Darktable Open Source RAW Darkroom

I've just become a fan of this amazing piece of software. Just everything about it seems to be perfect. The noise reduction is stunningly good while preserving details. The sharpener brings out crips details down to the single pixel. You may even be able to tether you camera via USB and control your camera's settings and shooting with live view directly from your computer. It even does some tone mapping, imports GPS data into your photos and more. I was going to say now it only has to take the photos itselt. But with tethering, in a way, it already does. :)

Simply fascinating. Try it out!

Hints: Check out some tutorials if you get stuck.

Quickly Shrinking the File Size of a PDF File on the Command Line in Linux

Ok, I'm most linking to a great page here. But I'll also give you my favorite choice: GhostScript, which is available almost on every system and did a terrific job in my test:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

Of course it also takes other formats like ps and eps or jpg as input!

Automatically Disable your Touchpad - Enhancing Palm Detection in Linux

I have already posted an entry somewhere on this blog on how to disable your touch pad if you plug in a usb mouse. But I've just found out that the arch wiki has a great summary on different kinds of touch pad settings including for a better palm detection:

synclient PalmMinWidth=4 PalmDetect=1

This works excellently for me - and I have a new system with a rather large touch pad. Enjoy! And as always: Please share your experience and ideas!

Fixing Panasonic LUMIX Wifi - "Connection to Access Point Failed"

This error occurred to me with a Fritz Box as access point and WPA/WPA2 mixed mode. The first time the camera still connected, later attempts failed. After switching the network mode to WPA2 only, it worked again.

Update: I've upgraded to Firmware v. 1.1 and the issue disappeared.

Otherwise you can probably try resetting the camera settings. Good luck!

A Smear Safe Android Lock Screen

You know that when you use a lock screen, it's often quite easy to know your combination by simply looking at the grease traces of your display? Well now there's finally an app against that. And it's called SmearSafe. Apparently, it was developed by people connected to the University Stuttgart. I've checked the whois entries and saw that the domain hcilab.org is really registered to the name of the professor of the University Suttgart. Further than that, I can't really validate their identity. But it appears ok.

The app works by changing around the image in a way that the way you have to move your fingers is different each time. I.e. it turns, distorts, moves and mirrors the image in different ways. This way the smears get mixed up and it's pretty much impossible for someone who sees your hand movements to guess your login. Of course, it may also require a bit more brain power on your side.

Let me know how it goes for you! Note: I had to set it up twice before it actually started to work on my phone. And it will request admin priviledges to be able to unlock your screen without being set to root.

Sipgate.com Closes

I've recently found out the USA service seems to end. It's still going on in other countries, though, apparently. Well the margins in the VoIP business must be smaller than I thought. Very sad, as Sipgate used to always have great service and good quality in my experience. But I guess it's hard to compete with Google in the same market.

Decrypting Android Encryption is Really Easy

Especially if you encrypt your phone only with a PIN, it appears that it's quite easy to find that PIN. More than that, there is already a script on github which automates a lot of the process.

Now the unanswered issue is: Which command do you use to mount the partition in Linux?

In any case: be aware, the encryption does not protect you much at all. Of course that's what you should expect with a 4 key (usually numeric) PIN.

Disable Customized Ads in Google

Google has a webpage where you can opt out of apps customized to your profile. Note that the popup will be high up on the page, where you probably won't see it until you scroll back up.

Gain Privacy in Youtube

This is just a side, but I just found out Youtube tracks all your searches and videos watched by default. Here's a post which describes how to disable that.

Mini-Tipp: Veromix

Installing the Veromix Widget for KDE4 lets you comfortably adjust pulseaudio volumes. Make sure to reassign the shortcuts, then you no longer need kmix.

Berkeley AirBears2 Setup on Kubuntu and Android

I'm not sure how long this information will remain accurate, because the network is still in testing stage, but working settings right now are:

EAP method: TTLS

Phase 2 authentication: PAP

CA certificate: empty

User certificate: empty

Identity: <your cal ID>

Anonymous Identitfy: empty

Password: Your special Airbears2 password, which you can get here or view here.

Tested to work on 6/10/13 with boat Cyanogen 10.1-RC5 and Kubuntu 12.04 (at the same time).

More information about Airbears2 is here: http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/June2013/AirBears2GoesLive. 

Enjoy!

Anki & AnkiWeb Network Errors

If you get these errors, the two most frequent issues are:

1. wrong Anki version (you need > 2.0) for websync to still work

2. wrong passwort/account name

3. missing proxy / no internet.

Hope that helps!

Finding Unneeded Data

Agedu is a great tool, as it doesn't only show you where the data is, but also how long ago it was last accessed. It's a bit sad that the tool is not as straight forward to use as it could be. But here's a guide. 

Basically you first call agedu -s <somedir>, then agedu -w to start a webserver and then look at the webpage that the latter command tell you about.

Memory Consumption of Common Linux Desktops

This blog post made a nice overview of the common choices you have and how much memory they use by default.

Small Bash Power Usage Monitor

While I'm about releasing power scripts, I've quickly written this script to monitor power usage on various Linux systems. It needs bash and sysfs. It can use bc and gnuplot for more comfort.

Automatically Resume from Suspend to Ram and Suspend to Disk to Save Battery in Linux

Suspending to RAM is allows the system to quickly wake up. But Suspend to Disk allows the system to completely power off, saving more power. That's why I've written a small script for modern Linux systems, which wakes up the system from S3 (memory sleep) and puts it into S5 (hibernation) mode. Also, it prevents you from losing data, because eventually your system's battery will run out.

Deshaking/Stabilizing Video in Ubuntu Precise 12.04

The easiest option is with transcode:

transcode -J stabilize -i MVI_1234.MOV && \

transcode -J transform -i MVI_1234.MOV -y xvid4 -o stable.mp4

But the version that comes with precise is not very good, so here's a backported version that works better:

https://launchpad.net/~quadrispro/+archive/backports/+sourcepub/2454870/+listing-archive-extra

There is a guide with a bit more detail here. And of course there's still the option of using Virtualdub with Wine.

Quick Tip: Looking for file extensions with locate

All you really need to do is put the intuitive command - as back in the times of Windows - in quotes:

# locate "*.exe"

Linux Tweaks for Samsung 535U3C

The Samsung Notebook already runs pretty well out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04.3. All this information is used at your own risk, you might destroy your device!

uefi

You should be careful about using efi, as you've probably read - or you might brick your notebook. Although the 535 series is usually not explicitly listed as having problems in this regard, better be careful and disable secure boot and boot in CSM mode.

AMD apu/cpu tweaking

After a modprobe msr and modprobe cpuinfo you can use the turionpowercontrol tool to enable frequency boost for your cpu: (this is potentially DANGEROUS!)

sudo ./TurionPowerControl -psienable -boostenable

Fan Tweaking

In Windows, the FN-F11 combination slows down the system's fans to make it pretty quiet for usual use, although the fans already run less in Linux than in Windows. There is a special kernel module for this purpose here: easy_slow_down_manager, the dkms package download is here, after installing it successfully simply echo 1 > /proc/easy_slow_down_manager.

Wifi after Suspend

The rfkill force locks the wifi after suspend to ram (S3) mode in my experience. The problem is fixed in Kernel 3.8, which you can get from the Ubuntu kernel PPA. You will need to install the fglrx-experimental-12 driver package (sudo apt-get install fglrx...), which works with this new kernel. To automatically enable wifi after resume, create a pm file:

echo ''#!bin/sh

rfkill unblock all

rfkill unblock all

rfkill unblock all

exit 0' | sudo tee /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000-535-rfkill

chmod +x /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000-535-rfkill

Video Acceleration (VA-API)

You can use xvba with vaapi to get video acceleration with vlc and mplayer-vaapi. For mplayer-vaapi you need a special package from a ppa:

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sander-vangrieken/vaapi/ubuntu precise main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vaapi-mplayer.list

With kernel 3.8 and the new catalyst 12 video driver, you'll need to manually install the xvba-vaapi backend. All you need to do is copy two libraries, though. (For some reasons the package is set to conflict with the newer driver, but really the same library is actually compatible and would still work. Feel free to inform the package maintainers for a workaround.)

Unsolved

Something I'm not sure how to fix yet is that the notebook can become become slow when the AC adapter is *plugged in*. I have no idea why this could be the case, but I've seen several reports about it.

There is no acceleration for the Adobe flash player plugin. However, this seems to be coming up, as AMD has just provided vdpau accelaration for its open source video drivers.

Let me know how this all works for you! Everything at your own risk!