Evolution and digiKam

UPDATE: Unfortunately in practice Evolution has turned out to be another poorly supported piece of open source software that is only getting minimal updates and bug fixes. It is not too much exaggeration to say its support for Imap resembles that of Outlook that it tries to emulate. As far as I can tell the software has not had a major update since 2012. If all the bugs were fixed it would be great software, but because there are serious issues like not being able to connect to calendars, and hanging when sending or receiving messages, and stuff that makes it unreliable, then I have to go back to using Thunderbird, which at least is dependable even with the (relatively minor) issues that it has.

As noted the main issue with Thunderbird is its inability to reliably update counts in additional Imap folders other than the Inbox. One way around this is to have, as I do now, three general purpose email accounts which are graded as low, medium and high priority.

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Having written about both last time I am getting more into depth this time around taking a serious look at what I can do with both pieces of software.

Evolution as an email package is written to emulate the look and feel of Outlook. It is of course much superior and also better than Thunderbird in some ways. At the moment the biggest thing for me is when using filters and labels to move messages to different folders. Thunderbird handles this poorly by not updating the subfolders until you actually enter them. Evolution's performance is better in this regard. Its limitation however is that it doesn't have the different folder view options like selecting favourite folders than Thunderbird provides. However, you can choose to unsubscribe from folders - I dislike Gmail automatically marking messages as important or starred and putting them into these folders, so I can unsubscribe from them and not have them wasting space in Evolution.

Since Evolution has turned out to have superior performance to Thunderbird I have decided to use Evolution for my day to day stuff and use Thunderbird for the accounts I am closing down until they close, it looks like Evolution can handle Gmail and Google Calendars and Contacts quite well without problems and Thunderbird has a lot of issues with not updating the counts in additional folders very well so I am working to implement this decision.

digiKam is an interesting piece of software that I need to evaluate further as well, one of the key considerations is whether it could take over from using a Windows computer to download and rename the photos from cameras. At the moment the key issue is whether I can get it to connect to any of my cameras. Initially Debian did not recognise a camera out of the box and it seemed the issue would be that the necessary capabilities are not by default enabled in Debian. When I tried plugging it into the mediapc running Xubuntu 17.10 it was detected and mounted immediately. After looking at some stuff with Debian I installed a package called pmount, and then plugged the camera back into the mainpc, and it was detected and mounted automatically as a USB mass storage device. digiKam has been able to import pictures from the camera and I am now testing it further to see how useful it might be and what I can do with it.

Facebook sucks...

As I have written before, but I think really apart from interacting with friends, Facebook is a giant experiment and not one that actually achieves a lot of good. The whole premise of Facebook is to be bigger than anyone else and to churn fantastic profits from advertising. The "social media" is about creating a product that people think is amazing so that people will use it, so that they can sell the advertising.

It is when you start to look between the lines and see all the cracks that you realise that many of these free social media platforms are a crock. At the moment Google is the only social media platform that I haven't had a bad experience with. I suppose there could be one coming - or I could count against Google their annoying repetitive advertisements which mine your emails and search history daily and immediately. Fortunately there aren't that many pages where advertising for Russian singles sites pop up but at times it seems like that is the only adverts you see all day long. I must see about getting an ad blocker on the browser because some of the other adverts especially the ones that are for fake products and scams are really annoying as well.

I did previously comment on my experiences with Flickr. Facebook and Flickr are about equal in my list of loathsome social media experiences. But most of my contempt is reserved for Facebook. As many people are finding out to their cost, the amount of trolling and self-aggrandisement on Facebook knows no bounds. There have been numerous shocking examples of bullying behaviour and trolling on Facebook. Here is an example:

• http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11935523

In this case a coffee shop manager made some stupid comments about their business, the result was a group of people vandalised their Facebook page and caused their business to have to close down.

Closer to home there have been several examples that come to mind. One was a local school where an unsubstantiated allegation of bullying was made by a parent who put a sign up in the street and then got the news media to publish a story highly biased towards him. The story resulted in the school having to take their Facebook page offline because of people vandalising it with attack comments. All on the basis of hearsay, not proven fact. I posted a comment in favour of the school, which got 250 thumbs down on the Stuff newspaper website. 

Another case is this one

• https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/97961837/kiwi-sisters-targeted-by-cyber-stalker-say-authorities-are-powerless-to-help-them?cid=facebook.post.97961837

Essentially there is no system that can prevent someone signing up a fake social media profile and having a go at someone. I have not had these experiences, but I am aware of getting friend requests almost every week from profiles that search out and make a lot of cold call friend requests to a lot of people. This is clearly what happens when you click on the profile to see who it is and find the profile has been deleted by Facebook. When you click "Delete request" and then "Mark as spam" if there are too many "Mark as spam" responses to a particular profile then FB automatically suspends the profile. This is the best response as if you do not know who a person is then you should certainly not trust them on Facebook or any other platform.

When we started doing things like Yahoo Groups for some communities of interest such as railfanning, it was tame compared to what happens on Facebook now. As a lot of admins of these groups have found, trolling and flame wars are everyday occurrences on their groups and the moderators have their hands full dealing with problems like these. Added to the fact there are people who use these groups for their own ends such as stalking or criminal activity against group members, whose background is entirely unknown (such as whether they have a criminal record) and there are huge potential problems with these situations. There are also problems because the news media also exploits social media to make stories, a lot of stuff that is appearing on the major news sites in NZ originated on social media and is often exaggerated or is not checked for factuality before publishing. Another example is the Neighbourly site which Fairfax NZ has taken a shareholding in - they are obviously looking for a news source for stories.

I think the fundamental problem is that the whole notion of social media is that everyone has something worthwhile to say and it gives people a vehicle to say things whether they are smart or not. So it has created a platform for a massive amount of online trolling and half truths masquerading as fact to be peddled. For me, social media is best utilised to interact with groups or agencies that I have good relationships with, like Christian ministries that I follow. When it strays into self opinionated drivel, that is best avoided and that is why my own FB pages largely stick to fact rather than opinion where possible. The news media of all hues is busy using FB and in many cases their own websites to peddle in many cases these days the most inflammatory opinionated rhetoric which they just let go as if they were someone special or we owed them a living. Duncan Garner and Sean Plunket are both fools who use social media to spout their opinionated drivel under the guise of "free speech" and then stalk off in high dudgeon when they get challenged. Well known Christian conservative lobby group Family First has come out all guns blazing against the new government attacking their policies before half of them are even known and some of their comments are at best half truths. It's a great time to be limiting one's social media activity because there is so much rubbish out there.

Digikam / Android 8 not perfect / Ditching Outlook.com email

For some strange reason this message (which only appears once in my inbox) has some magical properties that enable it to push itself to the top of the list every so often.

Android 8 seems to have issues with DefaultCarrierApp which puts up a notification that won't go away telling me I have run out of mobile data. This is quite a common issue a lot of people are experiencing as it turns out.

Aside from testing Evolution for email (quite positively so far) I am now experimenting with digiKam as a pseudo replacement for Irfanview. I don't know whether it can do watermark text or renaming the same, or automatically download images from the camera, so it will take a lot of work to test out these features.

Upgrade MainPC (and BedroomPC) to Debian [3]

This is really just a quick followup to two of my four PCs replacing Xubuntu with Debian running Xfce desktop. It's interesting that I tried out Debian a few times in the past and never liked it that much, maybe using the familiar Xfce desktop has helped but it is far more likely the case that my increased familiarity with Linux has been the determining factor. In both cases the installation took more work than Xubuntu but I am quite confident of being able to overcome any challenge with Debian by now, it has a well deserved reputation as the king of Linux distros due to its very long and continuous development over more than 20 years, stability and widespread adoption and support in the OSS community. 

I still have one PC running Xubuntu and there is absolutely no rush to change it over. Like the bedroom PC which had a non booting installation that needed to be fixed it would only be out of actual necessity I would replace the installation on this computer, since everything runs just fine on it at present. The impetus for MainPC was Qgis compatibility for the most part after perhaps a rash decision to run a beta version of Xubuntu for a time.

More useful Linux software

Obviously one thing you need with an operating system platform is software that will run on it. Every platform has stuff that is produced cross-platform and stuff that is only for its platform, and we constantly have the issue that something we want to run is not available on the platform we use most of the time. It's for this reason many of us using a less well supported platform like Linux desktop or macOS need to keep a computer or at the least a virtualisation software platform running Windows to be able to use some of the software for that platform that we haven't found or can't get an equivalent replacement for. After one year of using Linux I am still using Windows for the automated download of photos from my cameras, scanning and printing software for those two hardware devices, IrfanView for photo editing, MS Office for some functions I haven't got around to seeing if it is possible in OpenOffice, Paint.net because the Linux equivalent Pinta is much less stable, and a few other less used capabilities like DVD ripping, iTunes, syncing another Google drive for personal files (rather than the maps on MainPC), etc. I am sure with a lot of hard work I could eliminate the need for any Windows computer for all these things but it only cost about $300 to build that new computer from scratch although I will have to buy a Win10 license for it someday. A VM would have trouble running some of those HW dependent software apps. This computer only needs one screen and can be used if I need a third screen for some other function I am doing on mainPC to which it is networked.

As the comment about Paint.net reveals sometimes what looks like and should be a direct replacement is not of good quality. Unfortunately there is a lot of software on Linux that doesn't live up to its promise, whether because development has been abandoned or inadequately resourced. I don't want to knock a lot of software or say it is the open source model that causes this because that would be patently untrue, however it remains an issue that lack of widespread adoption of Linux desktop means we are really grandparenting off the massive adoption of Linux server or using software that has a Linux port from some other platform or is natively developed for Linux desktop and then ported to other platforms. Qgis is an example of some very good software that starts on Linux and has been ported to Unix, Windows and macOS and I started using it on Windows and then switched to using it on Linux. I'm happy to say the experience on Linux was at least as good as Windows, only the issue that the packages install folder can't easily be configured (maybe there is a way around this I don't know about yet) precluding multiple installations has been a concern, this is the price you pay for being able to upgrade to a new edition painlessly and automatically by just typing a command into a terminal window. The build from source option I have employed to have two versions running on my Debian desktop hasn't been too difficult. Qgis has the great benefit of being well supported and stable despite the at times appearance of slow evolution and resolution of issues. Much of the graphics and video editing software I have tested on Linux tends to be unstable and more often than not this is a consequence of poor design in that the programmers have not anticipated and coded for possible error situations in a way that allows the software to recover, so it just crashes instead.

The aim of this post today is to write about some more software tools for the Linux platform that I have adopted recently. As a result of becoming a webmaster recently for nzrailmaps.nz I had to find software that would allow me to edit and maintain my site. With no custom site builder integrated at trainnweb.org it's back to using a desktop graphical editor or a specialised text editor GUI and separate FTP software to sync updates to the web server. I spent a lot of time looking for and trying several GUI editors before finding Seamonkey for Windows, which for some reason is not available as .deb packages for Linux and is hard to install for that platform, examining and rejecting it due to its apparent lack of CSS support and a few other issues like clunky design. Because these days due to the rise of free web host sites like Google Sites and many others which have sitebuilders integrated into them there is not much call for basic GUI web editors these days and not many people writing them. I came to the conclusion it was far easier to use a specialised text editor with HTML / CSS templates built into it, of which there are a great many more produced due to the fact they can work with a whole lot of different coding languages and environments. Editing HTML in a text editor is not very hard and it's something I have plenty of experience with. So Bluefish is the editor of choice, very stable and useful. The FTP software for now is FileZilla, something I remember from Windows, and quite suitable for a small site, you have to manually browse to each directory and select the files to upload, though it does have a capability to highlight which directories or files have been updated. 

Another type of software I am experimenting with is seeing if there is a better email client than Thunderbird. Really the only realistic alternative out there that is not tied to some other package like (for example) the Seamonkey browser is Evolution, which is interesting as it is rare for non-MS software platforms to support Exchange (there is only a proprietary Exchange plugin available for Thunderbird). I have installed Evolution on MainPC and set it up to access a few lower priority or soon-to-close email accounts for now. As it has been noted in the past that Outlook has issues with Imap support it will be interesting to see if Evolution is significantly better in this regard and also how it handles Google calendars etc. Evolution used to be cross-platform but is now Linux-only. It was started by Ximian/Novell and is now commercially developed by RedHat and is obviously beneficial to their wider interest of commercial deployment of Linux for corporate environments, but still has an open source free variant that can be downloaded and installed automatically by apt.

As long as there is a lot of software for Linux, which I have no reason to doubt, it will continue to be a very useful desktop platform, but I can't see that Windows desktop disappearing any time soon. Although some Windows software has been ported to Linux using the mono adaption of .NET, I have generally felt that it is not as good as native software, although this could just be a perception. I have found both Pinta and FlickrDownloadr which are built on Mono, to be not very stable or well developed pieces of software, but this could be just a perception rather than a limitation of the platform.

Why I no longer have confidence in Flickr

Flickr used to be a great photo site. It was started in 2004 in Canada, but it didn't stay independent for very long. Yahoo took it over in 2005, and for quite a while it looked good. It was quite distinctive from some of the other photo sharing sites, and has retained a quirkiness all of its own. The problem is that Yahoo has had a lot of problems in recent years, and their properties like Flickr have suffered along with the parent, as they fall more and more into Google's shadow. 

For me, I thought Flickr was pretty good until relatively recently. I have even set up a new home site recently for some of my photos as a result of changing my core online identity this year. I had thought everything was well with Flickr. However what has shaken my faith in them has been a total failure in customer support. If you try to contact them, using the methods provided on their website, then you cannot get a reply. Your ticket will go into what looks like a regular customer support queue, but you will never get a response from them. Therefore, it's practically impossible to get any issues resolved.

The biggest concern I have had with Flickr, which I only just discovered last week, is that they have removed some of the photos from my albums. I only found this out when I tried to transfer the photos to a new Flickr account, and received messages that a few images were considered "infringing content" and had been previously removed. I then checked and found that the pictures in question had been replaced by templates with the text "this photo is no longer available" printed on them.

I haven't been able to determine how the photos came to be removed. The photos were unremarkable and the most likely scenario is that malicious allegations of copyright infringement were reported by persons unknown, in order to force the images to be taken down. One album with around 2000 pictures in it had 200 images that were replaced by this template. But simply put, Yahoo decided they did not need to notify me of the reporting of the images; they simply removed them without advising me in the slightest. The law in the US requires notification of a DMCA related takedown of an image. NZ copyright law also requires this. If Yahoo's case is that neither of these laws applied, then they are responsible to inform their users under what other circumstances and what other law they consider themselves empowered to remove images.

Needless to say, Yahoo has not responded to any requests in relation to this issue. I have just filed another support request, to move the NZ Rail Maps Flickr albums to ownership from a new Yahoo ID. This process used to be available directly from Flickr account settings but has been removed from there, and you now follow a process that involves filing a support request with Yahoo's helpdesk. Well of course this has gone unanswered like all the other requests. 

More than any other reason, this situation has precipitated the decision to register a domain name for the NZ Rail Maps project. It has come out of the realisation that Flickr, which has been where I hosted the map tiles for a long time, cannot be depended upon any more. Google Photos will probably end up being where a lot of the tiles are hosted in future. I am still thinking about whether to ditch the rest of my Flickr albums and move all my stuff to Google Photos. At that time I would still follow some people on Flickr, but not use it for anything else.

Upgrade mainpc to Debian 9.1 [2]

Well as usual I have decided to rush in boots and all and get Debian on this computer. Creating the pen drive for the netinstall image that I used previously to create VMs was a little tricky until I realised it had to be in FAT32 format rather than ext4. The Debian installer threw up a warning about using the Unetbootin tool to create the pen drive, but it worked flawlessly. The installation is practically the same as Xubuntu except you get a choice of desktop environments, from which you can choose, in this case, Xfce. It being old hat I soon had the partititions set up on the SSD (2x 60 GB, one the boot partition and the other swap) and the installer flew along as expected. One of the reasons for wanting to change the installed OS is some issues that have come up with Xubuntu 17.10 which naturally proves one has to be careful about installing the latest bleeding edge in a production environment. For this reason I decided not to install the testing repository and will find some other way to update Xfce if it is an old version.

Once having completed the base install the next step is, as usual, to set up the RAID array, which we do by logging in as root and then installing the RAID software and configuring it, just as I have numerous previous times. I'm being incautious by not having made a backup before starting the install, but I did have a backup done a couple of weeks ago, and there are two disks in the array that are exact copies of each other, and it's unlikely to be an issue to get the array working again. So actually it was very straightforward. So now for the rest of the day I will just be tweaking the installation and re-installing bits of software on the computer. As usual as soon as I pointed /home at the RAID array and then logged on as myself everything came back especially the XFCE panel and menus and it is hard to see any difference from Xubuntu. One of the key things I can do with this version of Debian is natively install a stable version of Qgis master alongside the most up to date version and at the moment it is building an installation from source that should work OK as it has on all the VMs I have put together up until now with Debian on them.

[UPDATE] So MainPC has been OK. The PC in the bedroom crashed a couple of days ago so I just jumped in and installed Debian on it as well. This is a bit tricky to do in general because of the differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and it took a bit more work to get it up and running. I still have to install a bit more software on it to finish it off, but it is going fairly well. I don't have a plan to migrate all the computers, and will only address it whenever it is necessary. So I still have one PC running Xubuntu and have no plans to change that.

Upgrade mainpc to Debian 9.1 [1]

I wrote about this last time. Like all the other times I have upgraded this will be a multi step process because of the various things needed on the system. However none of my other computers will be changed from Xubuntu. I don't have any real ideological reasons but I do want a system that is more widely supported than Xubuntu and yet still has the Xfce desktop interface which is light and fast. I remember that I tried Debian one time before and didn't like it for some reason, but I think that time is now past and I will go ahead with the upgrade this time. Probably all of the other computers will stay with Xubuntu (Artful currently).

To get more up to date packages the system needs to have the testing repositories added to apt, this is simple enough to do with a line or two in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ testing non-free contrib main

(you may also have a deb-src line as well)

which gives me access to the NZ repositories for testing. When I put this into my test VM and ran apt update it said there were 778 new packages available. Whether all of these actually are required is somewhat moot as the main issue is that the system is pretty well stripped down to the minimum required components - which is probably going to be the case anyway. There were actually 892 gets needed which took 11 minutes in total to download. About the same amount of time again was needed to install everything.

So this is just an early stage of looking into it because there are numerous steps to follow and there will be reinstallation of the software and various disruptions etc.

How to set a custom display resolution in Xubuntu

This is the way to mirror my pair of screens on my bedroom PC. One screen is 1360x768 (a little odd) and the other is 1680x1050. The default mirroring in XFCE will only run them both at a 4:3 resolution like 1280x1024, since this is the highest resolution they are both compatible with, even though the aspect ratio is wrong and so a part of the screen is not actually used.

x.org server ships with a command line tool called xrandr. This is capable of changing the display settings on the fly and in this case the command we want is either of the following:

xrandr --fb 1360x768 --output VGA-0 --mode 1360x768 --scale 1x1 --output HDMI-0 --same-as VGA-0 --mode 1680x1050 --scale-from 1360x768

Alternate form (which I also tested): 

xrandr --fb 1680x1050 --output HDMI-0 --mode 1680x1050 --scale 1x1 --output VGA-0 --same-as HDMI-0 --mode 1360x768 --scale-from 1680x1050

Which one you use will depend on which screen it is more important to run in native mode. At the moment I am using the first option, as it gives a native size picture on the 1360x768 screen which is the easiest to read bedside screen. The important difference over what xfce4-display-settings can achieve is that one of the screens can be scaled to match the other. It would also be possible to have some oddball configurations like three displays with two of them an extended desktop and one mirroring one of the others.

Running this command only lasts as long as the next boot. In order to make it come into effect at every startup it needs to be put into a file that the LightDM window manager executes when it initialises.

In this case, after looking at the Ubuntu documentation over here on the wiki, I made a file in the path /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d and called it 50-myconfig.conf

The contents of this file are just two lines:

[Seat:*]
display-setup-script=xrandr --fb 1360x768 --output VGA-0 --mode 1360x768 --scale 1x1 --output HDMI-0 --same-as VGA-0 --mode 1680x1050 --scale-from 1360x768

Basically display-setup-script is a prefix that tells LightDM to run this command after it starts the X server, and then it is the xrandr command I mentioned above.

Just as an aside, right now I am looking at putting MainPC to Debian 9.1 with XFCE as the front end. The issues to be resolved will be how to get a more up to date version of XFCE than the default from the Debian repository, this will probably entail using the unstable repositories. This will all be tested out in a VM before migrating. No other computers are planned to be shifted, it is mostly about getting the best system on a PC that is used for the most work I do.

[UPDATE] When I reinstalled the bedroom PC with Debian recently I had to put this setting back in to the computer. The PC is also using XFCE as its GUI and the settings were the same, except I put the display-setup-script line into /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file. An interesting twist was I had to install some extra packages for Radeon drivers before Xrandr could detect the display settings and ports properly. Since there have been questions over video performance on this computer with late releases of Xubuntu it will make an interesting comparison. Although, this tiny PC is to get a makeover soon with a Asrock Q1900 board that will run Intel chipset and graphics which will help a lot because of better support in Linux.