Showing headlines posted by dmpop

If only an iPad or an iPhone could run Linux tools like Rsync, ExifTool, ImageMagick, etc., you wouldn't have to schlep around a Linux notebook when traveling, especially if your photographic needs are limited to keeping your photos and RAW files safe.

Tags are great. But no matter how meticulous your are with tagging items in digiKam, you'll inevitably end up having multiple unused tags dangling around. Good thing then that the Tag Manager tool makes it easy to remove unused tags.

Notebook batteries are fickle creatures. They don't like being charged to 100%. But they also not keen on being completely depleted. According to the conventional wisdom, to give your notebook's battery a long, productive, and healthy life, you should avoid charging it above 80% and discharging it below 25%.

Although I use Mejiro pretty much all the time, I haven't done any work on it for quite a while. Mostly because it does what it's supposed to do, and I didn't have any ideas for improvements. That changed last weekend. I wanted to tweak Mejiro a bit, and I ended up spending the entire weekend, and then some, fixing and improving the application.

The best way to learn new words and phrases is to use them actively. The next-best way to learn new words is to be exposed to them as much as possible. And since the wallpaper that adorns my graphical desktop environment is what I stare at most of my waking hours, I thought that it'd only make sense to add words and phrases I want to memorize there.

Used with the Obok DeDRM plugin, Calibre can easily strip DRM from ebooks bought from the Kobo store. The combo works fine, but it has two downsides: you need to have access to the machine running Calibre, and you must connect your Kobo reader to the machine. While these are not deal-breakers, Kobodl provides a more elegant solution for downloading Kobo ebooks and liberating them from the DRM shackles.

Hald CLUT files offer a quick and easy way to apply effects to photos, and there are plenty of desktop applications that can handle the task. But if you want to use your favorite Hald CLUT files on an Android device, you'll quickly discover that there are not that many apps (if any at all) that allow you to do that. No problem: instead of relying on a third-party proprietary app, you can roll out your own solution using Termux.

Google Translate is great, until it's not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.

Add a nifty VU meter to your desktop player

Even a quick search for "Raspberry Pi expansion board" yields an impressive array of boards for all sorts of practical uses. There are boards loaded with sensors, boards for driving motors, relay boards, and the list goes on. And if you need a basic expansion board with a couple of inputs and a display, there is Tomodachi.

I've been using a QNAP NAS for a couple of years. For an appliance, it did a decent job. But after a long while, I realized that I actually don't want an appliance: I want a proper Linux server. My immediate thought was to set up a Raspberry Pi-based server. Then I remembered that I still have a ThinkPad T410 stashed in a storage box.

I can't code to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from trying. My latest creation is a case in point.

A new version of Raspberry Pi-based Little Backup Box is here, featuring improvements and new functionality.

Little Backup Box comes with a dedicated shell script that greatly simplifies the process of installing and configuring the required packages and scripts. But before you get that far, there is one hurdle you have to clear: creating and setting up a bootable microSD card with the Raspbian system.

If you want to transfer, rename, geotag, and organize photos and RAW files in one fell swoop, Otto is your friend. This shell script can transfer photos and RAW files from a storage card, neatly organize them, and even add a copyright notice to each photo.

The New tab area in your browser can be put to a variety of practical uses: from displaying time zone to taking notes and managing daily tasks. It's also possible to configure the new tab to showcase your photos.

My every Little Backup Box improvement project starts with the same thought, It does the job but... This time around I wanted to fix and improve several things.

If you happen to use KDE as your preferred graphical desktop, Konbini might be right up your alley. It adds several useful image manipulation actions to the Dolphin file manager as well as installs and configures a handful of photography-related tools.

I want my Raspberry Pi-based Little Backup Box to be simple and reliable. So I prefer not to tweak and enhance it too much. I do make occasional exceptions to that rule, though.

What’s Momo? you may ask. Momo is a Bash shell script for importing and organizing photos and RAW files. It is also an essential part of my Linux-based photography workflow.