Noodlings 13 | Kontact Solaar through a VPN

The luckiest podcast or just a baker’s dozen of noodlings.

13th Noodling of nonsense

Kontact | Akonadi Reference

The killer feature of the Plasma Desktop has been the KDE Personal Information Manager, Kontact. I have been using it since 2004 time frame and although we have had a tenuous relationship over the years, specifically the switch to the Akonadi and the pain that came with it in the early years. I actively use Kontact on multiple machines for the feature richness of it and haven’t found anything in existence that I like better. I also exclusively use Kontact on openSUSE Tumbleweed with the Plasma Desktop Environment.

I have decided to publish my reference concerning the maintenance it requires. I could be an edge case since I have five mail accounts and multiple calendar accounts as well. Historically, I have had issues where losing network connection, regaining it, suspending and resuming my machine over a period of time would cause the thing to have fits. So, here are my fixes, whenever the need arises.

You know those stories of people that have these crazy habit ts that don’t make sense, things they do that don’t really help or solve a problem like making sure the spoons are organized in just the right fashion? Yeah, well that could be what this whole post is and my obsessive-compulsive tenancies are in full expression. So, take all that into account should you choose to use any of these references.

Solaar | Application for Logitech Unifying Receivers

I recently purchased a new Logitech wireless keyboard for my kitchen computer because the Bluetooth keyboard I had previously used was driving me nuts. Mostly for the keyboard layout and sometimes because it didn’t want to connect. That was due possibly due to hardware failure or bad design. It also doesn’t have media keys, like volume control, so I thought it best just to replace it.

I have previously used ltunify with success but I only used it because “L” comes before “S” so that was my first stop. Since I received feedback that I should try Solaar I did so this time. Since there isn’t an official Linux based application available from Logitech, the fine open source community has stepped in to make managing your devices simple and straight forward.

Having Solaar in the system try is quite handy. Though, the reality is, I don’t need it all the time in fact, it isn’t actively running very often but having it to manage your devices is very handy. It’s nice to know that you can manage multiple Unifying receivers with this application. This is easy to use and has a great, well laid out and straight forward interface. I am glad I was recommended to try this application out. It has now been placed high on my list of tools to keep handy.

Dell Inspiron 20 3048 SSD Upgrade

There comes a time in the lifespan of a computer where you decide that the performance becomes a little lacking. That was my case with this computer and the state of the drive was becoming a little dubious as it felt like it was getting slower and having periodic file system errors. Rather than just reinstall openSUSE on the same drive, I decided, I wanted to make an inexpensive upgrade so I purchased a Solid State Drive (SSD) for it.

Since I have taken this unit apart before, I already knew what I was doing with it. The back of computer comes off but does take some time to get all the snaps to release. I would really prefer that this was held together with screws instead of snaps. That is the only real design choice I don’t a care for with this machine. Upon releasing the back cover from the chassis, it exposes the 2.5″ drive which sits in the lower left corner of the machine. The drive is held in a caddy that snaps in to the chassis, no tools required to remove or insert the drive. I think this is actually quite the clever design.

The hardest part about the whole job was hanging the computer on the VESA mount. In fact, as much as I like utilizing VESA mounts, they are often a pain in the fanny to do without an extra set of hands.

The average read rate of this drive is 443.9 MB/s with 100 samples. The access time is pretty great compared to the typical seek time of “spinning rust” hard drive platter which averages around 100 MB/s. Essentially a factor of four increase in performance. The seek time on the SSD is .10 msec as opposed to 18.81 msec which is about 180 times faster.

I resisted for a long time going to SSDs because, that seems to be my M.O. on new technology. I am glad that the SSD technology has come down in price. It has greatly improved the performance of this aging all-in-one and extended the life of this machine. The performance improvements of SSDs over HDDs is not in any way a revelation. The point I want to emphasize here is that by putting in an SSD, the machine is far more useful and the user experience is vastly improved. So, rather than chuck the old computer, swap out the Hard Disk Drive with a Solid State Drive.

Windscribe VPN Service

With all the talk of VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to keep you safe and my general lack of interest in the subject, I was talking to Eric Adams, my co-host on the DLN Xtend podcast about the subject. He was telling me that he was hesitant to recommend any service so he gave me some option to try out. The one I chose, after doing a little reading was Windscribe.

I am new to the VPN game so I want to be careful in saying, I am recommending this as the perfect solution but rather demonstrating how I set it up and how I am using it on my openSUSE Tumbleweed system.

I know that my employer requires me to VPN in to do any real work so even they recognize the value of a good VPN, so maybe I should too. How often do I plan to use it? Not all that often, really. Maybe a few times a month, specifically when I am using an internet access point that I do not trust. I will especially use it if the access point is has “xfinity” in the SSID as I have little to no trust for them.

I appreciate how simple this is to use and should I get to the point where I am pushing my 10 GiB per month limit, I will go all in on an annual subscription. It’s not that expensive to put up one extra line of defense, especially one as convenient as this.

BDLL Followup

FerenOS is the current BDLL Challenge. I find that I really appreciate the work that goes into Feren OS. It is certainly worth a spin for anyone, whether you are a “KDE Fan” or not. I do think that the departure from using Cinnamon as the base has been good for the overall experience, not because I am a huge fan of Plasma, which I am, but that it seems to have opened up a lot more creative flexibility to the project.

My review of Feren is still forthcoming, at the time of recording but I find that the experience is great. It feels like a polished well thought out product that pays attention to the finer details. It’s certainly worth a visit.

Bottom Line Up Front: FerenOS (2020) is simply fantastic. The way you are greeted and guided through your setup is brilliant. I am not keen on every design decision but that matters not as I am never keen on every design decisions, to include my own. FerenOS is going for a look that is uniquely its own and is not afraid to experiment, cross toolkit boundaries and stray from the normal. I appreciate the design decisions, more than any other “boutique” distribution that I have seen in a long while. Do I like all of them? No. Would I choose many of these? Also, No. But I think they do look great, make for an enjoyable experience, just not one I necessarily prefer.

openSUSE Corner

Tumbleweed Snapshots 20200105, 20200106, 20200107, 20200108, 20200109, 20200110, & 20200111

YaST2 (4.2.47 -> 4.2.49) along with 12 modules have been upgraded. Fixed several bugs

smartmontools (7.0 -> 7.1) bug fixes

Plasma-Framework received an update to fix a possible crash with a “broken” locale setup

Shotwell (0.30.7 -> 0.30.8)

Mesa and Mesa Drivers (19.2.6 -> 19.3.1) numerous bug fixes and features including OpenGL 4.6 support for Intel drivers. A number of new Vulkan extensions supported by Intel and Radeon, better AMD Radeon APU performance and many more

libinput (1.14.3 -> 1.15.0)

Plasma5-Thunderbolt (5.17.4 -> 5.17.5) provided some bug fixes.

seahorse (3.34 -> 3.34.1)

fwupd (1.3.1 -> 1.3.6) included plugins for coreboot, updates for Dell hardware and a hold host of fixes and improvements

KDE Plasma packages (19.12.0 -> 19.12.1) basically all of them which introduced many, many bug fixes across the entire suite of applications and tools.

MozillaFirefox (71.0 -> 72.0.1) addressed several CVEs

Tumbleweed Snapshot Reviewer:
20200105 – Stable 94
20200106 – Stable 94
20200107 – Stable 97
20200108 – Stable 96
20200109 – Stable 98
20200110 – Stable 99
20200111 – Stable 95

Nifty Link

If you are interested in open source games that run on openSUSE via the Direct Installation link, visit

https://software.opensuse.org/packages/Games

I have forgotten about this and if I have, maybe you have too. Some of the interesting games I see are”

0 A.D. – A Real-Time Strategy Game of Ancient Warfare

Armagetron – A motorcycle battle game in the theme of Tron

Barbie Seahorse Adventures – A 2d Pixelart platformer that I can admit I tried many years ago and it was rather enjoyable.

Endless Sky – A space exploration and combat game

Extreme Tux Racer – A high speed arctic racing game based on Tux Racer.

There are many more to check out that I truly find enjoyable.

Computer History Retrospective

The 1983 the then “modern” word processor was already adding efficiency to the Newspaper Industry where columnists could write in a remote location, type, edit and transmit content, via modem to the newspaper or where books could be written, stored on disks and transmitted to the publisher when it was completed.

Even in 1983, Correcting Spelling and stylistic devices were already being employed. While some winters had disagreement with the affect on written language by these technologies and that computers will promote dry, bland writing by diluting an individual style. Others claimed that it improves writing ability as the amount of computer intervention is at the writers discretion.

It was even suggested by Paul Schindler that, like a car, you should try a Word Processor before you buy it which was a good idea because of the price.

Wordvision $50-$70 range
Wordstar up to $500

Paul Schindler gives advice about not needing to buy a 32bit “super micro” if all you are going to do is word process. I couldn’t help but relate that to modern computer thoughts. Don’t buy a computer that has more power than you need but at the same time, I would argue that it isn’t always the case

It is interesting to point out that the most powerful tool in word processing and analyzing words was on a Unix System V.

Watching this episode of “The Computer Chronicles” has really made me appreciate the state of word processing today. LibreOffice, AbiWord or any of the other word processing applications out there are available to me without any expectation of monetary exchange. Though, if you would like these applications to continue to exist, it would benefit you to donate to them.

This whole thing was an incredibly interesting retrospective on how differences and similarities of computer or automated technologies employed in the 1980s as compared to today. We are very fortunate that the open source software availability has made day to day computing far less expensive and I would say, far more productive.

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