A new trend, new to me at least, is the use of social media to bait for engagement. I suppose it is ages old really, “tune in next week for another exciting episode” and all that. This trend seems more akin to ‘content baiting’ than to ‘click baiting’; here’s a tidbit, follow me, and you’ll find out the conclusion.

Content baiting example

Recently I was on Facebook and saw an interesting quote on my feed:

“The work of carpenters, farmers, merchants, et al., is not a physical exercise, since we do not observe voluntary movement” (no attribution)

The quote was provided by Ben Miller of Hema United. So I asked, where the quote was from, and the reply was “I’ll be putting up a lengthy video in the coming days with all the sources“. I mean, really.

So, I did the only thing I know how, got in a huff with someone on the internet and went digging for data … well it’s not the only thing I know how, but I feel like I excel at it.

Where the quote is from

Read the rest of this entry »

Installing digikam from source. It seems harder than it should be. Perhaps my old skills need polishing. This is a stub post just to put the info I have so far out there and to provide documentation for myself for what I’ve done so far.

Dependency hell heck

Briefly, have some deps installed

sudo apt install extra-cmake-modules libqt5xmlpatterns5-dev libkf5filemetadata-dev libkf5threadweaver-dev libkf5notifyconfig-dev libkf5akonadicontact-dev libkf5contacts-dev libkf5sane-dev libkf5calendarcore-dev libpostproc-dev libexiv2-dev libtiff-dev libtiffxx5 libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libmagickwand-6.q16-dev libmagick++-6-headers libmagickcore-6.q16-dev libxslt1-dev bison libx265-dev libxslt1-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev liblensfun-dev libgphoto2-dev doxygen libqtav-dev ccache liblcms2-dev qtav libopencv-dev libopencv-core-dev libopencv-apps-dev flex

Finding this list was much harder than it should have been.

If there was a digikam source file in the apt repos then `sudo apt build-dep digikam` would get the necessary files, but sadly that just returns “E: Unable to find a source package for digikam”.

Read the rest of this entry »

To install digikam, first install the deps

To make a pie, first invent the universe. To install digikam, well probably best to give in and go with a pre-compiled binary; but failing that then this might help (and if you want Jasper for other reasons).

Not sure if this is actual WordArt but it being the “logo” for a image processing toolkit seems ironic!

I had an idea about creating a digikam package for Kubuntu, as they only do flatpack, appimage, and snap now. I started my linux days with Slackware, so I thought this would be easy. But, I am conscious it’s been a long time since I was ./configure; make; make install-ing with the best of them …

During install I came across problems as the digikam bootstrap.linux script (which appears to run cmake, which maybe in turn runs make??) was throwing a bunch of errors (due to many unmet dependencies).

RTFM

The INSTALL doc in the project root directory says this (note second point):

1) Select an empty directory to use for building the software.
Let $BUILD_DIR denote this directory.
2) Generate the makefiles used for building the software. To do this,
invoke the command:
cmake -H$SOURCE_DIR -B$BUILD_DIR -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$INSTALL_DIR $OPTIONS
where $OPTIONS corresponds to zero or more -D options as described below
under the heading "Cmake Options".
3) Build the code using the make utility. To do this, invoke the command:
cmake --build $BUILD_DIR
4) Run the test suite to ensure that the software seems to be working
correctly. To do this, invoke the commands:
cd $BUILD_DIR
ctest --output-on-failure
5) Install the software. To do this, invoke the command:
cmake --build $BUILD_DIR --target install

Invoking the command under 2) requires choices to be made for the directories to use.

Clearing up what that means

This could be made more clear by providing an example, say, so I made an issue on their github.

Read the rest of this entry »

Should DABUS hold a patent, can a monkey own a selfie, should #aisongcontest [5] songs be protected by copyright, how about DreamWrite’s AI written articles?

The UK government are currently having a Call For Views (CFV) on the relationship between AI and IP (Intellectual Property) — should AIs be allowed to own IP? A couple of UKIPO’s senior staff spoke about the background to the CFV recently on a podcast channel that previously interviewed the creator of DABUS, an AI that applied for a patent.

There is a summary of the CFV questions on AI & IP, if you’re a creator then these issues may directly affect you.

Also presently the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) currently have an online exhibition on the subject of AI & IP.

Footnote / disclaimer

Declaration: I work for a party involved but this post was made by me individually without solicitation or consent from my employer who I do not represent here.

WiiU Hacking in 2020

A journey begins

Well, we’re on the cusp of buying in to Switch (pretty late now in 2020), and WiiU is getting pretty old, so now every time I insert a disc I’m thinking “perhaps this will be the last time this works”. So, I’m looking to be able to backup data from the WiiU (savegames) and install discs we own like Legenda of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Unfortunately it’s not been going well …

FSOpenFile failed

I’ve been having “FSOpenFile failed” a common problem trying to run haxchi following a Howto Geek guide.

Spent half a day using various SD cards. That guide says that you need 32kB allocation unit size for the FAT32 file system (see this ArchLinux page on FAT) on the SD card …but I use Linux and there’s no simple way to do that.

I tried [from a dash shell on Kubuntu Linux distro]:

sudo mkfs.fat -f2 -F32 -s64 -S512 /dev/sdg1
# format as FAT32 with a 32KB block size, for WiiU;
# -s is sectors per cluster, -S is sector size, need 32KB per cluster

[Aside, lsblk, fdisk or cfdisk, and fsck.fat -v are useful for checking on your SD card to see if it’s the right format. gdisk and gparted (I use kdeparted) are also good.]

but gave up and found a laptop with Win10 on, used PowerShell (as admin) and did:

format /FS:FAT32 /A:32K E:

where E is the drive letter of my SD card (/A:32K sets the allocation unit size).

Note that these will fail on smaller SD cards as you need a certain number of blocks to make a FAT32 filesystem. You will also need special techniques to work with very large SD cards, which normally come formatted as exFAT, to work with FAT32 beyond the usual maximum system size.

I’d unzipped all the necessary, so that the root folder of my SD card had a wiiu folder, and inside had “payload.elf” file. I confirmed that the sha1sum of the file was A2..DC (full sum a2841c2dfc85177bf6fbab59b910719fed17a8dc) on the SD card from both Linux and Win10.

I’d also confirmed access to the SD card was possible by using MiiMaker to save images to it. Even tried using “SD Card Formatter” from Tuxera, as someone on a gbatemp thread had mentioned it seems to do something special; didn’t help me.

But with several SD cards I just got “FSOpenFile failed” over and over …

Now people will tell you “your file structures wrong”, “your SD card is broken”, “the reader is dirty, blow on it”, “payload.elf is corrupted”, or “payload file is in the wrong place”, etc., but it’s possible that none of those is the issue at all.

Then it worked … try a different SD card

Today, used with an adapter, as one last try before giving up. Had opened up discord to try and get help (having looked in multiple other places) … and what do you know, works first time. I’ve not installed yet as I need to buy my DS game.

For those many others struggling — check you have the right file tree, unzipped on your SD card (number one error I’ve seen mentioned) — try different SD cards!

So FSOpenFile solved/solution for me, inasmuch as it works no for no apparent reason!!

Alternate solution?

Edit: a comment by SGL3286 on gbatemp, [Guide] Community noob guide to Wii U hacking; post-8658276 suggest that I may have been using the wrong homebrew_launcher.elf:

“Using the other instructions figured out the mistake. So apparently the FSOpenFile can ALSO refer to not locating the homebrew_launcher.elf which in my case was caused by downloading the v2.1 RPX version of the homebrew_launcher, not the v1.4.”

So that’s definitely worth checking on too — if that works for you then please report back in a comment, thanks.

Postscript: Downloading files

Also, RikuMax was a really easy way to get the files needed, as opposed to hunting around on GitHub for zip releases from wiiu-env, dimok789, FIX94 (haxchi), vgmoose (wiiu-hbas), etc..

Further help?

Cemu; Discord & Reddit

I’m just coming to terms with Discord and don’t really get it yet. The reason this is here is that I posted on there and some people basically said “we don’t do it that way”, so it seemed best to avoid ruffling feathers and post to my own blog where I can just go “meh” if people don’t like it. Anyway, your mileage might vary, there appear to be active WiiU and Switch communities like #wiiu-assistance on Discord and /r/cemu (for the CEMU non-Nintendo WiiU emulator) on Reddit and they may be good places to seek further help.

Some software. Jump to the end if you just want the raw list. Of course we call sofware applications “apps” now!

Software that I use(d) and endorse(d)

Why do you care? I don’t really know … but we’re here so, lets have at it.

2007 called and they want their list back

Recently I came across this list from 2007 in an archived post :

Favourite Open Source Applications

• 7-Zip; 7z442.msi – nearly universal zip application
• Firefox; Firefox_Setup_1.5.0.4.exe – high quality browser, highly secure, excellent standards compatibility, very fast too
• SketchUp; GoogleSketchUpW-EN.exe – 3D sketching program from Google
• Inkscape; Inkscape-0.44-1.win32.exe – vector graphics package
• OpenOffice.org; OOo_2.0.3_Win32Intel_install.exe – replacement office suite for Microsoft Office
• Thunderbird; Thunderbird_Setup_1.5.0.4.exe – great email application, warns you of scams, excellent junk mail filtering
• AdAware; aawsepersonal.exe – run this to remove adware from your computer, an essential maintenance task to do each month
• Abiword; abiword-setup-2.4.4.exe – a MS Word replacement with a clean crisp interface
• Audacity; audacity-win-1.2.3.exe – sound editting application
• AVG; avg71free_385a721.exe – antivirus program that doesn’t use up all your computers resources
• Celestia; celestia-win32-1.4.1.exe – extreme star-gazing
• GIMP; gimp-2.2.10-i586-setup.zip – complex but fully featured graphics program
• IrfanView; iview392.exe & irfanview_plugins_392.exe – best ever graphics viewer, views nearly any type of graphics file, the interface is a bit clunky though
• jEdit; jedit42install.jar – good Java based programmers editor, made excellent by installing the extensions
• nVu; nvu-1.0-win32-installer-full.exe – full featured web page editor
• Opera; Opera_9_Eng_Setuo.exe – another killer browser, this one looks good, is fast, can be controlled (in XP and 2000) by voice commands!! “Computer, make tea”??!
• Picasa; picasa2-current.exe – a photo viewing and editting package from Google, enables upload of pictures and easy tweaking. I’ve used this for thousands of pictures
• Scribus; scribus-1.3.3.2-win32-install.exe – exceptionally good DTP package that can create SVG and PDF files. Does require getting used to. It’s not great unless you have the text already to hand, IMHO
• Spybot; spybotsd14.exe – finds and removes spyware, use in conjunction with adaware
  … more soon

That’s about 250MB of great applications, and it won’t cost you a penny.

and thought it would be fun to look at the list and see what I’d recommend now instead. Much has happened in the last 12 years. But enough about that, on with the show. The same list with notes and additions replacements based on my current, 2019, usage and experience.

What I endorse in 2019

My primary operating system is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, Kubuntu 18.04, which uses KDE’s Plasma desktop as the DE. But, after much pressure from the kids — to enable easier gaming, particularly for Epic’s Fortnite game — I have a Microsoft Windows 10 install on a new computer too.

The list, updated, comments in italics, still used apps in bold, no longer used apps struck out:

I’m still a huge FOSS nut

• 7-Zip – whilst it’s still a popular zip too, and I installed in on MSWin recently, I have hardly used it in years, my main compression tool is tar (a linux command line tool) nowadays, followed by the Dolphin file manager’s built in uncompress options.
• Firefox – I’ve upgrade from 1.5 to version 67.0 and do most of my browsing via Kubuntu now, recently I’ve been using Brave Browser (0.65) too.
• SketchUp — still around but I never really got in to it
• Inkscape – vector graphics package; now using version 0.92 on both MSWin and Kubuntu
• OpenOffice.org – replacement office suite for Microsoft Office; there were various changes with this one, name and ownership changes and splits, so we now have at least two codebases based on what was once Star Office, now I use
• LibreOffice 6.2 — as this is the successor to OpenOffice.org, and I was using it before that, it gets to be bold.
• Thunderbird – great email application, warns you of scams, excellent junk mail filtering; “still” using Thunderbird, but it’s kinda, and not really as I’ve used a few MUA in the interim including Kmail, SylpheedClaws, and whatever, but returned to Thunderbird and am now on version 60.7.
• AdAware – it’s still around but I use a pihole nowadays along with uBlock Origin
• Abiword – a MS Word replacement with a clean crisp interface
• Audacity – sound editing application; version 2.2.1 now, still use occasionally but due to not doing sermon recordings I don’t need it often
• AVG – antivirus program; again it’s still around, on MSWin I use Microsoft’s Windows Defender along with extreme cynicism, and a pihole.
• Celestia – extreme star-gazing; the choice now is the very excellent
  Stellarium 0.18
• GIMP 2.8 – complex but fully featured graphics program; still in regular use on both MSWin and Kubuntu but I also rather like Krita for raster image work and Inkscape for vector image work.
• IrfanView – best ever graphics viewer; I don’t use it anymore, Okular for viewing docs, or just the file manager
• jEdit – good Java based programmers editor; again not something I use anymore, moved around a lot of editors and IDE’s including simply Kate, PyCharm, NetBeans, and am currently using Visual Studio Code aka “code” most of all (on MSWin and Kubuntu) at the moment.
• nVu – full featured web page editor; never really used it that much, used Dreamweaver and Bluefish a bit a long time ago, but always happier with a simple editor, now that browsers have developer tools I’ve given up on any other visual tools.
• Opera – another killer browser; Opera Unite was my great hope for the future of the web (see link for blog post) , but I no longer use Opera anywhere, Firefox, Brave, Chrome, and other browsers for testing but that doesn’t include Opera anymore as now it’s primarily a wrapper on Chrome AIUI.
• Picasa – a photo viewing and editing package from Google; I think Google, or Alphabet their parent company now, killed this one, but in any case I’ve been using the following excellent KDE based photo manager for ages now, it’s really great (but the facial recognition still isn’t up to the standard of Picasa from 10 years ago IMO). I don’t do photo management under MSWin, I think my in-laws still have Picasa.
  Digikam 5.6
• Scribus – exceptionally good DTP package; don’t use this as much now, as Inkscape has developed it’s become better for my needs from the design side and LibreOffice fills in from the documents side, but I still have it installed and have still designed advertising copy in it recently.
• Spybot – finds and removes spyware; never had an issue with such things using Linux.

What other apps am I using now

Not, now-now, I’m not really a big multi-tasker, but you get the gist.

The main additions to the list would have to be:

• Steam [for Linux] | Steam [for Windows 10] — a game installer and manager; use this on both Kubuntu and MSWin, quite a lot.
• KDEnlive 17.12 | OBS Studio 23.2 — video editing suites; I only recently found OBS Studio when doing my first proper Windows install for myself, KDEnlive I’ve used for a long time now, on and off. I’ve also used Blender as a NLE (Non-Linear Editor).
• Dolphin 17.12 — I use Dolphin a lot, it’s not the only file-manager I use (sometimes I use Krusader, or even Midnight Commander [mc], FileLight probably counts here too) but it does get a lot of mileage. I’m still not sure it’s better than the KDE’s previous file-manager (Konqueror) but it’s useful, and usable, and used, nonetheless.

Plus I spend a lot of time on the command line in Kubuntu for which I use the Yakuake drop-down terminal. I spend quite a bit of computing time using BASH, I grep, ack, find, ssh, sshfs, fusermount, git clone, sudo apt install (or aptitude), cat, tail, lsof, locate, pgrep, htop, … and all of that jazz. Recently I’ve started to use Chocolatey on MSWin too so I can choco install firefox, or whatever, and then updates are as easy as with apt.

Then there’s phone apps, … but that’s a different kettle of fish.

Web apps, are they the now/future?

The way things have developed the browser has become much more powerful, both in itself and as a link to web applications. We use a lot of web apps, including the main social sites like Facebook, media sites like YouTube, and gaming sites like Roblox or Worms.io (favourites of my family), in 2019.

I wonder how things will change in the next 12 years.