning and preparing release parties everywhere in the world. One of them will take place in Leuwen, Belgium, which we kind of know already – we had to stop there with a defect dynamo in our ageing car in 2019 when we went to London, so from Leuwen on, the travel went on by train instead (which was cool but kind of expensive if you need tickets right away).
Anyway, I can attest that Debian 12 aka “Bookworm” is/will be great; at least on my machine (with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU) and on a much older notebook with a Core 2 Duo mobile it runs very nicely. The latter one has only 2GB of RAM, so there I’m using it with the XFCE instead of a Gnome desktop environment. This is the system I would recommend to friends and family without hesitation and/or second thoughts, and I’m writing this article using it. Why would I recommend it? Read about the reasons here. My personal reasons are that I run it as my main operating system on anything I had since over 20 years – desktops, servers, everything. It’s my safe space and my trusted work horse. Here’s a pic of me from Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, 20 years ago:
Like always, thanks for reading.
I’ve had problems with swollen batteries on both the old Google Nexus 5 and also the Pixel 4a devices. Nice as they were, this was probably my own fault: like the company’s laptop/notebook, I had them “plugged in” (into their power adapter) pretty much all of the time, and I’ve only recently learnt and read that doing so is putting lots of stress on those rechargeable batteries.
So with the remaining devices (one Pixel 3a which I re-inherited from my late brother, after originally having bought it for Mitchie who gave it to Zuleikha who gave it to Willi – and my Pixel 6a which was a gift from my family and the first ever new phone I’ve got), I’m a bit more careful. What I’ve read is that you shouldn’t let the batteries run out completely and you also shouldn’t always charge them until they’re really full – an 80/20 rule would be much better for longevity. So I’ve decided to use that 80/20 rule whenever possible – meaning charge them when the batteries reach 20% (turning on their battery saver at that percentage as well, in case I don’t see it), and charge them up to 80% mostly, and only to the max if I know I’ll be out of the house for a while and want them to last as long as possible.
They last long anyway, at least with my way of using them. Here’s a screenshot from the 3a where you can see the reloading to about 80% spike after a few days:
That one lasts long because first, I don’t use it that much (it doesn’t even have a SIM card, so I use it via WLAN only), and second I had its original Google Android operating system replaced with GrapheneOS which doesn’t “call home” as much as the original did. In fact, no Google services on this one at all…
… but also the Pixel 6a is pretty good once I turned off everything I don’t really need, like location history or Google’s “Fit” and other stuff. This one *does* have a SIM card, but I also don’t use it really often, so here’s a screenshot showing that I charged it to 100% last Friday evening, and the screenshot was taken this morning, at 25% battery life left. As you can see, I’ve used it for reading a bit, with a free PDF viewer:
So how do I keep track of charging them up to 80% only, instead of full? Easy: I’ll get a notification from my computer, like this:
And that one comes from a program / an extension on my desktop which is called GSConnect. You can set it like this, like here for the Pixel 3a:
On the phones, the application you have to install is KDE Connect, and you can get that from the F-Droid store in case you don’t want to be logged in into Google just to use their own “Play Store”.
The application can do lots more than just notify you about the battery status, but that is what I usually do with it – looks like this on the Gnome desktop:
According to its Wikipedia page, KDE Connect is also available for Microsoft Windows and for Apple’s MacOS, but I haven’t tried these. Go on and see for yourself if you’re using these. It’s built right into KDE (their “Plasma” desktop) in case you want to try that as well.
Hoping that this is useful for anyone. Like always, thanks for reading.
I had installed the new and upcoming Debian 12 (aka “Bookworm”) on my machine, parallel to the stable version (Debian 11 aka “Bullseye”) and Windows 11 – so I had a triple boot operating system again since a while.
The Windows part is a bit controversial – since I have this new self-built machine with the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G processor, my Windows 10 offered to upgrade itself to Win11 which I did. But in recent times, more and more reports arrive saying that Microsoft is forcing ads upon its clients all over the place – I’m running it with a local account and haven’t seen them yet. But the day I will, it’ll be a “goner” as they say.
Anyway, I was also looking at Arch Linux again since that is always the latest and greatest (like Debian unstable aka “Sid”, it’s what they call a “rolling release”). First I tried some things in virt-manager and QVM/KEMU, but then I decided to overwrite my old stable Debian 11 with Arch. Went fine, except that both Arch and Debian have different ideas about where their respective /boot folders are mounted. They’re both of the EFI partition alongside Windows, but still – anyway, maybe that’s a good thing; at least they won’t overwrite each others’ kernels and/or firmware. But both run fine, even if at the moment I can’t start Arch from Debian’s grub or vice versa; doesn’t matter.
Once I damaged my Debian 12 part, accidentally deleted the firmware, so it wouldn’t boot. Didn’t matter the slightest bit since for Debian I’ll always have my /home and system parts on different partitions – so wipe it with the latest (RC2 at this time) installer – and I just saw that since today there’s even an RC3 installer – and all is well. Except of course a bit of manual labour with reinstalling Ardour and all, but even that could be remembered and more or less automated when using Debian; have done so in the past with saving and later restoring its list of installed packages…
Anyway, here’s a screenshot where I newly registered the only commercial program I’m using on Debian, it’s Sonarworks’ Reference 4 headphone correction which I use in the monitoring bus in Ardour:
Haven’t installed Ardour in Arch (yet) since at this moment they’re close – with version 7.3 in Debian’s “unstable” and 7.4.1 (or so) in Arch.
The only programs which I still use in Windows from time to time are the OM Workspace from the former Olympus guys, and Nik’s Silver Efex Pro2 which you could get for free from Google for the time they’ve owned it (sold by now to DXO, not sure what they’re going to do with it…). So it’s kind of a jump-through-the-hoops for photography, but for music I’m on Debian alone since long, like for everything else as well.
And now, from time to time, I’ll have a look at/into Arch again. Normally when you read about new program versions with new features somewhere, looking into Arch means that you’ll have that newest version already. And Debian will stay my main and stable machine once that Debian 12 will be made official on June 10th.
Oh, by the way: Arch is slim, as they say on their homepage. Unlike Debian or other distributions, it doesn’t come with LibreOffice or any other programs pre-installed, so it’s *you* who has to decide what’s needed. Together with the Gnome desktop plus Firefox, Thunderbird and a few goodies, even with all my Wikiloops albums copied onto it, it’s still less than 10GB as you can see here – one third of that is my data so far:
That blue and purple stuff is all music (with the purple bits being published albums, and the outer blue one being raw and unpublished songs in .wav form)…
Like always, thanks for reading.
Lots of my former colleagues preferred Google’s Chrome browser to alternatives due to its speed. And while on Android its more free siblings like Vanadium and Mulch (both based on the non-Google-“optimised” and open source Chromium browser) are also some of the most secure browsers (if set up accordingly), on desktops it’s different.
And what I found – to explain it to those who don’t know yet – is a web-based comic in pdf form about it, called “Contra Chrome”, by Leah Elliot. It’s a lot of pages, but worth your time in my opinion. Also available in German or other languages one page up, here…
Found it via the browsers page of DivestOS Mobile, found that one via my friend William Beebe’s blog post.
Thanks to everyone involved in creating and sharing this, thanks to you for reading.
We have that old Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 which we’ve got for Mitchie short before moving to our current home. That was in 2008/2009, Zuleikha was just 4 when this machine was brand new.
It came with a Windows version called “Vista”, for those of you who still remember that – something NT-like, just an in-between younger than XP but older than Windows 7. The machine has a sticker for it, as well as for its processor from the Pentium-M “Centrino” aera, it’s an Intel Core 2 Duo T5670, 1800MHz in 65nm and up to 100°C, just two cores, nothing “hyper”threading on this one.
That machine was never really capable of running said “Vista” without throttling, it has only 2GB of main memory and was swapping even before the OS was fully loaded. So we installed Linux, and it ran just fine, for a while.
The last OS I had on it (Mitchie has a much newer machine by now which is pretty much taken over by Zuleikha tho) was Debian 11 with the XFCE desktop. That ran pretty well unless you tried to start a few tabs in Firefox and at the same time have Thunderbird open – these programs are getting bigger like our average cars do, so I was looking for something slimmer again.
I first tried LXQt on the new and soon to be released Debian 12¹, and while it installed just fine (thanks to the Debian developers now allowing “non-free” firmware for the WiFi and so on), it had a few issues. First it also installed lots of stuff from the KDE Plasma desktop which I didn’t really want or need. Plus some things like screengrab didn’t even work at all, so for a screenshot I had to take my camera! Excuse the bad quality and lighting, but it looked like this:
I know – I should have issued a bug report to the Debian devs, but I just wanted to try and see LXQt, and while even Debian unstable didn’t have the current version 1.3.0 (both have 1.2.0 instead), I assumed that that bug was probably dealt with “upstream” as they say in dev circles, so I didn’t bother.
I looked at Fedora again which has a LXQt spin of their current version 38 – but that one’s a “Live Image”, and guess what? Wouldn’t even boot on a machine with only 2GB of RAM! So much for “Enterprise-class” (and -developed) Linux; nothing is really tested for end users like us… so if you’re a private person like me, don’t bother with anything “Enterprise” – it’s a waste of time in my (repeated) experience.
In the end I decided to go the slim route, and installed Arch with LXQt as its only desktop. And that one’s a thing of beauty, with its Clearlooks theme:
And as you can see, screengrab worked just fine on LXQt 1.3.0 and on Arch.
Using pacman I then installed both Firefox and also Chromium, and while Firefox got the CPU fan spinning again, Chromium seems to be a little slimmer (tho bigger in download size).
Anyway, just trying to figure out how to keep old machines working, and this one surely looks and feels quite wonderful.
Like always, thanks for reading.
¹ In fact on Debian 12 I tried a combination of LXQt, XFCE, and Cinnamon to make first choices – but while the installation went well (kudos), they all influenced each other with placing desktop icons around on each others’ desktops, so that wasn’t any kind of ‘pure’ experience. And since Arch gave me lots of options as well (the Budgie desktop for instance), I looked at these in a virtual machine on my desktop later. Nice but not as lightweight was my impression…