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Barnaby Walters
Barnaby Walters
Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:
Pronouns: they/he
Last Seen: 2018-12-19
Elsewhere on the Web
Data Disclosure
This site is hosted in Lithuania by Hostinger (affiliate link). I use GPG, get my key and fingerprint.
When importing photos into DigiKam, I want them to be renamed based on the ISO8601 datetime they were taken, ideally to millisecond precision to avoid conflicts when multiple images were taken in a single second. This has the nice side-effect that photos from multiple camera sources are guaranteed to be displayed in the correct order when browsing files, which is important and practical for me.
Unfortunately, this led to my files all being in the wrong order, even from the same camera. I haven't quite figured out why, but it seems that there are several different internal datetime values stored in the image files: file creation date (which is completely wrong), the values used in DigiKam's
Exif data, which are not only correct but provide sub-second resolution too !
So here's the DigiKam import naming template which I will be using going forward:
46 15 th April 2024 (updated)
Ended up getting frustrated with the old version of DigiKam available on Kubuntu, so tried installing an AppImage. The state of AppImage integration with Kubuntu is abysmal, and I open DigiKam fairly regularly, so I finally tried installing AppImageLauncher, which is recommended by DigiKam and is supposed to be a good tool for integrating AppImages with the desktop environment (something which Plasma should surely do itself, if AppImages are really going to be part of the future of linux app packaging).
Unfortunately, installing AppImageLauncher completely broke my desktop environment, causing it to hang and preventing me from logging in. Looked it up and it was clearly related to whatever this issue is about, as moving
Removing AppImageLauncher and the mime cache got things working again, and, lo, before it broke my system, AppImageLauncher had kindly made
At this point I decided to take a more manual approach to integrating AppImages I cared about with my DE, so I added a link from
I store AppImages and other applications not installed via the package manager) to
Having quick access to this location makes manually managing
I went about improving the ones AppImageLauncher had made (e.g. adding version numbers to the names ? I find it very useful to know what version of an app I'm launching).
So, back to DigiKam: at this point I had a DigiKam 8.3 AppImage installed and openable via launchers thanks to the
It had to re-download the facial recognition files, but other than that picked up everything from before. However, in the main photo list view, the maximum size of the thumbnails was tiny.
I spent some time poking around in settings and tweaking the QT scaling factor via the .desktop file, but I'll spare you the details. tl;dr: if you want the DigiKam 8.3 AppImage to let you see large thumbnails on a high-DPI screen, you need to check the following boxes:
- Miscellaneous ? System ? Use high DPI scaling from the screen factor
- Vews ? Icons ? Use large thumbnail size for high screen resolution
Restart DigiKam, and it should let you make thumbnails large enough to be useful. This is especially necessary seeing as how DigiKam's photo list view has a horribly wasteful layout, with almost as much whitespace as photo surface area.
38 9 th April 2024 (updated)
If you run into weird ?file corrupt or unwritable? errors when trying to tag/rename tracks with Picard on (k)ubuntu, check whether the files are read-only. When using Dolphin to rip and encode CDs (an excellent feature ? Dolphin continues to surprise me) it retains their read-only permissions when copying them to your disk, rather than setting it to something sensible.
08 18 th January 2024 (updated)
Drew ferris with a soldering iron as I couldn't find much embedded rust art
(version with solid white background)
41 9 th January 2024 (updated)
Some tips for using Teensy<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<span itemprop="name">Teensy</span>
</span> on linux:
The teensy board support package is only supported in the Arduino applications downloaded directly from the arduino site, NOT on versions distributed by package managers. I used the AppImage and it worked fine. If you try to install the teensy board package on an unsupported version of Arduino you might see errors like ?archive not supported?.
Even when you have a supported version of Arduino installed, installing the Teensy<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<span itemprop="name">Teensy</span>
</span> board package isn't totally reliable. The first time I downloaded it, compiling would fail with the following error:
Compilation error: fork/exec/home/barnaby/.arduino15/packages/teensy/tools/teensy-compile/11.3.1/arm/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++: no such file or directory
The 11.3.1 folder existed, but was empty. Down- then upgrading the board package didn't fix it. Removing the board package and reinstalling it did work.
46 5 th December 2023 (updated)
If you're getting the following error in Inkscape on (k)ubuntu when trying to open the Extension Manager:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'appdirs'
42 8 th November 2023 (updated)
In a world where even ?digital-natives? increasingly don?t understand basic file management, and where it's more and more common for user data to be siloed per-app even on desktops, I propose a corollary to Zawinski?s Law: ?All apps which don't store data transparently in the file system are doomed to implement their own limited and fragile filesystem equivalent?
10 30 th October 2023 (updated) ? 1 
1 
If you're in the unfortunate position of needing to use MuseScore4 on linux for some reason (for example to use its excellent MIDI to notation conversion) and are having issues with the Flatpak version having an unreadably tiny UI on high-DPI screens, here's how to fix it.
Open the .desktop file for MuseScore 4 ? mine was in
Mine ended up looking like this:
Save (you'll need to enter your password, or to have launched the editor with
Try launching MuseScore again. If you're lucky, it'll have a readable UI. If not, try restarting and launching it again ? I haven't found a way of successfully getting KDE to force-update all its .desktop files. Presumably there's a cache somewhere? If anyone knows how to reliably do this, please let me know !
This should work for any Flatpak which uses QT, on any desktop environment which uses .desktop files. I really hope ?UI Scale? becomes a standard per-application setting in the near future.
58 8 th October 2023 (updated)
? 
Barnaby Walters: Notes from the first day using a Slimbook Executive running Kubuntu (probably applies to anyone moving from macos to Kubuntu on similar hardware) Generally, very good first impressions. The hardware is nice, the connectivity is perfect for me, it boots fast, the screen looks amazing. The keyboard and trackpad are fine, except for the surfboard trackpad button design. Came with a bunch of stupid marketing stickers on (what year is this, 2005?), most of which were easily removed.
Apply Plasma Settings so that your login screen is a sensible size. Right click status bar, enter edit mode, Panel height: 100 Sleep Default sleep mode seems to be a hibernation which takes 10-20s to wake up from, including whenever you close the lid.
Power Management, in AC Powered tab set lid close to just turn off screen (or lock if desired). This will just turn off the screen when closed on AC power, but actually put the laptop to sleep when the lid is closed on battery power, to reduce power consumption. Then, sudo nano/etc/systemd/sleep.
This changes the behaviour of sleep to initially just suspend the system, keeping data in RAM and allowing immediate wake-ups. When the battery goes under 5%, it'll instead hibernate, which takes 10-20s to wake up from but stores the contents of RAM on the SSD. EDIT: On further testing, this sadly doesn't fix the issue completely (or at all? It's hard to tell). Putting the computer to sleep using the meta menu works absolutely fine, but using F1 or the laptop lid (which I assume are handled the same way internally) leads to this blank screen with a cursor and hidden password entry field for 20s on wake up issue. I have no idea what's causing it, and IMO it's a big reason not to use KDE Plasma on these laptops ? sadly, as it's easily my favourite of the linux desktop environments I've tried so far. FURTHER EDIT: turns out this was all due to the laptop coming with an outdated linux kernel installed, which didn't support the hardware. A fresh install of the latest Kubuntu works perfectly. Firefox By default, Firefox treats scroll events from the trackpad as scroll wheel inputs, causing jerky scrolling.
Touchpad Pointer acceleration: 0.6 Tap-to-click, tap-and-drag enabled Two-finger tap: right click Scrolling: two fingers, invert scroll direction Right click: press anywhere with two fingers Function Buttons Boot holding F2 to open BIOS settings, dig around to find and enable ?Fn lock? to make the function keys perform their alternative functions by default (with numbered function inputs available by holding Fn, as on a MacBook) Next pain points which I didn't find a solution to yet: Occasional trackpad issues where the cursor freezes and only starts moving again after a two finger tap (right click). At the beginning this happened all the time, now it seems much better. Need to keep an eye on it. File browser not having a column view. Apparently this is an ongoing struggle for years in Kubuntu, which seems hard to believe. I tried to install the ElementaryOS file viewer but it didn't seem to work. Setting up the keyboard for international typing. I got extremely used to typing special characters, diacritics and fancy punctuation on my macbook keyboard and am reluctant to have to re-learn all of that. Ideally I'd like to get a least a large subset of the key combinations working again.
Kubuntu Slimbook update 2:
After a brief dalliance with PopOS (which I liked well enough, but convinced me that I much prefer Plasma over Gnome), thanks to advice from someone on r/Kubuntu I discovered that most of my Kubuntu issues had been due to Slimbook delivering laptops with an old version of Kubuntu and the linux kernel on, which isn't really compatible with their laptops (and I had foolishly assumed that the system software update would also update the kernel ? not so) tl;dr: if you buy a Slimbook laptop and want to run Kubuntu on it, install it yourself !
Desktop Environment
After trying out Plasma on both X11 and Wayland, I decided to opt for sticking with Wayland, despite a few ?showstoppers? and other minor annoyances. It has excellent support for a lot of quite slick features, such as fractional per-monitor UI scaling and multitouch gestures for switching virtual desktops (currently not yet configurable, hopefully this will change in the future).
The current stable release of GIMP uses an old version of GTK which doesn't scale well under Wayland, but fortunately the development release (2.99.16) has GTK3 support and the UI scales just fine.
VLC also looks very weird under Plasma. I kept it around as it's so useful, but also installed Celluloid 0.25.1 from their PPA as a potential Plasma-friendly replacement.
Keyboards
I type almost exclusively in ABC-Extended on my macbook, which gives me quick access to all the international characters I need access to, as well as some nice punctuation like en+em dashes, ellipses and curly quotes.
I tried several keyboard layouts on my slimbook, and eventually settled for the English (Macintosh) one, which is almost the same with a few small differences. I will probably end up making my own keyboard layout which shifts some things around and replaces unused things with useful characters.
For quick reference and learning different keyboard layouts, I recommend assigning this command to a global shortcut (I used ctrl+alt+shift+k), which brings up a keyboard preview, scaled to look good on my monitor. I haven't found a good way of dismissing it other than using the trackpad (ideally I'd like it to only be displayed while I hold the shortcut), but it's still very convenient.
For some reason, my F2 button's special feature is ?toggle whether the super key is locked, without indicating the current status to the user at all?. Apparently this is a common feature, but some cursory research did not reveal why this would ever be useful, or what the intended use is. I also didn't find many other people asking about it. What am I missing here? Why does anyone need an entire button dedicated to disabling another, unrelated button? Why can't I make it do something useful?
For the moment I decided for Thunderbird for mail, contacts and calendars (more about those later), and it was easy enough to set up for mail. I'd much prefer something which looks and works like mac os Mail, but installing the Conversation extension went a long way to making it usable (despite not always finding all messages in a thread for some reason).
For the moment I chose Quod Libet as a basic iTunes replacement. It successfully scanned the contents of
AAC m4a files after I installed kubuntu-restricted-extras. Unfortuantely Quod Libet (and every other media player I tried) seems to be unable to inhibit sleep under Wayland ? hopefully this will be remedied soon, as the ?create a NoSleep activity and switch to it whenever you want to play music? ??workaround?? is not particularly appealing. I'd also settle for a status bar widget which let me switch power profiles quickly.
Photos
Moving my photo library took a little more effort, but not much, thanks to osxphotos. Additionally installing exiftools and then running one command created a structured export of my entire library, with all the metadata I care about stored safely in EXIF fields:
created.mm"--filename "Tcreated.hour created.min created.sec title?
This command takes the edited version of each file (falling back to the original), and stores them in a
I then imported this library into DigiKam, which quickly read all the metadata and made everything searchable. To get newly imported photos to fit into the same structure, I had to go into the Import Settings (plug in a camera or card, go ?Import from device? and then open the sidebar on the right ? unfortunately these settings don't seem to be exposed anywhere else) and set the default filename to be the datetime, and the default ?Album? to be
I'm not a huge fan of DigiKam, as it's cluttered, unstable and requires some very awkward workflows (editing images opens them in a separate window? adding a tag requires opening the ?tag manager??? ?hierarchical tags???? I think the developers did not understand what a tag is and what makes them useful) but will do for now. To ensure longevity (and ease migrating to a different management application if I find something better suited to my workflow) I opted to store all metadata in EXIF fields in the files themselves. This way, DigiKam's external database works as an ephemeral index and cache, which I can throw away or rebuild at any time without losing anything.
A useful tip I learned along the way (thanks to ChatGPT):
Calendars and Contacts
I set up a Nextcloud instance on my web host to see how much of my (already limited) iCloud usage it could replace. Despite learning that Hostinger doesn?t allow access to the .well-known directory required for zero-config carddav and caldav setup, I successfully managed to get my calendar and contacts migrated there. Thunderbird was able to sync with both without any issues, and mac os Calendar did eventually read my calendars from Nextcloud. No such luck with mac os Contacts unfortunately, but that's much lower priority than calendar anyway.
Pages and Numbers documents
I had hoped that there would be a way of easily and mostly-losslessly batch converting all my Pages and Numbers documents into their microsoft XML equivalents, before then converting them to Libreoffice documents later on. Alas, that is only partially true. I ended up modifying a script provided by Viking OSX, which finds all Pages documents in a given folder and exports them as word docs to a separate folder. My changes instead export them in-place, and additionally export a PDF version so that I have a lossless read-only copy of each document exactly as it was:
"COMMENT"Do a recursive descent on a folder hierarchy gathering Pages document. Export these documents from Pages as Word .docx and .pdf documents in the same location. Tested: Ventura 13.0.1 VikingOSX, 2022-12-06, Apple Support Communities, No implicit warranty or support.
AS use scripting additions tell application "Pages" activate try set infile to POSIX file"$"set outfile to POSIX file"$
PDF end timeout close thisDoc saving no on error errmsg number errNo display dialog ""& errNo &" : "& errmsg end try end tell -- unhide the exported filename extensions tell application "Finder" if exists (item outfile as alias) then set extension hidden of (item outfile as alias) to false end if end tell return AS function completion /usr/bin/osascript
AS use scripting additions set DialogIcon to "/ System/Library/ CoreServices/ CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ MultipleItemsIcon.icns" display dialog" Pages documents found: "&"$
"Pages documents exported to Word and PDF docx: "&"$"with title" Processing Complete" with icon POSIX file DialogIcon return AS # do a case-insensitive recursion finding Pages documents and sorting by name setopt nocaseglob for f in $STARTDIR*.pages(.
Cnt )) done # give the user statistics completion $pagesCnt $docxCnt
(aside: I initially tried to get ChatGPT to generate the necessary applescript to do this entire task for me, as I'd heard that it was good at that, and applescript is a notoriously unintuitive and badly documented language. It seemd to get fairly close but I was unable to debug the (incomprehensible) errors in its scripts. The approach taken by VikingOSX is much more efficient: use applescript only for the things it's absolutely necessary for, and do the rest in bash or python)
I did the same thing for Numbers documents, the necessary script changes for that are left as an exercise for the reader.
Unfortunately, these exports (and/or their subsequent imports into Libreoffice) were not very successful except for the simplest of documents. I only actively use a total of maybe 5 documents, which I will simply reconstruct from scratch in Libreoffice, and for the rest a combination of lossless read-only PDF and potentially-broken Office<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<span itemprop="name">Office</span>
</span> XML files should be sufficient.
ALL issues
The official way of installing Prusa Slicer on linux is using an AppImage, a format which I've had mixed experiences with. This was no different, as opening it in Dolphin had no result. Opening it in a console revealed some sort of locale error, and suggested some commands to fix it, but they also had no effect.
After doing some digging, it turns out that it's KDE Plasma's fault. Plasma splits your localization settings up into various categories (language, time format, currency etc.) ? an excellent feature by itself.